On writing settings as characters
Okay listen. If you’re treating your setting like a flat backdrop, you’re cheating your own story. A setting isn’t wallpaper. It’s not just there to stop your characters from floating in the void. Your setting is an active participant. It does THINGS and It leaves SCARS.
I mean, think about it. When you go back to your childhood bedroom, do you just see four walls and a bed? Or do you see the exact spot where you cried in eighth grade, the corner where you hid your journal, the way the wallpaper has yellowed like it’s aging with you? That’s not “background.” That’s a living, breathing presence... and it shapes you whether you want it to or not.
Here’s how I think about it (notes incoming)...
𐙚 A hometown is NEVER neutral. It’s either the place they’d do anything to stay in or the place they’re desperate to escape from. Sometimes it’s both, which is honestly the juiciest tension of all. A hometown isn’t just “Main Street and a bakery”, no one cares about your generic boring set. It’s the shame of being known too well, of walking into the grocery store and running into someone who still calls you by your middle school nickname. It’s also the ache of being invisible in the one place that should have noticed you. That sting when the teacher, the neighbor, your parents, treated you like background noise. Hometowns are loaded. They are identity cages. They cling to your character like smoke, even when they’ve “moved away.”
𐙚 Forests aren’t just TREES. C’mon guys. Don’t you dare write, “they walked into the forest, it was dark.” No one cares. The forest is wet hair sticking to your forehead, it’s your shoes making that squelch sound because the ground is trying to eat them, it’s the way your brain won’t stop whispering fairytales about witches and wolves the second you lose cell service. The forest is a liar. It looks quiet but it’s crawling, breathing, alive. When your character steps into a forest, they should feel small, or watched, or weirdly welcome. But it should be SOMETHING.
𐙚 Cities aren’t just crowded. Stop writing them like postcard skylines. Cities are mean. They flirt with you one second and rob you the next. They chew you up, spit you out, then give you one shining night on a rooftop that convinces you maybe you belong here. Cities seduce you. They trap you. They raise you faster than you’re ready to grow. They’re the messy roommate you can’t get rid of (loud, exhausting, always in your space) A city has moods, okay? Monday at 2pm feels nothing like Friday at midnight.
𐙚 Weather is not filler. Stop skipping over it like it’s boring. Rain is grief, not cute drizzle, but heavy, relentless grief that soaks into your clothes. Heat is anger, sticking, suffocating, relentless. Snow is silence so suffocating it makes you feel like you’ll never speak again. Weather is mood. Weather is memory. Weather does things.
𐙚 Weather is NOT filler. I will scream this until I die. Stop writing weather like it’s boring small talk. Weather is mood. Rain isn’t just “wet,” it’s grief. Heavy, relentless grief that soaks your socks and makes you smell like mildew. Heat isn’t just “summer vibes,” it’s suffocation. It’s sweat dripping in your eyes and anger simmering because everything feels too much. Snow isn’t “pretty flakes.” It’s silence so loud you can’t breathe. Weather presses on your characters. It sets tone without a single line of dialogue. Stop wasting it.
𐙚 Your setting raised your character. I mean it. Don’t fight me. If you grew up near the sea, you can smell storms before anyone else. If you grew up in the suburbs, you know the exact second the streetlights flick on because that was your curfew. If you grew up in a high-rise, you move differently, you’re used to cramped elevators and neighbors on every side. Architecture leaves fingerprints on you. You can’t write a character in a vacuum, their environment literally raised them.
𐙚 Battlefields don’t forget. Sure, your character survived the war, but the ground didn’t. The soil is still soaked. The air still stinks of rust. Even decades later, the land remembers. Don’t write it like it’s been scrubbed clean just because your character wants to move on. The land is another witness and it carries scars too.
𐙚 Comfort places matter. This one’s underrated. Give your character a kitchen, a tree, a park bench. Somewhere that’s theirs. Somewhere that says: “this is who I was before everything.” And then (yes, because we’re cruel) rip it away...
stormborns
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