A sure sign of Epiphany around my office is the ceremonial ordering of the spring textbooks for the Bible school and seminary. In spite of one accommodating instructor, who told me he made a point of ordering mostly books he’d determined to be already in stock, this batch is proving more difficult than usual. A surprising number of the books on the list are out of print, which means ordering them through Amazon. One thing I don’t like about Amazon’s system is that, when they tell you a book is available from an affiliated bookseller, there’s no information as to whether that seller has one copy or many. So I end up buying one copy each from a long list of vendors, and that drives the shipping/handling costs up.

Our buddy Loren Eaton, over at I Saw Lightning Fall, links today to a fascinating piece at Tor.com by author Mary Pearson, about the importance of setting in fiction. An excellent essay, well worth reading.

I think sometimes setting is almost relegated to the grab bag of afterthoughts when it comes to describing it, but setting is what makes the characters and plot come alive. It creates atmosphere that the reader can share. It reveals who the character is and how they came to be that person. It supports and pushes events so things happen. It is metaphor and motivation, and often even the janitor too, swishing its mop across the stage long after the performance has ended and you are still in your seat and don’t want to leave. The setting is the last to leave your memory.

I’ve never thought about setting much, because in my own stories setting usually comes pre-packaged with the story. When I write about Vikings, the locale is fairly limited (though the Vikings swung a pretty wide cat, as my latest book shows). And if I’m not writing about Vikings as such, I write Viking-themed modern stories set in the country where I grew up and live. To be honest, I hate trying to write about places I’ve never visited. I figure that, as oblivious as I am to my own home town, parading my ignorance about an exotic place would be overreaching.

But that still determines what kind of stories I can write, whether I like it or not. Or, as Loren says,

Consider how a simple tale of cunning detective thwarts career thief changes when moved from New York to Botswana or to one of Jupiter’s Galilean moons. Despite sharing similar plot arcs, Neuromancer feels worlds away from any of Richard Stark’s Parker novels. That’s because setting is more than color or icing, more than a chance for an author to wax poetic. It sets boundaries, draws lines, holds the course. It says, “You go this far — but no farther.”