Where and When: Setting, Atmosphere and Point of View

Setting is the pressure a place puts on a person. A kitchen where a family argues quietly is a different kitchen from one where they laugh; the room, the table and the hour are doing some of the arguing with them. Give your story one place it truly lives in, and know that place beyond what you show: what time the light arrives, what can be heard from the street, which chair nobody sits in. Detail chosen for a reason is atmosphere; detail poured in for its own sake is decoration. Point of view is the other half of this. Decide, before the first paragraph, whose head we are in, and stay honest to what that person could actually perceive. A narrator who knows everything flattens the tension, because there is nothing left to discover. A narrator who knows too little becomes a puzzle rather than a person. One practical test: read a page of your draft and underline every fact your narrator could not have known at that moment. Then either earn it, cut it, or move the telling to someone who could know it. Atmosphere is what the reader feels about the place before anything happens there. It comes from selection rather than adjectives: not 'an eerie room' but a clock stopped at ten past four, and a chair arranged to face it. Try this Write two paragraphs of the same scene: one in close third person, inside your character's mind, and one in first person told years later. Then choose the one that keeps something hidden. Questions to sit with What does your narrator notice first, and what does that reveal about them? If the setting were removed from your story, would it survive? If it would, the place is probably not carrying its share.