Setting is not background. In a good text the where and when are doing part of the arguing.
Four jobs
- Pressure. Winter, distance, curfew, a plague quarantine that stops a letter arriving.
- History. A place has a past, and in Canadian writing that past is often the subject: whose land, whose road, whose reserve, whose town.
- Character. What a person notices about a place tells you what they fear.
- Meaning. Verona’s public square, a tomb, a generator shed — the places a text returns to are the places it is thinking about.
A worked case
In Moon of the Crusted Snow the community is already remote before anything fails, and the novel makes that ordinary — the store, the band office, the road out. When the power goes, the setting stops being scenery and becomes the plot: distance, cold, and a community that has survived a collapse before.
Waubgeshig Rice is Anishinaabe, from Wasauksing First Nation, and the novel’s argument about who is prepared for an apocalypse depends entirely on the place he chose to set it in.
In your own writing
Cut any description that does not do one of the four jobs. A paragraph about weather that is not pressure, history, character, or meaning is a paragraph a reader will skim.
Curriculum connection
B1.7
evaluate the effectiveness of texts, including increasingly complex texts, using evidence from the text to support their opinions (e.g., explain why the plot of a novel is believable or not; explain why one online information source is more useful than another; explain some of the ways in which a particular novel engages the reader; explain why the wording of the text in an advertisement succeeds in capturing the attention of its teen audience)
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B2.2
identify a variety of text features and explain how they help communicate meaning (e.g., “explanatory” titles or epigraphs for individual chapters in a novel; logo size, illustrations, font sizes, and colour in an advertisement)
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