How Setting is Crucial to Your Story

Setting is the time, place and social background of your story.  Setting helps set the mood or atmosphere of the story.  It can also influence characters' behaviour, affect dialogue, foreshadow events, invoke emotion and reflect society, according to The Writing Place (https://thewritingplace.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/story-elements-importance-of-the-setting/).

As a writer, you can show setting by:

1.  Dialogue

A teenager from Chicago speaks differently than one from rural Kentucky.  Someone who orders a caramel mocchiato might be of a more sophisticated social class than someone who orders an orange soda.

2.  Weather

A hurricane might suggest that you are in New Orleans whereas a blizzard might suggest you are in New England.  Fragrant flowers infers springtime whereas swirling leaves infers fall.

3.  Foreshadowing

A dark, gloomy house foreshadows danger.  Flickering candles foreshadows romance or a religious ceremony.

4.  Behaviour

A story set during 9/11 would be a good place for heroic behaviour.

5.  Society

If our protagonist lives in Victorian era London, the customs are quite different than current day New York City.

6.  Emotion

Victorian era London, its streets filled with wide eyed orphans with rumbling tummies, evokes more emotion than present day London.

Darcy Pattison suggest turning the familiar into the unfamiliar.  For example, Where the Wild Things Are starts in the protagonist's bedroom but ends up in a jungle.  King Bidgood's in the Bathtub transforms a nightly bath into a wild adventure.  You can do the reverse as well.  Turn something unfamiliar into something familiar as Brinton Turkle does in her story about a Quaker family called Rachel and Obadiah.

No matter what setting you choose, make sure you have a working knowledge of the locale and time period.  If not, do thorough research before you start writing.  Here are some picture books and chapter books whose authors have done an excellent job of setting the scene:

Picture Books

1.  Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Judi Barrett)

2.  The Lorax (Dr. Seuss)

3.  Thundercake (Patricia Polacco)

4.  Ghost's Hour, Spook's Hour (Eve Bunting)

5.  The Hockey Sweater (Roch Carrier)

6.  One Splendid Tree (Marilyn Helmer)

Chapter Books

1.  Summer of the Gypsy Moths (Sara Pennypacker)

2.  To the Mountaintop:  My Journey Through The Civil Rights Movement (Charlayne Hunter-Gault)

3.  The Impossible Rescue:  The True Story of an Amazing Arctic Adventure (Martin W. Sandler)

4.  Crow (Barbara Wright)

5.  The One and Only Ivan (Katherin Applegate)

6.  Making Bombs for Hitler (Marsha Skrypuch)

https://www.papermasters.com/setting.html

The History of the Chapter Book

The chapter dates back two millennia.  The Bible is divided into numbered, titled segments of text. The modern novel, divided into chapters, debuted in the 17th and early 18th Century.  Works like The History of Charlotte Summers by Sarah Fielding (1750) , The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens (1836) and The Warden by Anthony Trollope (1855) are but three examples.

http://covers.feedbooks.net/book/225.jpg?size=large&t=1425660139

The chapter book, or middle grade novel, did not appear until the 20th Century.  According to Marsha Skrypuch, early chapter books, geared to ages seven to ten, are anywhere from 500 to 3000 words.  Unlike picture books, chapter books include a story told mainly through prose, although they can include illustrations.  They are divided into short chapters to give the young reader, often with a shorter attention span than an adult, a chance to pause.  The vocabulary is controlled.  Flat Stanley (1964) and Busybody Nora (1976) are two examples of early chapter books.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/13/Flat_stanley.jpg

The middle grade chapter book, geared to ages ten to twelve, is 10,000 to 50,000 words in length.  It serves as a good transition between readers and novels.  Sold at book clubs and fairs, it is the easiest to sell of the chapter books.  The children select them and their parents pay for them.  The middle grade protagonist is a child, the topics are still child-related, and the vocabulary is rich. Stolen Child and One Step at a Time, both by Marsha Skrypuch, are examples of middle grade chapter books.

http://www.amazon.ca/Stolen-Child-Marsha-Forchuk-Skrypuch/dp/0545986125

Finally, the young adult chapter book (Y/A novel) is 40,000 to 60,000 words in length and is geared to teens.  The protagonist is a teen.  The subjects are gritty, but they are "handled with kid gloves", according to Marsha Skrypuch.  The covers are usually "edgy and sophisticated".  Judy Blume, author of Are You There God?  It's Me Margaret, was the "Queen of the Y/A novels" in the 1970's and 1980's.

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1257293727l/304917.jpg

For more information, read http://www.calla2.com/wordpress/tips/types-of-kids-books/.