6 Questions to Consider When Choosing Your Story’s Setting

Setting can give birth to plot, shape characters, and influence the atmosphere of a story. It can be the difference between a forgettable reading experience and an exciting journey into an unknown world.

This is from the prologue of The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2016:

“Plants everywhere will die, and the animals that depend on them will starve, and the animals that eat those will starve. Winter will come early, and hard, and it will last a long, long time. It will end, of course, like every winter does, and then the world will return to its old self. Eventually.

Eventually.

The people of the Stillness live in a perpetual state of disaster preparedness. They’ve built walls and dug wells and put away food, and they can easily last five, ten, even twenty-five years in a world without sun.

Eventually meaning in this case in a few thousand…