FUNDAMENTALS OF SETTING: WHEN SPACE IS NOT THE PLACE
An Office Hours question from Nancy Hall: My southern novels seem to turn some readers off. Is there any answer for that?!
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Recently a dear friend confessed that they don’t like stories set in outer space. At all. This was a shocker for me because I’ve known this friend for decades and we’ve seen more movies together than I could count, and yet I never once picked up on this predilection. Plus, as a scifi-head I assumed everyone loved outer space as much as I did — but of course that’s far from true.
Human beings are “decidedly a territorial species,”1 in every sense of the word. Given how important space/place (and their resources) are to our survival — literally life or death — no surprise that space/place would evoke all sorts of visceral reactions in folks. It’s just how we’re built; we all have inner compasses that point in some directions but not in others — that lead us to landscape X over landscape Y. There are people who hear the words New York City, for example, and their imaginations soar and other folks who hear New York City and start having nightmares.
Which is why, after genre, Setting is one of the great dividing lines for readers — and because genre often has Setting baked in there’s a lot of overlap here. When you select a Setting (or select a genre) you will automatically pique the interest of some readers and rankle others.
This is the wild part — a reader is far more likely to read stories about characters they don’t like than those set in places they don’t like.
Same with genre. I know readers who won’t read fantasy no matter how persuasively I pitch it — it just ain’t for them.
Not a ton you can do against the Hard No crowd (though one always holds out hope for the literary version of a Damascene conversion). But there are people that one can reach — or better said, there are ways to improve your Settings’ ability to attract and hold the attention of folks who otherwise might not choose to journey to your particular Narnia.