I love that rush I get, when a story bursts into my head with a couple of characters and a hazy setting, and I can start fabulating just who they are and what’s going on. The narrative ideas spool on out like an early silent movie, and I ignore the initial story setting in favor of the basic “getting a clue”. (I’ll add the sound and color later on, I tell myself, once I figure it out).

But… that’s not how “The World” works. Not even the invented versions. Logically, settings are around before the story set in them exists. They have history and texture.

Take a walk down a random city street. That building over there looks like it maybe started life as a bank, but now it’s some sort of bar. The pavement is the worse for wear and you have to watch your step. You draw trivial conclusions about everyone you see, based on their clothing, their posture, the way they gesture. You can’t help any of this — it’s built into being a thinking observant animal with eyes, ears, and a history of understanding how things work.

Now, heaven forfend that you should literally describe all of this when telling the story, when it’s mostly just background, a setting for the people and the action. But parts of it are there (in the character’s mind, anyway) and can be hinted at in narration to convey an environment and history and attitude to the reader, (e.g., “I had to dodge the last of the stinking winos being swept away from the Old Bank Tavern’s alley over the rain-slick flagstones, like so many bounced checks.”)

The point is — all story settings are effectively old (even if they are literally set in a building just completed.) They pre-exist a character’s observation and thus come before him with a life and history of their own. The same is true for every person, every animal, every gust of wind, every piece of trash. The character has an environment, and however accustomed to it he may be, he will notice things about it even when they’re not important, just because it’s that sort of world, or he’s that sort of person.

In shaping our stories, with character motives, clues, personality, and so forth… we control what the character notices in order to tell our story plot and to illuminate his character. We choose the bits we share with the reader as part of our craft.

When we watch a movie, the writer/director makes the same sorts of choices. But because it is a movie, we can’t help but see an awful lot more about the environment than we typically share with a reader. It can’t all be plot-relevant — after all, the setting has to exist concretely in some form, even if most of it is ignorable. It sets a tone, a tension, a reminder… all sorts of things… but we can’t not see it, even if we’re being deliberately misdirected in what we notice, to build an element of surprise for the story.

The danger for us as non-film writers is that we have to be explicit about some of the background and the clues, just as a movie must, but it’s easy for us to sometimes forget that they don’t exist if they aren’t somehow referenced. We have to supply enough of the everyday environment that the story-important bits can be appropriately obscured or ignored as clues, but the larger context can be alive and convincing as a world.

It’s a tough balancing act to convey the verisimilitude of a real world that can be interacted with, without overt explanations or boring descriptions. How do you remind yourself to ground the reader appropriately in a plausible setting? How do you make yourself notice and recount telling details, even if they don’t tell your literal plot?