When writing settings, the main thing to do is to put the reader there. Perhaps the most important place is the start of your story. Use all the senses to convince the reader they are experiencing the same sensations as your protagonists.

Settings should be used to show off character to full advantage. Think of the places your main character would typically be in/visit, and draw attention to aspects of setting that your character would be most effected by.

I sometimes find it useful to take just ONE sense for each important character, so that different characters could appear in the same setting, but experience it differently.

For example, I write children’s books. My mouse character Housie Mousie experiences a great deal through her nose :) so smell is very important. Focusing on just one aspect of sentience makes a character more memorable. I deliberately put Housie Mousie in places where there are interesting smells, for example, in a kitchen where apple pie sets her whiskers twitching, in a house where Mousie is intrigued by the medicinal smell of eucalyptus and so on.

Another middle grade book I have written features a young girl dog-sledding in a winter wonderland. She’s a musher and a violinist. So I made her a sensitive character, who feels all the sensations of driving her dogs on sled-runners. To her, the movement of the sled sliding on the icy terrain feels like the sensation of a violin bow sliding as she plays. She is a touchy-feely character.

In my ya novella, a retelling of The Snow Queen, I had a lot of fun depicting Irish life at a public house. I focused a great deal on “voice” and “sound” in this setting to give an impression of a tiny corner in a typical Irish street, brimming with life. So there was a character who made his entrance, clacking his shoes, and colloquialisms you would only find in an authentic Irish setting. Attention to detail, adding “local color” is important so I showed characters gambling and following the horse races from the bar.

For characters to be convincing, there should be a congruence between them and your chosen settings. Unless of course, you are writing something like a thriller or crime novel. In this case, incongruence - the character tries to pass-off as “belonging” in a setting, but really he/she doesn’t - could add an intriguing dimension to your story. In actuality, a police officer once told me that incongruence or a kind of mismatch; finding someone in a particular place who doesn’t seem to belong there draws police attention immediately.

My watchword for setting is “atmosphere.” Even an empty room has a kind of atmosphere. In a ghost story, an empty room or abandoned house, void of any living beings, could be made into a character in itself.

As you write, my advice is “think cinema” and you won’t go wrong! Show off your settings from different angles and viewpoints - close ups, middle-ranges and long shots. I find it useful to drop in a color to make settings more startling. Everything I put in my setting, even objects, carries meaning.