: Re: How to make a setting relevant? One piece of feedback that I got on a story I wrote is that my settings feel irrelevant, or that the entire book could have been a phone call. I am not

@Rivera824

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I've seen this feedback to a bunch of folks lately. That's got me thinking.

Here's a few things to consider.

Don't describe setting bits that don't matter.
Describe setting through character action.

Using these two pieces, imagine the following options (neither is very good; just mock-ups):

The office was roughly square in shape, with wallpaper that looked to
be from the 1970s plastered on its walls--velvet roses in a
shade of yellow that had surely never occurred in nature. The desk, on the
other hand, was sleek steel, and pushed against the side wall, and oddly,
appeared to serve only as a place to store papers.
The center of the office was dominated by a fake putting green, the kind
you could order from the comfort of 30,000 feet from a Sharper Image
catalog. No windows at all.

OK. You can picture the office But none of it is relevant to your story. So it serves no purpose. There might be a teeny bit of character development in it, based on the commentary about golf, but since there are no actual characters in sight that hardly matters. It's like a blueprint--and that's the problem with it. Make the setting matter to the character we're following and it's better for story (although it would be worse for a contractor, heh):

Joe strode into the boss's office and nearly tripped over a nine iron
on the floor. He picked it up and leaned it against the wall just past
the mock putting green. Disposable income, he thought, must be
nice.

Hank--Mr. O'Malley, Joe corrected himself--was leaning against his
desk, which had been pushed to the side of the room. The desk's knee
cubby was up against the wall; the guy really liked his golf it
seemed. Situated as it was, the desk served as nothing except an extra
place to store old papers. No, strike that, the only place to store
papers; there wasn't a file cabinet in sight. Or a single chair. No
windows for that matter, and Joe looked around wondering where he was
supposed to sit without even a windowsill as a possible option, or if
he was supposed to just stand there, in the middle of the room, like a
school boy waiting to be disciplined. He considered leaning against
the wall, but the outdated velvet wallpaper put him off the idea.

Make the setting a source of props for your character and it becomes interesting.

In a restaurant, you have tons of props. Things to throw, to chew, to be be disgusted by, people moving about, etc. Points of commonality to imply camaraderie. "What are you drinking? Scotch? I'll have the same." And so on.

best to use only the setting details that the character interacts with or notices in some way. Over time, the character can notice new things--like how the boss keeps a picture face-down on his desk and never, ever faces it up, and it starts to become a point of curiosity for Joe, for example.
Provide enough details that a character is not a floating head, but not so many we become distracted. A little goes a long way. There are questions on the SE to address how many details are useful.

Answer: If your character is interacting with the setting, then the setting feels relevant.

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