Last night, my local NaNo chapter held a settings workshop which I attended, and the speaker presented a neat little table that can help you get an overview of your setting in a short amount of time.

Forgive my formatting since I can't upload a picture, but it's a very simple idea:

                   Macro          Midi          Micro

Physical:

Temporal:

Social:

It's fairly self-explanatory from there. The box where Macro and Physical meet would have your general setting in it: Europe, New York City, Mars, etc., then Midi narrows it down a bit, and then Micro is the specific unique place or places where your story happens.

Temporal is the same, but with the time your story happens during. Macro is the time period, Midi is the year or years. Micro is the season or month, or however specific your story gets.

Then social is more of the same. By the time you get to the micro social setting, you're usually dealing with your protagonist or possibly a group of characters from your book.

I found this really fascinating and helpful for me to figure out what my setting is and why that's important. I hope someone else can find it useful, too.


Sihaya