How to Come Up with Band 6 HSC Story Setting Ideas

In this article, you’re going to learn how to develop your own story setting ideas for Module C. 

As a Senior HSC English Tutor with 200+ hours of experience, I’m here to help you get past any writer’s block and craft the perfect setting for your story! In this article, I’ll break down:

1. Good vs. bad settings (with examples).
2. A step by step guide for developing your setting.
3. A free table of 30 unique story settings and writing prompts to get you started.

So, what are you waiting for? Let’s start building a setting that brings your story to life!

What is a story setting?

How to Develop a Story Setting Idea in 5 steps

Good vs. Bad Story Setting Examples

FAQs About Story Settings

What is a story setting?

The setting of a story refers to the time, place and environment in which the events of the narrative unfold.

The setting plays a crucial role in establishing the atmosphere, reflecting the characters’ circumstances and helping to convey the main themes.

As American author Carmen Maria Machado writes: “Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.”

This highlights how a setting is more than just a backdrop, it gains meaning through the characters’ perspectives and the emotional or thematic weight it carries. Whether it’s a dystopian future, a small town or a fantasy realm, the setting can profoundly impact how the reader perceives the plot and the characters.

How to Develop a Story Setting Idea in 5 Steps

➡️ Step 1: Brainstorm

If you already have a strong concept for characters, themes or the main message of your story, use that foundation to help guide your choice of setting. A clear understanding of these elements can make selecting the setting more intuitive, as it needs to complement and enhance your story’s core ideas.

Say you want to write a story with a message warning about the dangers of obsession and romanticising another person, that already gives you a lead as you can look up famous cases of obsession (or pull from your own imagination) and jot down some ideas that inspire you.

Then it’s just about choosing what works best for your story! 

For example, if you want to explore the tension between obsession and anonymity, you might consider setting it in an online landscape like a chat room. On the other hand, if you want to invoke the intensity and dread of being physically followed, a suburban street at night might serve that intention better.

However, if you want to establish the setting before anything else, here are a few ways of finding inspiration.

• Think of settings from other stories that you’ve read (films, tv shows or video games work too if you’re not much of a reader). While you can’t directly set your story in a specific place, like Hogwarts for example, the overarching atmosphere of a British boarding school might inspire you.
• If you find it difficult to describe settings from your imagination, think of places you have personally been to as a foundation for your story setting. Scroll through your camera roll, are there any photos of locations e.g. interior of a hotel, a beach at sunset, etc. that give you ideas about what to describe?
• If you’re interested in history, you might consider writing a period piece (a story set in a specific time period in the past) or a historical fiction (a story where the characters are real historical figures, but the events are fictional or fictionalised).

➡️ Step 2: Research

Once you’ve chosen a setting, especially one you’re unfamiliar with, it’s essential to do some research to make the space feel authentic and immersive.

Readers will quickly notice if a setting lacks believability or detail, especially when it’s a specialised environment like a courtroom, prison, hospital, etc. or a specific cultural or historical setting.

For instance, if your story takes place in a courtroom, look up how court proceedings actually work: what’s the layout of the room, who speaks when and how formal is the language used?

Or, if you’re writing about a country you haven’t been to, read through some websites or even skim Street View on Google Maps to get a better sense of the setting. Your research doesn’t have to be super in-depth, just enough to get a sense of the culture and atmosphere. Look out for not only what a place looks like, but how it feels, what people wear, how they talk and what sounds or smells might be in the air. 

If you’re writing a story set in Ancient Rome, for example, you’d want to research basic Roman architecture, social customs, clothing and daily routines. Helpful starting points could include The World History Encyclopaedia or short educational videos, like those from CrashCourse on YouTube. 

Ultimately, it’s not about stuffing your story with trivia, but about making the setting feel like a lived-in world.

➡️ Step 3: Describing

Once you’ve chosen a setting, the next step is to bring it to life on the page, and the key to that is sensory imagery. The best settings don’t just tell readers where the story is taking place, they make them feel like they’re in the space by engaging their senses.

Think about what your character would experience if they were standing in that setting. What do they see? What sounds surround them? Is there a particular smell in the air – something comforting, or maybe unsettling? Can they feel the dampness of rain on their clothes or the dry heat pressing down on their skin?

For example, rather than saying “It was a hot day,” you might write:

“The pavement shimmered under the sunlight  as the humid air clung to her skin.” 

Details like these make a scene immersive, but they also help establish tone. A brightly lit cafe with the warm hum of conversation creates a very different feeling than a dim, echoing hallway where footsteps seem too loud. Descriptive choices subtly signal to the reader how they’re supposed to feel in the space.

That said, be careful not to overdo it. A common mistake is overloading a paragraph with too many adjectives or unrelated details. Keep your imagery purposeful by choosing the most striking, relevant sensations that create atmosphere or reveal something about the character’s state of mind.

Here are a few tips to help guide your descriptions:

• Focus on 2–3 senses per scene, rather than trying to include all five.
• Think about how your character’s emotional state might influence their perception of the setting.
• Use figurative language, such as metaphor or similes, to describe the environment in a more creative way.

Ultimately, as NESA puts it, the process of crafting an immersive setting requires you to “experiment with a range of language forms and features for example imagery, rhetoric, voice, characterisation, point of view, dialogue and tone.”

➡️ Step 4: Staying Consistent

Once you’ve chosen and described your setting, it’s important to make sure the details stay consistent throughout your story.

For example, if your story takes place in an abandoned mall, it wouldn’t make sense for the escalators to still be working, as the electricity would likely be cut off, which also means the characters would have to rely on torches or phone flashlights to see. 

Ultimately, plot holes can lessen the reader’s immersion and sometimes derail the entire story, so always double-check that your descriptions make sense in the context of your setting.

➡️ Step 5: Next Steps

Now that you’ve got your setting all figured out, there are a couple of other elements you need to consider before you start writing. Here’s a checklist of questions to help you get started:

👥 Characters

• How many characters are in your story?
• Whose perspective are you telling the story from? 
• Are you going to change perspectives?
• What narrative voice are you using (first, second or third person)? 
• How do your characters interact with the setting?

💬 Themes

• What are the main themes you want to focus on?
• How does your choice of setting and characters enhance your exploration of these themes?
• How are you going to represent these themes through showing rather than telling? For example, if you’re exploring the theme of trust, telling would involve a character directly saying something like “it takes years to earn someone’s trust, but mere moments to lose it.” Consider instead how you can convey that same idea to your audience through techniques such as subtext, motifs and characterisation.

Good vs. Bad Story Setting Examples

✅ Good Setting Example #1

Good settings often serve as a symbolic reflection of the protagonist’s internal world.

Take this example from Stephen King’s The Shining describing the interior of the Overlook Hotel:

“She whirled around and stared at the night-blackened window, and a hideous white face with circles of darkness for eyes was gibbering at her, the face of a monstrous lunatic that had been hiding in these groaning walls all along – It was only a pattern of frost on the outside of the glass.”

In this excerpt, the unsettling description mirrors Wendy’s growing fear and paranoia towards Jack, as well as the way the Overlook itself increasingly feels like a malevolent force, rather than just a physical space.

✅ Good Setting Example #2

Good settings often create a vivid atmosphere that foreshadows aspects of the characters’ journey and connects to the story’s themes.

Take this example from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian describing the American outback:

“They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.”

In this excerpt, the description of the desolate desert landscape mirrors the harsh, inescapable fate awaiting the characters. The setting becomes not just a backdrop, but an active force, ominously shaping the dark tone of the novel and reflecting themes such as human brutality and the unforgiving natural world.

❌ Bad Setting Example #1

The main thing that characterises a bad story setting are vague or overly simplistic descriptions that don’t stick in the reader’s mind or create a specific atmosphere.

Take this example from Gerald Lund’s novel The Alliance describing Alliance Square:

“What you see before you is the heart not only of our city, but of the entire Alliance.” The bus pulled into a turnaround so the passengers had a clear view. “Alliance Square houses offices for all three levels of government. Those along the north side are the AFC buildings, or the equivalent of the federal level. The square building with the round dome houses the Senate and the judicial offices. The brown brick mansion is where the president, Peter Dobson, lives.”

This except, rather than immersing the reader in a vivid place, functions more like a basic exposition dump, offering names of buildings and roles without any unique imagery, sensory detail or a strong sense of tone.

❌ Bad Setting Example #2

However, it is also possible to go too far in the opposite direction by overloading the setting with excessive adjectives and unnecessary details, which can undermine the story’s atmosphere.

Take the opening sentence from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Paul Clifford:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” 

While this excerpt attempts to evoke the chaotic atmosphere of a stormy night, its long-winded and repetitive nature can bore the reader and make the setting feel overly complicated.

Here’s a rewrite which keeps the sensory details and cuts out all the filler:

“The rain fell in torrents, occasionally disrupted by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets of London, rattling along the housetops and fiercely agitating the scanty flames of the lamps struggling against the darkness.”

FAQs About Story Settings

What’s more important: characters or setting?

The truth is, the most important thing is the story itself and the meaning you’re trying to create. As such, the characters and setting should be carefully chosen to help you convey this meaning. 

For example, if you want to explore themes of economic imbalance and systemic failure, a possible setting could be a housing commission apartment dilapidated due to governmental neglect, and your main characters could be a hard-working family struggling to make ends meet.

Keep in mind that well-chosen story setting ideas don’t just frame the story; they amplify emotional impact and help readers understand the characters’ struggles on a deeper level.

Do I need a unique setting?

While unique settings are great for making your story stand out, what’s really important is including sensory details to create a specific atmosphere that immerses your reader.

For example, even if your story is set in a common location like a park, you can describe it in a way that creates a vivid image:

”The gentle sunlight brought out the russet hues of the newly fallen autumn leaves as I walked through the park.”

This line evokes a calm, pleasant atmosphere, establishing not only where the story is set but also how it feels to be there. So, just remember the most important thing is how you intentionally use your setting to reflect mood, theme and character perspective.

How long do I need to describe the setting for?

There’s no strict rule about how much description you need, it simply needs to be enough to orient the reader and create an immersive atmosphere.

A few well-crafted sentences near the beginning can help establish the scene, but the setting shouldn’t stop there. Sensory details woven throughout the story can deepen mood and tension. 

For example, during a serious confrontation, describing the wind disheveling someone’s hair or their breath fogging in the frigid air can heighten the emotional intensity and ground the moment in a vivid physical space.

What is the most creative setting you have seen in a story?

In my opinion, the most creative settings are those that create their own imaginative world.

A great example is George Orwell’s 1984, which reimagines the world as divided into three supercontinents constantly in conflict, creates a new propaganda system centred around the figure of “Big Brother”, and even invents a new language: “Newspeak.”

But let’s be real, inventing a fully unique dystopian, sci-fi or fantasy world is incredibly difficult in the limited space of a short story. There often isn’t enough time to fully explore how the society works or develop its internal logic.

That’s why one of the most effective ways I’ve seen students get creative with setting is by choosing locations that are typically overlooked in literature.

For example, back in high school, my friend wrote a story for Mod C which was centred around a group of strangers talking while in a queue for a public bathroom.

It was a setting so mundane in real life that it felt oddly unexpected and engaging on the page. The everyday nature of the place, combined with the unpredictability of what might happen there, created an absurd but compelling atmosphere. It proves that creativity often comes from how you use a setting, not just how imaginative it is.

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Christina Ugov is currently completing a double degree in International and Global Studies and Theatre and Performance at the University of Sydney. Outside of her studies, she enjoys exploring creative writing projects, analysing literature and playing with her cat. She spends her spare time reading, listening to music and drinking lots of tea.

Elizabeth Goh isn’t a fan of writing about herself in third-person, even if she loves writing. Elizabeth decided she didn’t get enough English, History or Legal Studies at Abbotsleigh School for her own HSC in 2010 so she came back to help others survive it with Art of Smart Education. She’s since done a mish-mash of things with her life which includes studying a Bachelor of Arts (Politics and International Relations) with a Bachelor of Laws at Macquarie University, working for NSW Parliament, and writing about writing.