How I Approach Adding Setting to My Romance Novels

Everyone’s writing process is unique, but here’s mine:

My first drafts are always what I think of as skeleton drafts. Basically floating heads doing things, and having conversations.

But entire scenes take place in a void.

Is my couple having this conversation in a five-star resort? A flea-ridden motel? Who knows! Certainly not my poor editors who’ve had to read through very early versions.

That’s because in the first draft, I don’t worry about setting.

For me, my first drafts are all about plot—what’s happening in the scene. That is all I’m worrying about.

My advice? If you’re trying to write a book and getting hung up on how to best describe the bedroom, the diner, the quirky coffee shop, don’t. Let all that be a revisions problem. Unless you naturally and instinctively write with rich, lyrical prose—where the scent of tobacco in a jazz club, the rumble of a sidecar down an alley, or the damp spray of the ocean demand to be written here and now—it’s okay to skip it. For now.

Because I promise, of all the things that are easy to layer in later in the process, setting is at the top of the list. It’s like the clothing of the writing draft, but you can’t outfit your story until the bones are there.

But let’s say it is time to deal with setting, whether in your first draft or fifth. Here’s my 3 top tips:

Focus on how the setting makes the character feel.

A hospital emergency room is going to be experienced differently by an exhausted nurse working a double, from a mom waiting to see if her son makes it out of surgery, or woman who’s stopped by to bring the waiting-room mom coffee, but is flooded by memories of when her sister died in a car accident three years earlier.

The details of setting only matter if they matter to the character.

Take my book Made in Manhattan. Many pivotal scenes take place in stuffy Upper East Side living rooms. For sheltered Violet, this environment is her comfort zone. For Cain, it’s foreign, almost suffocating.
But the room itself doesn’t change.The floral chairs, the Tiffany lamp, the china decor—they’re the same.
What makes the setting come alive is how the characters interact with it. Cain hesitates before sitting on the floral loveseat, half because it looks uncomfortable, half because he doesn’t want to dirty it. Later, Violet—overwhelmed from a crappy day—flops onto that very couch, finding comfort in its familiarity.

Same setting, two completely different experiences.

The same goes for destination settings. The exact shade of blue of the ocean? Not that interesting. But knowing that the heroine looks at that aqua-blue water and feels either a thrill for the week ahead or a deep nostalgia for what she left behind? That is what makes the reader step into the scene with her.