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Setting is an incredibly important foundation. It doesn't make a story, but it can break it. One of my favorite characters was a feisty warrior woman half crazed AND royal blood. She could have this odd combination because even though her world was medievil, she came from a wild swamp tribe, explaining the odd bits like her position in society, her fighting ability etc.

Really, if you have a crap setting then you WILL have a story that's underpar.

I don't think anyone here is old enough to know one of the reasons why the original Star Wars movie worked on a visual level, but it's the same reason the Lord of the Rings movies worked.

They poured an insane amount of work into the background to build up a believable field -- the scruffed up look of the Falcon, the used and battered appearance of the tables and tools in the Shire -- and yet put no focus on them.

That's the cold, hard truth of worldbuilding, for any kind of Alternate Timeline, Fantasy, Science Fiction, etc. setting, if you're writing anything more involved and longer than a short story. You need to devote time into creating the world, the politics, the religion, the manner of dress and the climate and the towns, even if it's nothing more than a throwaway line of an overall impression of something (ex., "Cleburn was a day's hard ride away from Wesarbo, but not much worth visiting. No major trade came through, and the whole village seemed grimy and smelled vaguely of rotten food." wink

Then comes the hard part.

Ignoring all the work you just did.

I know how tempting it is to throw in all these little things to highlight how very brilliant and clever you are, but believe me, it is generally very obvious when a writer does that, and very annoying when it is obvious. Your cleverness is not the main character, and needs to go back to being the Invisible Man Behind The Curtain. If you do it right, your cleverness will not NEED you to point it out, because you are writing a world so rich and full and vivid and real that has a feeling of extending out far beyond the pages of the book that the reader will know it, without you beating them over the head with this fact.

It's hard to do hours and countless hours of figuring out the names and places and royalty and religious policies -- especially when you know the odds of the information ever making it into the book as anything more than a tossaway reference (if even that much at all!) -- and sit down to write and not at least nod to your work. It's hard to look at what you have to do and think it's at all important and wanting to sit down and flesh out a story... but you can't make something from nothing. Why is The Bad Guy considered Evil? Why does your character believe the way they do? Why is it Always Done This Way in that village? Why? Why? Why?

And why should you do that work when it may never even see the light of day beyond your notes? Because it gives you meat on your plot. It flavors it, seasons it, gives a reader something to really sink their teeth into, and it gives you more information to build up twists and secrets and discover new characters and things you hadn't thought of when you began to plan the basic plot.

This is especially important if you're writing Alternate History set in this world. What would happen if our world had been more steampunk, or if religion hadn't been such a strong developing influence over the centuries? What if Christianity died out by the tenth century? What sort of things would NOT have come to pass because of that? And what sort of things -- good and bad alike -- would have? Another religion would have stepped in to fill the gap, it's human nature. What would be the political differences? The social ones? You can't just say "oh, X religion never got big" and ignore the names and places and social customs and political policies and wars that shaped entire nations and empires over the centuries because of X religion, unfortunately.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That's the reason why we have to worldbuild when we are writing in a place beyond our own. We have to find out where the actions are coming from in order to figure out the reaction it has on the story and plot, and what actions those reactions cause.

It seems thankless, but it makes all the difference when you hit 'print' for that final draft to ship it off to your agent.

I'm an absolutely obsessive world builder! While my characters and plot end up being dominant once the story is a-rollin', I make sure that my setting is built to a high level of detail before I begin writing. I know not only what the physical location looks like, but what life is like in the place, which part of the location the characters grew up in and how this shaped their lives, what the technology is like and how this affects the story, and how history has unfolded up until the point the story starts.

I hold with those who think there should be a distiction between "Physical description" and "setting". I don't want to read pages and pages of purple prose about the glorious land somebody's created, or the thousands of cliches about places like New York*. I would rather see the setting embodied through the character, by how it affects their way of thinking, their daily habits, etc.

*Seriously, I have never read a story set in New York that didn't constantly reiterate all the things people know about it; pidgeons, homeless people, rude taxi drivers, etc. Which I guess kind of suggests that the writer never bothered going there or researching it, and just took the easy way out.

I love settings; they really make a story for me, along with the characters.
HDM has a setting which makes the story; the plot is good, the characters good but the setting is fantastic. A new world where the soul is visible and takes the form of an animal, witches with a prophercy, theories on dust etc

I agree with ignoring settings though- making them present but not upfront. At the moment part of my setting is based in my hometown simply because I know it best, I know its character etc and I think thats better then trying to make a town I've never visited seem real. Plus it fits in with the general theme of ordinary, my town is the very picture of ordinary and thats what I need. I may change it, I don't know- at the moment it fits in with the rest of the setting though.