How broad is your canvas?

Every story needs a setting.  This is the canvas on which the story is painted, and it often shapes the form of the story too.  One of our first tasks when we"re creating a story is to discover and design the place it is set in.

Our settings come in different widths.  If your characters are locked up in prison, or are severely ill, one room might be the whole setting.  If someone is held captive it could be their whole world too.  Your characters will know every inch of that confining space, and the way that they deal with it and their psychological reactions to confinement will drive the story.

Zooming out a little, many crime novels and horror stories are built around horrible things happening in small, remote, hamlets.  Usually the isolation of the setting serves to isolate the characters from any source of help, ratcheting up the tension in the story.  Or how about the tension that can arise in the confined space of a ship out on the ocean, a remote research station deep in the arctic or in an impenetrable jungle?  

We might want to use a city as our setting.  Your characters may have more physical freedom here, but what keeps them coming back to that rough neighbourhood?  What emotional tie keeps them bound to the ghetto and the brutal gang boss they grew up with?  

Or we might want to send our characters on a road movie, an adventure, or a quest that takes them to many places.  Here often the landscape becomes an adversary, blocking the character from getting to their goal through adverse weather, geopolitical upheaval, or even physical upheaval of the setting.

Science Fiction writers have the choice of the whole universe to set their stories, but often these are focused on one planet or a series of planets, or the action taking place on one confining spaceship.  Even when we're let loose in the universe to play, we have to find a setting we can relate to, something that doesn't overpower our senses or keep us in a constant state of awe that prevents us doing our jobs out there.

Setting can give you a broad view of the universe, or a zoomed-in, untra-close up of the world where every tiny bug is a massive monster.  Choose the scale that gives your story extra depth and power.