How To Construct The Setting Of A Short Story

Setting is a quite unimportant part of a short story, as it seems. In fact, you will have to form it carefully, if you want to make a story round.
Considering a novel, there will be much text about the time and place of the action, generally speaking. The novel finds the way to the reader’s mind and heart when it sets up the action and its flow in a precisely depicted world of material and visible things and backgrounds. There is enough space to tell about the facade, the look and the state of a building, before Chandler’s hero Marlowe enters the house in which he’s going to get his new task as a detective. The author takes his time and space to paint the picture of the garden, the walls, and the inside of the villa.
In a short story it is just the opposite. Have a look at Hemingway’s Old Man at the Bridge. It has only four pages, and it is full of action and dialogue – so it seems that the setting is irrelevant. Nevertheless place and time are very significant and very specific. There is a river, a bridge, a valley, dark clouds, and it is Easter Sunday, during the Spanish Civil War – the author uses about 15 lines for the setting, and in spite of using very little effort for it, his construction is perfect, the absolutely fitting surface for the action.
Imagine this very short story as a novel. How much more space would the author have to describe the landscape, the weather, the country around the bridge, the valley, the different developments of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, the movements of the characters in different places! All that is not possible in the short story.
You might think this is bad, and you are forced to write a text that is worse than a novel. Actually this is an error. The short story takes all its excitement and motivation from being short with the characters, the action, the solution and the setting. The typical form and content makes it short and compact, so that it gets readable and enjoyable. The reader literally expects that it has some lines about setting, but only very few and very appropriate ones.
Normally, you will read a true work of art when the author manages to focus all your interest on the action, the conflict, the exciting moments of the text, and at the same time you have the feeling that this very action can only take place at this very time, at this very space. Reading the story, you will not really reflect the background, but you know it is there, and it must be like this, for this very action.
If you really want to learn what I mean here, you should read this short story, and enjoy it. If you want to compare the methods of building a setting, I recommend reading Hemingway’s great novel For Whom The Bell Tolls. Maybe you get the same idea as I did: that the novel is the long form of the short story – which is also and especially valid for the construction of a perfect setting.