A location tells a lot about the person or people who inhabit it. An organized office, a scattered room, a neatly arranged work desk, a mansion in Malibu or a studio apartment in Queens tell us a person is organized, scattered, rich, or struggling. This also applies to your characters and the setting, which you can use to highlight your characters' strengths and weaknesses and tell some specific details about who they are. It can also present a growth opportunity for your characters. 

Display Their Competence

It is crucial to display your hero and heroine as capable because such traits make them endearing, admirable, and worthy of your reader's attention. A simple method to demonstrate these qualities is by showing your characters performing with competence and proficiency in their natural environment. Show them as calm and collected as they handle a chaotic situation, not flinching or losing their focus with the ability to perform under pressure. 

The scene where this is displayed could also be the first time the hero notices the heroine or vice versa. She can't help but recognize his skill in his workplace or his kindness in his community. Or she immediately captivates him with her ability to lead in an industry dominated by men or how she cares for the young and elderly in her locale.

When you show your characters at their best in their natural settings, you allow readers to see how the characters’ strengths can be compelling and complementary, and sometimes emotionally alluring and sexy.

Display Vulnerability

As it is crucial to show your main characters displaying their strength in their natural environment, it is also essential to show them in their moments of vulnerability. You can achieve this with the setting by putting your hero and heroine in an unnatural environment. Take them out of their comfort zone into the complete opposite of their natural surroundings. Let readers see your characters lose it and fall on their faces in a place where they have little to no control or mastery.

Here, a successful Wall Street executive used to the lavish life of success may find herself in a desert in Mexico trying to escape assassins sent to kill her on her summer exotic vacation. A brave firefighter may get caught in the heat of a dysfunctional extended family. He thought he had escaped from them, but as they all organize their grandmother’s burial, he deals with them again. 

In each case, taking the hero and heroine out of their everyday setting and into a new setting catches them off guard, making them contemplate things they’ve often ignored about themselves. This displays their weaknesses instead of their strengths and lets the readers and other characters see past their confident, competent persona into their flawed and endearing humanity.

Display Growth

First, you put them in a setting that shows their strengths. Then you plunge them into a setting that uncovers their weakness. Now, it's time to bring out the best in them. Through your setting, you can allow your characters to change for the better, face their fears and demons, and come out successful and transformed. Your setting can hold the key to the growing process of your characters.

Our Wall Street executive trapped in the Mexican desert, at first, may have felt out of place, scared, confused, and uncertain. While in the desert, she begins to confront so many aspects of her personality and emotional baggage, which she had ignored during her successful Wall Street years. She may get downcast and dejected but soon adjusts to her new environment, learning how to survive in the desert and, at the same time, addressing her emotional issues.

Our firefighter may learn to get along with his dysfunctional family. He begins to appreciate the true meaning of family and love and opens his heart to trust and fall in love again. Soon it's his grandmother’s funeral, and readers see a new man worthy of the heroine’s love and capable of happily ever after.