Ideally, every aspect of your romance novel — character descriptions, dialogue, and narrative — should advance your plotline. In a romance, that means bringing your story closer to the hero and heroine's achieving their HEA (Happily Ever After). Setting is no different.

Don't waste words. Describing the hero's living room from the heroine's POV only gives the reader a description of furnishings. However, if you use the description to offer insight into both her personality and his, you'll move your story forward.

The easiest way to use setting to advance your plot is to make sure the setting details are relevant on more than one level. Following are five tips that might help:

1. Use setting to show the passage of time. For example, if you are writing a historical romance, you can jump ahead months by using a short description in the heroine's POV of how the weather has changed from summer to winter.

2. Use setting to introduce an internal conflict. For example, assume you are writing a contemporary romance where the heroine can't trust men because her father had abandoned her and her mom years earlier. If you add a scene where the hero and heroine visit a casino, the setting could trigger the heroine's memory of her father's compulsive gambling, which was the reason he had ultimately left.

3. Use setting to turn the plot in a new direction. For example, you could write a romance in which the heroine and hero are traveling together by necessity. If you foreshadowed in Chapter 2 that the heroine will leave the hero once they arrive in Abilene, Texas, the destination becomes a part of the plot. Once they arrive in Abilene, reader expectation for forward movement of the plot is understood.

4. Use setting to become the catalyst for a shift in the romantic relationship. For example, if the heroine and hero find themselves having to seek shelter in an abandoned barn after a sudden downpour, they might end up making love in the hayloft.

5. Use setting to reveal hidden aspects of a character's personality, which propels the story forward. For example, assume the heroine has thought of the hero as a tough, by-the-book cop who has no empathy for other people. Then she watches him at a Safety Awareness class in a school-room full of third graders. He's a different person from the gruff cop she's known. He's softer, kinder … and much more attractive to her in the new setting.

Setting, if used correctly, can work as any other element of the story. Don't think of setting as simply the backdrop for the action. Make it count by finding a way to use setting to advance your plot.