Setting (14 page)

This last point is very important, although it does not relate solely to the setting in your story. Writing is a lonely business, and it is all too easy to become so focused and intense about your work that you start closing doors and windows, turning down chances to meet new people, and begin to resemble a hermit. If your story world is to be vibrant and convincing, you must be out in the world, continually drawing from new and stimulating experiences. Research —and hobbies —make sure you maintain this outer focus.

A word should also be said about "painless research" of a different type: travel. As mentioned before in a different context, we tend to get so used to our everyday environment that we take many things for granted, and practically don't see them anymore. Familiarity breeds a kind of blindness. Traveling to a new locale, where nothing is familiar, awakens all the observational apparatus; we look,
really
look, at a church or store or office building that we might drive right by without seeing if it were in our humdrum, everyday setting. A change of scene sharpens all our observational skills. Even after we return home, we see things with fresh and inquisitive eyes for quite some time.

I'll talk about travel for on-site research of setting in Appendix 1 on research techniques as well as in chapter fifteen.

SUGGESTED SELF-EXAMINATION

Perhaps this chapter has suggested a course of self-examination that might help you analyze your own "research" and setting work in its broadest possible definition. Let me offer a few specific ideas for such a self-exam.

Look at the settings you have used in your last four stories or books. Are they very much the same? Are they small-town settings, for example, or all contemporary, or perhaps all big-city neighborhood or all business? If they are, ask yourself what other different setting you should research for your next creative effort.

Can you see many things that your settings have in common, even if they appear different on the surface? Do your story people always come from similar backgrounds, for example? Do they always have the same values? What different backgrounds or values could you research for your next setting?

Study the way you described physical settings in recent stories. Do you always stress what is seen, at the expense of mentioning other sense impressions? Is it possible you could enrich your descriptions if you took a trip or tried a new hobby which might excite your mind and make your observations — and writing—more acute?

Have you done as much research as you should have for recent stories? If not, why not? List ten sources of setting information you regularly use —or
should
be using. Have you taken an interesting trip, even a short one, in the last six months? Have you looked into or begun taking part in a new hobby in the last year? Think about these things!

Finally, one more exercise. Select a setting for a story which would be quite uncharacteristic for your work: a place and time and set of attitudes you have never used as a story backdrop before. Don't make this selection easy; pick something really "out in left field" in terms of what you usually do.

Now research this setting, and prepare a fact portfolio about it. Make up and fill out a setting research form for it. (You will find one writer's setting research form as an example in Appendix 2.)

This work is guaranteed to open your eyes to some of your tendencies about handling setting. It will also, I feel sure, stimulate you to find new ways to handle your setting problems.

CHAPTER 10

SETTING AND VIEWPOINT: IT'S HOW YOU LOOK AT IT

At many points in the telling of a story
, an author faces the decision of where to put the vantage point —the point from which the setting is to be described or discussed. Fundamentals concerning this decision were discussed in chapter two and mentioned again in chapter three. Let's briefly review those points and then look at other aspects.

Essentially, what you often have to decide, as the author of the piece, is where you stand—where you place the reader's imagination —in experiencing the story setting. In the broadest terms, you have the two choices already mentioned: The omniscient or author-objective panoramic view, told as a god might tell it, seeing everything and knowing virtually everything, or the view as experienced from inside a character, and limited to what that single character can realistically experience and know.

Each approach has its pros and cons. So let's reconsider them as briefly as possible.

THE OMNISCIENT VIEWPOINT

The omniscient approach offers three distinct advantages:

• It offers the broadest possible scope.

• It allows the author to provide information no character knows.

• It is economical—allows summary.

Useful in describing scenery, landscape, and great movements over time, the omniscient viewpoint allows you the author to show anything you wish from as far away, or as close, as you desire. It allows you to provide a long-time sense of history. Such "on high" observations can also include information that no character inside the story could possibly know. Therefore, the omniscient viewpoint has many applications in broad-sweep situations.

Such a viewpoint is not used only in broad-sweep situations, however. It is a very efficient way of showing information about a setting, and allows for summary because you the author are not stuck in the lifelike narrative of a story character, whose experience often must be told moment-by-moment, with no summary, in order to be as realistic as possible. That's why you sometimes find a writer getting out of character viewpoint at the start of a story segment in order to provide a few broad brushstrokes of setting as quickly as possible. In such situations, the omniscient viewpoint is the most effective.

Here, for example, is a brief use of the technique by novelist Jeff Clinton in a recent western titled
Big Sky Revenge:

Night came, and with it a clear starry sky and the sliver of a rising moon. The ground quickly gave off its heat and in the dark it was cold, the kind of cold that sinks quickly to the bone.

This is economical writing. A broad and general picture of the setting is provided in fewer words than might have been necessary if the same description were put in the viewpoint of a character, who might have had to walk outside and look around, shiver, etc., in order to experience the same thing. The brief passage also illustrates the ability to summarize. At least an hour passes in two sentences. If told from a character's viewpoint, the passage of so much time could hardly have been summarized so deftly because there is no summary in real life, and little in the lives of fiction characters; rather, the writer would have had to add considerable minute details in order to show time passing, rather than simply summarizing it, as the omniscient approach allows.

Just as the technique has advantages of sweep and compression, however, it has disadvantages which you must weigh before making a decision to use it:

• You may lose your character identification.

• You may get carried away and overdescribe.

Since omniscient writing by definition is told outside a character viewpoint, there is always the danger that the reader may lose contact with the viewpoint character if such passages go on very long. Your shifting to a broad, godlike viewpoint takes your reader to that mountaintop or place out of space and time, too, remember. He may stop thinking about your main story character and her outlook during such on-high journeys. Such a loss of contact with the viewpoint character may mean loss of reader sympathy and identification with that character —and, consequently, loss of interest in the human story.

To put this another way, there is a danger that such a passage, if extended very long, will turn the reader's attention from the story people to the setting exclusively, and all storytelling will be lost as the reader studies a kind of stop-action photograph in words. Make sure the advantages clearly outweigh dangers such as this one if you "go omniscient."

The other disadvantage noted above —that one might get carried away in omniscience —is easier to deal with once you realize the danger exists. Sometimes a writer gets so deeply into the broad-scale imagining that she is carried away and starts putting in great gobs of purple prose. Or she may start lecturing the reader about the facts.

I think most of us have cringed at one time or another when encountering an awful purple patch of overheated description in a story. Perhaps most of us have almost dozed off, too, when confronted by a huge block of solid factual information that stopped the story dead in its tracks. Almost always such errors come when the writer is in an omniscient mode. Always keep in mind the reactions of your readers.

THE RESTRICTED VIEWPOINT

What should we remember about using the restricted viewpoint of a story character as our place for viewing the setting? Again there are advantages and disadvantages you may already be aware of from the earlier discussions in chapters two and three. Here we'll review and then move on. (You may wish to return to the earlier chapters as part of your study here.)

The advantages of viewpoint restriction:

• It's convincing because it gives the reader this information the same way he experiences real life: from the limited view of a lone individual.

• It's simpler because there will always be many aspects of the setting that the single individual cannot sense or know — being on the wrong side of the mountain to see the waiting outlaws, for example, or standing too far from the scene of the crash to hear the clashing of metal.

• It tends to be briefer because a character caught up in the action and problems of your story ordinarily just won't have the time to notice a lot of things.

We've looked in earlier chapters at the major disadvantages of restricted viewpoint, and need only mention them by way of review here:

• There may be times when you want to show a broader picture, and simply can't find a character who could experience all that.

• There may be information you want to provide that no single character could possibly know.

THE URGE TO TELL TOO MUCH

I've known writers who got very uneasy—or downright panicky—because they thought they needed to get certain broad-scale information or sense impressions into their story at a given point, but couldn't find a character to experience all that they desired to convey. If you ever get that feeling, let me suggest that you sit back for a minute and ask yourself if the reader really needs that panoramic view (or additional information). Often you may discover that she doesn't, and that your feeling is an
author
concern, not a
reader
concern. You may be wanting to tell more than necessary just because you happen to know it.

It's hard sometimes to accept that a reader doesn't need to experience or know something. You know everything about the setting, can see it all in your imagination, and your natural impulse is to want to share your vision with your reader —to put in everything for the reader to know, see, hear, smell, taste, feel and believe about the setting at that moment of story time. It's a brave impulse, and one that's very hard to dissuade writers of sometimes, but nearly always it's fallacious.

Your reader seldom needs to know all you do at any point. You might think he would benefit from a vast and panoramic view of that city setting, but he does not experience his real life that way, and he does not want to experience the story setting that way, either. Belief comes from identification with the viewpoint. Identification with the viewpoint comes from a restricted view of the setting. The reader's concern is with what the character knows. Your authorial concern about showing the big picture often has nothing whatsoever to do with telling a good story in the most effective way.

However, if you decide after reflection that broad-scale information is vital to the reader, you obviously may elect to assume the omniscient view for a short time. Or you may elect to keep your viewpoint limited to a single person at a time, but hop around among several characters in order to show what each is experiencing.

Let me offer one example here of how the omniscient viewpoint can provide a sweeping picture. This is from an early segment of the novel by Jeff Clinton mentioned earlier,
Big Sky Revenge:

It was a magnificent day: brilliant blue sky, a few low clouds forming a silvery haze on the lower slopes, the upper reaches already blinding white under their winter coat.

Crossing a swift stream, its banks encrusted with ice, Ford spooked an elk—a flash of tan and orange—in the long declivity a quarter-mile behind his house, on higher ground. He didn't fire. He saw some deer, a doe and a buck, higher up and at some distance. The light snow under the trees was crisscrossed with the tracks of rabbits, beavers, otters, and skunks. Ford walked steadily, his breath a huge cloud around him, and reached the turning in the creek designated on Craddock's map. He moved on.

A brief analysis of this short passage may be helpful. The passage comes after a transition in time, clearly marked by double white spaces in the text, so the reader presumably begins reading without too strong a thought connection to any viewpoint.