Setting (2 page)

The writer's imagination
can benefit from setting research. Very often, researching factual information for a story, or visiting an actual site to experience it physically, will fire her imagination in unexpected ways.

Perhaps you'll forgive another autobiographical illustration. When I visited California's Napa Valley several years ago," researching information about winemaking for use in the setting of my novel
The Winemakers,
I was quite concerned about how to open the novel in a way that would establish the setting and a sense of impending trouble at the same time. As I was walking through a winery with its owner one day, he cautioned me not to stumble over a number of heavy electrical cables on the concrete floor.

"Those control the temperature of the fermentation tanks," he explained. "If you pulled the plug, we could lose five hundred gallons of wine."

In that instant, my research into setting had set off my imagination and solved my problem with the opening of the book. If you read it today, you will find that it begins with a young winemaker arriving at her winery—and finding that someone has intentionally "pulled the plug."

TAKE YOUR TIME

Here we've looked at setting in a variety of ways, but in a cursory fashion. I hope I have managed to convince you that your handling of setting may be far more vital to your fiction project than you had previously suspected. In the chapters ahead we'll take a closer look at these and other aspects of setting, and how to maximize their potential in your story.

Let me urge you to work through the chapters slowly, seeking out ways you can reconsider your own work in light of the matters being discussed. It may help you to have copies of some of your own completed stories at hand as you study. As a point is made here, you may benefit by pausing to absorb the idea, and then carefully looking at some of your own copy to see if you have considered the idea in your past work. If not, you should ask yourself why not; if so, you should ask yourself if your new understanding might improve what you did earlier, perhaps without knowing why. If you choose
to
rewrite portions of your earlier material before moving on through this book, so much the better.

There's no tremendous hurry, you see, and hasty reading without action on your part might let important technical information go in one ear and right out the other. I encourage you to take your time and apply each chapter to your own work before moving on to the next.

After all, you remember the cliche—"Rome wasn't built in a day."
Your
story's Rome, if it's to be convincing, can't be built overnight either.

CHAPTER 2

PRESENTING SENSE IMPRESSIONS

When most writers think
of the word "setting," they think of the physical impressions of the story world: the look, sound and smell of the place or places where the story takes place.

As we move along through this book, we'll also consider many other aspects of fiction which can rightfully be considered part of setting, but first let's consider the sense impressions of the story world.

Your use of description is vital in putting the reader into the story world. Use of vivid descriptions places him imaginatively inside the setting, transporting him to your story world through an appeal to his senses.

Sense impressions, therefore, are tremendously important in presenting your setting and keeping your reader intensely, physically aware of it. An in-depth examination of descriptive methodology is beyond the scope of this book, but we'll take a cursory look at some techniques in chapter fourteen. For now, a brief overview might help.

A truth every writer should keep in mind is that when she stops to describe something in fiction, the progress of the story usually stops while she does so. Fiction readers seek movement in their fiction, and so every "pause to describe" can be a dangerous one, threatening to weaken or even kill the reader's interest.

What is one to do, then, given the equally compelling truth that description of the story setting is vital to reader belief and physical involvement?

The answer is that descriptions generally should be kept to

a few words or a few lines at any given spot. Sensory descriptions should be sprinkled throughout the story, rather than "dumped" in great gobs. Handled this way, descriptive passages won't slow the story for long, and the reader will be reminded again and again —in short passages —how the story setting feels.

THE FIVE SENSES

Psychologists have repeatedly shown that sight is the dominant sense for most normal people. Therefore, it stands to reason that your sense descriptions most often will be dominated by how things appear. Hearing impressions usually rank second, but one can easily imagine circumstances in which tactile impressions might rank higher in story importance. So let's look briefly at each of the five senses you'll hope to touch in most of your stories.

Sight impressions
may be of various kinds. There is a common misconception that one has covered the waterfront if she tells what colors can be seen in a given setting. Color is important, but —again according to psychological research findings — we know that a person's sight impressions of a given setting come into consciousness in a specific order.

Spatial dimension is often noted first. How large is the area? How open or closed? How high is the ceiling, if there is one? How far away is the sight-horizon if we're outdoors? How big or small does this space that we're describing feel to the onlooker?

The source of light is usually noted next or may be noticed simultaneously with dimension. Where does the light come from? How bright is it? Is it white light, or a mixture of subtle hues? (If we are "walking the reader" into a room, for example, is there a wall of high windows, or a single slit in a solid gray wall? And if a wall of windows, is the light that streams through sunny or cloudy gray?)

The dominant color of a setting may be striking and important. In describing a desert, for example, you may stress —after the vastness of the scene, and perhaps the glare —the monotonous tan of the terrain under a harsh, copper-colored sky.

Texture may also play a role in sight impression. The play of shadows over a weather-shattered cliff face may be a crucial sight impression; so might be the perfectly flat and placid surface of a small mountain lake on a windless day.

Contrasting shades of color are sometimes a dominant aspect of sight. The leaves of a tree might be green in actuality, for example, but in the context of your story they might look like sharply defined black shapes against the brilliance of the blue sky. That yellow fire truck might be more vibrant if it's seen parked in front of a red brick wall. Contrast often enlivens sight impression.

Hearing impressions
are also crucial. The loudness of sound in a given setting is, of course, important, but also consider what is the tonality of the sound. Is it harsh or melodious? Why?

Is the sound a simple, single-source one, or a complex of many sounds? Should you transport your reader by concentrating on the single high wail of an ambulance siren, or would your setting be made more vivid if you depicted the siren sound almost lost in the groan of a garbage truck nearby, the honking of taxi horns, the roar of a diesel engine and the rumble of a subway beneath the pavement?

The identity and direction of a source of sound may be im- portant. Is the sound coming from a distance, or close? Is it in the room or beyond the walls? Is it the muffled echo of a gunshot or the whimper of a child?

Assuming you are telling your story from the viewpoint of a character inside the action, that character's interpretation of the sound or sounds may also be highly significant in your description of it. For example, your character in the woods hears a low, guttural animal sound. Does she interpret it in terms of remembering how her pet dog used to grumble at squirrels, or does the image of a hungry grizzly instantly leap into her mind?

The sense of smell
often ranks third in the hierarchy of sense impressions in a setting, usually far below sight and hearing because it is a more primitive sense, one we often tend to overlook or discount in real life. We often notice only strong odors, whether pleasant or unpleasant, and seldom form a

strong judgment about a setting on the basis of them alone. Also, for most writers, describing odors is difficult and seldom seems highly relevant.

Yet, a woodland setting might come to life most vividly for the reader through a brief, cogent mention of the scent of pine and fallen leaves. The terror of a fire might come partly from the stinging cloud of smoke that threatens to choke bystanders. In such cases, an appeal to the sense of smell might be called for, or even demanded.

Tactile sensations—
feeling with the fingertips or the surface of the skin — are more individualistic than most of the other senses mentioned thus far. Here we are dealing with physical feeling —roughness or smoothness, heat and cold, and the like. While there are imaginable circumstances in which the description of the setting through tactile sensations might be in order — in a story of someone threatened by freezing after being lost in a blizzard, for one obvious example —such sensations usually form a small part of the setting of a story.

Taste impressions,
as part of setting, will be highly individualized. This sense is seldom used to a marked degree. But in those rare instances where a description of a taste —sweetness or bitterness, saltiness, acidity—may be called for, they too form a part of the physical setting of the tale.

As a fiction writer, you'll come upon occasions when you want to appeal to most of the senses in an attempt to make your story setting vivid and appealing. However, just as you must be accurate in factual background, you can't allow yourself to be "carried away" by some poetic flight of fancy in describing. Bluebirds
are
blue, and readers aren't going to like it if you change the color to orange because you think it might be more vivid.

HOW TO DELIVER SENSE IMPRESSIONS WITH PRECISION

It is not enough, though, to stick to known and verifiable impressions, and to sprinkle them in with care. Readers yearn for the most vivid and striking physical presentations of setting that you

are capable of giving. Here, then, are some additional points that you should keep in mind.

If you know your story setting well, your notebook and imagination will be teeming with sense impressions you want to convey to the reader in order to make the story world vivid. But there is a danger that you might overdo it. The key here is to avoid generalizations or vagueness, and stick to specific, concrete detail.

Suppose, for example, you are trying to describe a fine country morning, and you bog down in generalizations and vague, catchall phrases (the words italicized in the following). You might come up with something like this:

The
beautiful
day began with a
bright
sun in a
clear
sky and a
gentle
breeze moving through the
handsome
trees behind the
big
house. Beyond the
wide
river, through a
slight
veil of mist, the
buildings
of the
town
could be seen. . . .

Clearly, one might go on for pages with this kind of vague and generalized description, and never really get anywhere. If you search for a few words that are as specific and concrete as possible, however, you may achieve your story goals and get on with things in a hurry, as follows:

Shading her eyes against the brilliant sun, Cassie squinted into the chilly breeze, trying to penetrate the smokelike haze over the river. Beyond it, the town's buildings jutted up like a child's blocks tumbled onto the ground.

We'll look more deeply at such questions of precision in wording in chapter fourteen. The point here is simply to start you thinking about the relationship between specificity of information and style. If you are specific enough, and strive to write with sharp impact, this in itself will tend to prevent your writing descriptive passages that are too long.

One further thought about "overkill" detail: Repetition of exactly the same sense impressions makes a story dull and pre-dictable. Similarly, repetition of the same background facts can be deadly dull. If you need to repeatedly mention the frigid weather, for example, find a different way to refer to it each time. You can't simply keep saying it's cold outside. Instead, consider dropping in brief mentions of details like the following:

• the shrill wind against the roof shingles

• thick ice encrusting the inside of the windows

• a character's breath issuing from her lungs in steamy clouds

• brittle snowflakes swirling in the misty night