Setting (9 page)

You may think of other examples in which the very emphasis on change in setting becomes a unifying factor of its own. The story of a wagon train going west, for example, might pass through a number of contrasting macrosettings — grasslands, prairie, deserts, rivers, mountains —and might in part be held together because the microsetting, the wagon train itself, remained much the same. Additional unity might be given such a story also, by having the characters notice and comment on the changing backdrop during the journey, saying things like, "I thought the rainy weather on the prairie was bad until we reached this Godforsaken desert, where it never seems to get below a hundred degrees."

Showing that the setting is contributing to the course of events
can add unity to a story. Here the trick often is to have characters in the story point this out, saying things like the following:

• "This couldn't happen except in Middletown."

• "A company town always enforces its rules on troublemakers."

• "If that wall of snow and ice starts to move, we're trapped."

• "A mother-lode discovery like this one always brings in the lawless element, and we should have expected it."

• "When the store was robbed last Tuesday, it changed our lives forever."

There are occasions when it may seem like overkill to have characters comment on the impact of setting on plot—when it's so obvious that mention of it may sound silly. But real people tend to belabor the obvious when they're under stress, and realistic

story people will, too. So as you build credibility sometimes by allowing characters to worry aloud about obvious problems, you may also improve the sense of story unity by pointing out to the reader that the setting is holding things together by contributing to story happenings.

A SETTING EMPHASIS TO AVOID

If you believe from this discussion that I consider setting a primary unifying factor in many novels, you are absolutely correct. As long as each mention of setting is done briefly —ordinarily a few lines at a time, at most—I believe constant reference to setting will have multiple salutary effects on your copy.

However, there are times in your story when you must be careful
not
to dwell on setting, especially avoiding mention of any new aspects of it. This is when you are just opening a new story segment which involves transition in viewpoint or immediate locale.

Suppose, for example, that you are writing a novel in multiple viewpoint, with multiple plot lines and numerous settings. Suppose further that you have been away from character Martha's viewpoint and plot for a number of pages, and now wish to return to her.

Making such a transition in story focus and interest is difficult for your reader. It is incumbent upon you to make the change as painless and unconfusing as possible. The last thing you want to do is confuse him. If you open up your new segment returning to Martha's viewpoint and emphasizing the new setting she is in, the new and unfamiliar detail makes the reader's reorientation more difficult and potentially confusing.

To put this another way, you're asking the reader to make a hard enough jump in going from, say, character Sam's viewpoint and locale back to Martha's. You want to make it as easy as possible. How would you do this?

1. Avoid introducing new setting detail at the outset. This

in itself will eliminate one possibly disorienting element in your transition.

2. Remind the reader how your character was feeling when last seen. Given any clue at all, your reader will recall how your viewpoint character was feeling when the story was last in her viewpoint. By mentioning this same feeling again when you return to her viewpoint, you give the reader a vital "connection point" for a successful transition.

3. Refer to a unifying aspect of setting already established. This will give the reader a familiar landmark as a point of reorientation. Only well after you have eased the reader into the changed viewpoint —and reminded him of the setting in terms already familiar to him —can you risk the potentially disorienting tactic of adding new details about the setting.

Let's look at an example to clarify number three. Suppose you were returning to Martha's viewpoint downtown after you had devoted a few chapters to other viewpoints elsewhere, perhaps on the far outskirts of your town. You might ease the initial transition something like this (italics added for emphasis):

Still angry and, worried
as a result of her argument with Bill, Martha parked her car on Main Street a block from the center of town. As she got out of the car,
the familiar sound of the old clock on the bank corner
reached her ears. It was tolling noon.
Fighting tears of frustration,
she walked toward the
tall, sooty brick tower where the clock had tolled for a century. . . .

The first italicized words avoid any new detail and reestablish Martha's point of view by harking back to the last time she was seen in the story, reminding the reader of the exact same emotion Martha was experiencing then. This returns the reader to Martha's viewpoint in the least difficult way possible. (This matter of identifying a character's feelings —her
emotional focus —
is a subject we will consider in greater detail in chapter eleven.)

The second group of italicized words further eases the transition by mentioning something in the physical environment that is already familiar to the reader from earlier parts of the story: the clock.

The third and fourth brief segments elaborate briefly on the first two.

This works. But imagine how confused the reader might be at such a time of transition if the author had begun the new segment by describing previously unmentioned aspects of the setting, such as, say, false storefronts along Main Street, advertising signs, small shrubs dying from a drouth, or a beggar often seen on the curb. Introduction of such new setting detail would only disorient the reader. When making a transition, the familiar must be emphasized first!

Later in your story section, of course, you might well add a few new details about the setting, but only after you had written a reorientation paragraph (or two) would it be safe to do so.

But how would such tactics work if Martha had really traveled far from her small town while we were away from her viewpoint for a chapter or two? What if she had gone all the way to London, for example?

The same basic procedure would work. Here's how that kind of transitional opening might be worded:

Still angry and worried
a full week after her argument with Bill, Martha felt very much alone as she walked along the Thames. She looked across the river toward Big Ben in its ancient tower that so symbolized London. The great old clock began to toll the hour. It sounded so
familiar, so much like the old clock on the bank corner back home,
that her eyes filled with tears. . . .

Later, of course, new details about the London setting would be added a few at a time, as necessary. But reader reorientation takes precedence over any such additional detail.

SUGGESTED EXERCISE

An exercise might help you firm up your understanding of the techniques outlined in this chapter. While no single bit of homework is guaranteed to touch all the bases, the following exercise is one that has helped a great many writing students. Perhaps you would like to try it:

1. Carefully write an author-objective description of a major, noteworthy aspect of a setting, something like the clock tower used in illustrations in this chapter. Make this description, up to three hundred words, as vivid and detailed as you can, appealing to as many of the reader's senses as possible, and try to tie the physical description to some feeling or mood you want to set up in a story.

2. Add two or three brief, cogent paragraphs to this description from the viewpoint of a character, adding a bit about how the setting looks to the character, or how it makes her feel, or what it makes her think about. (Not more than a hundred additional words for this.)

3. Simply list five additional and related aspects of setting you might use in the same story if you were pursuing it through several additional chapters.

4. Imagine that you have been away from your chosen viewpoint character's head and heart for twenty-five pages, and now wish to return to her, in viewpoint, near the place where your major, noteworthy aspect of setting is located. Write the first four sentences of a segment that would return the reader to this viewpoint and locale.

Having done these things, put the pages aside temporarily and reread this chapter on setting. Then go back to each of your assignment pages with a critical eye and ask yourself these questions:

1. Is the noteworthy aspect of setting which I selected a good and central one for the story I want to tell? Is it interesting? Unusual? Sure to stand out?

2. Have I described it vividly, in as few pointed words as possible?

3. Is my list of additional features (to be added later) the best I can come up with? Taken altogether, do they tend to complete a coherent, evocative picture of this place and/or time?

4. In my "returning episode," have I carefully noted my imagined character's emotion? Have I carefully mentioned only that part of the setting which forms my central, noteworthy aspect?

If your answer to any of these questions is "no," then rewrite! It's important to have the material in this chapter clearly in your mind before moving on to other dynamic ways you can use setting to improve your story.

CHAPTER
7

HOW TO USE SETTING TO ADVANCE PLOT

Its far too easy to fall into the trap
of thinking of setting as a fixed and static aspect of your story. As implied in some of our earlier discussion, setting is not necessarily static at all: The weather may change, a storm may develop or collapse or move on; the background attitudes of characters may be radically altered by plot events; virtually anything may happen to alter the environment in which the story is playing out. Just as a story's plot must move forward and its characters must experience things, and change, so too the setting can seldom be allowed to stand in the background as a totally predictable, immutable element. When writers get bogged down in a story, sometimes it's because they have forgotten all this.

ADVANCEMENT OF PLOT

Setting can be used in several ways to help you advance your plot.

First, you can emphasize setting in a new way, bringing out a previously unseen problem. Imagine that you have built a story setting involving a small business depicted as thrifty, energetic and competitive against larger firms. Now think about how you might complicate and advance the plot by putting much greater emphasis on the company's competitive situation and the size of its rival firms. Suddenly your reader (and perhaps some of your characters) might begin seeing the company set-

ting as precarious rather than comfortable, as too small to compete successfully rather than as a cozy Ma-and-Pa operation, as a place to escape from rather than a place to settle in. Once you have begun emphasizing these ways of looking at your setting, imagine how your plot might be advanced in terms of character problem (and reader interest).

It might come in a passage like this:

The constant jangling of telephones suddenly struck Calvin as discordant, harshly demanding. He saw the driven expressions on some of his coworkers' faces, understanding for the first time how desperately all of them were working to stay ahead of the Acme Company down the street. He smelled frightened sweat—his own —and felt his stomach tighten as Meg hurried in from the front office, carrying a stack of change-orders. He had seen change-orders a thousand times, but suddenly they looked different to him. Now, instead of a challenge, they represented a threat. What if that stack of papers represented cancellations that could sink the Blodgett Company . . . and threaten his future?

Now the office setting is no longer comfortable. Now today's business is not merely important, but a matter of life and death. Now the meeting this afternoon must perhaps deal with a crucial marketing decision, rather than with routine business. By emphasizing the setting in a new way, you may dictate inescapable results in the immediate plot. To put this another way, by emphasizing the setting in a new way, you make something happen in your plot.

Or as another example, suppose you're writing a story about a small mining town in the Old West, bound inside a tight river canyon by high mountains on both east and west. You might first describe this town setting as secure, walled in from intruders, protected from the winter weather and cool and shady in the summer. But you could easily use the same setting to advance your plot simply by choosing to emphasize other aspects of it: The great gray massiveness of the surrounding mountains, their enormous bulk seeming to hang poised over the town, ready to wipe it out with a landslide at any moment; the way the tight river canyon walls in the town and makes it impossible for anyone inside the town to see approaching attackers; how the encapsulation of the town in its stone cocoon has made its people closed-minded and suspicious.

Even more dramatic in terms of advancing the plot is the introduction of new aspects of the setting not previously seen, so that your reader worries more and your major characters are forced to take some unexpected action.