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Writers' Toolkit: Setting
Aug. 29th, 2005 11:36 amLet's think about something other than the weather for a while--but we can think about weather in the abstract, as part of the SETTING for your story.
Setting as character. Ah, the brooding swamp of Yoknapatawpha County. The dark forests of Mordor (or the Three-and-a-Half Kingdoms.) The parking lot of a Wal-Mart recently closed in Kentucky.
What's that I hear? Is it the cooling jets of the spacemobiles as they land outside the porthole window, or the rattle of carriage wheels over cobblestones?
The overall setting is the locale in which the majority of the book’s action occurs; this can be a real place about which readers may have preconceived notions or particular expectations, such as Dallas, Texas (ahem), or it can be an imaginary locale like Ladenia or Renner, Texas. Specific settings are where individual scenes take place. Specific settings can be quite different in character from overall setting: an air-conditioned courtroom or a tavern with lazily turning ceiling fans made of tropical leaves, for example, for a lawyer and a cop, repectively. Use "filtering" in a close-in, intimate POV. Let readers crawl inside the POV character’s body and experience the scene from her/his perspective by using the five senses: what do your characters see, hear, touch, taste and smell? (Don't overwhelm the reader with florid sensory experiences, though, because then she'll feel as if the sensory deprivation chamber cracked and she fell out onto the Vegas strip. Maybe use all the senses over the course of a couple of pages, then give it a rest until the scene changes or the character's mood changes [without falling into the pathetic fallacy, where it's raining to indicate she's crying. Well, at least don't do that in EVERY book.])
Setting can "set up" the fish-out-of-water thing. A heroine who is a high-powered New York lawyer could easily find herself at odds with a frustratingly slow-witted cop (or so it seems at first--he's doing the "I'm just a simple country boy" routine while the gears whir in back.) Let's say she has to cope with a seemingly dull but hunky New Orleans cop. Down in the Crescent City in that elbow-y bend of the mighty Mis-si-sip, nights are so humidly hot she wakes up sweaty and has to take *another* shower. Everybody is everybody else’s third cousin and nobody, especially the cop, ever seems to hurry. She can have lots of conflict as she tries to rush people or push them to go faster, and they can actually decide to sabotage the "crazy pushy Yankee." She's missing what they have to offer.
Setting can be a source of conflict. If your character needs to flee or hide, provide a setting (such as a national forest, a swampy bayou, outer space, or an alternate universe) where he/she can do so. Keep in mind the availability of help: if your heroine can call the police from her cell phone or run into the nearest convenience store when the killer is chasing her, it detracts from the credibility of your plot if she doesn’t do so. You have to set up things like low battery, bad antenna, connection lost, and so forth. Setting solves that problem if you put her somewhere she can’t easily get help. It's better to set up that stuff early and then have readers go, "I KNEW IT! I knew that would be a problem later."
The setting must be strong and suitable for your story. But don't let it overwhelm the story. Sprinkle in descriptions a line or two at a time as you go. You can get away with a paragraph now and then, especially if you use the character's senses to smell the salty sea, feel the warm Delta breeze, taste a shrimp off the barbie, etc. But don't write a travelogue. If you did a lot of research, as hard as it might be, don't use it all in the book. Use the stuff that fits in, and readers will be happy to have learned something.
Setting also covers more than geography. When in time is the novel set? What's the weather like? What special problems, if any, does the setting cause the hero? Is the setting important to the novel? If not, why are you using that setting?
Use the five senses to convey setting. Don't forget smell, taste, and touch.
Prayers still going out for the Gulf coast. And it sure looks to me as if the all-night prayers worked.
Setting as character. Ah, the brooding swamp of Yoknapatawpha County. The dark forests of Mordor (or the Three-and-a-Half Kingdoms.) The parking lot of a Wal-Mart recently closed in Kentucky.
What's that I hear? Is it the cooling jets of the spacemobiles as they land outside the porthole window, or the rattle of carriage wheels over cobblestones?
The overall setting is the locale in which the majority of the book’s action occurs; this can be a real place about which readers may have preconceived notions or particular expectations, such as Dallas, Texas (ahem), or it can be an imaginary locale like Ladenia or Renner, Texas. Specific settings are where individual scenes take place. Specific settings can be quite different in character from overall setting: an air-conditioned courtroom or a tavern with lazily turning ceiling fans made of tropical leaves, for example, for a lawyer and a cop, repectively. Use "filtering" in a close-in, intimate POV. Let readers crawl inside the POV character’s body and experience the scene from her/his perspective by using the five senses: what do your characters see, hear, touch, taste and smell? (Don't overwhelm the reader with florid sensory experiences, though, because then she'll feel as if the sensory deprivation chamber cracked and she fell out onto the Vegas strip. Maybe use all the senses over the course of a couple of pages, then give it a rest until the scene changes or the character's mood changes [without falling into the pathetic fallacy, where it's raining to indicate she's crying. Well, at least don't do that in EVERY book.])
Setting can "set up" the fish-out-of-water thing. A heroine who is a high-powered New York lawyer could easily find herself at odds with a frustratingly slow-witted cop (or so it seems at first--he's doing the "I'm just a simple country boy" routine while the gears whir in back.) Let's say she has to cope with a seemingly dull but hunky New Orleans cop. Down in the Crescent City in that elbow-y bend of the mighty Mis-si-sip, nights are so humidly hot she wakes up sweaty and has to take *another* shower. Everybody is everybody else’s third cousin and nobody, especially the cop, ever seems to hurry. She can have lots of conflict as she tries to rush people or push them to go faster, and they can actually decide to sabotage the "crazy pushy Yankee." She's missing what they have to offer.
Setting can be a source of conflict. If your character needs to flee or hide, provide a setting (such as a national forest, a swampy bayou, outer space, or an alternate universe) where he/she can do so. Keep in mind the availability of help: if your heroine can call the police from her cell phone or run into the nearest convenience store when the killer is chasing her, it detracts from the credibility of your plot if she doesn’t do so. You have to set up things like low battery, bad antenna, connection lost, and so forth. Setting solves that problem if you put her somewhere she can’t easily get help. It's better to set up that stuff early and then have readers go, "I KNEW IT! I knew that would be a problem later."
The setting must be strong and suitable for your story. But don't let it overwhelm the story. Sprinkle in descriptions a line or two at a time as you go. You can get away with a paragraph now and then, especially if you use the character's senses to smell the salty sea, feel the warm Delta breeze, taste a shrimp off the barbie, etc. But don't write a travelogue. If you did a lot of research, as hard as it might be, don't use it all in the book. Use the stuff that fits in, and readers will be happy to have learned something.
Setting also covers more than geography. When in time is the novel set? What's the weather like? What special problems, if any, does the setting cause the hero? Is the setting important to the novel? If not, why are you using that setting?
Use the five senses to convey setting. Don't forget smell, taste, and touch.
Prayers still going out for the Gulf coast. And it sure looks to me as if the all-night prayers worked.
