A Writer's Guide to Active Setting (16 page)

This is a small, short passage that expands the conflict already set up by the lack of witnesses at the motel. Look at the word choices—
cinder block lounge bar
and
no windows
. Then, by adding a visual of what type of bar it is—
Exotic Dancers
sign lit up in pink
—the likelihood that there are witnesses who would be focused on anything but the bar and the dancers isn't good. Two sentences and the author has ratcheted up the conflict of finding witnesses to a suspicious death.

Here's a Setting example, early in a story that not only anchors the reader as to where the story is unfolding, but foreshadows upcoming conflict by contrasting the image of the city, as viewed by the POV character, with what's already happened.

At this point, the POV character has just returned from the funeral of a good friend, a woman who died of AIDS contracted from a blood transfusion. When she reaches the dead woman's house, she runs into a group of protestors using the situation as an anti-AIDS rally. The POV character reflects on the people she sees and the town she's in:

The idyllic setting is twisted back upon itself with one short, stirring sentence. This city may look like paradise on one level, but there's a lot more going on. Talk about a strong one-two conflict punch, all relayed through Setting.

Here's how another author gives the reader a hint of backstory and more than a hint of conflict as the POV character returns to his childhood home for the funeral of his father:

The reader isn't given a visual image of a large white mini-mansion with Doric columns and delusions of grandeur. Instead, by combining place with the POV character's specific response, the story conflict and unfolding story drama is succinctly foreshadowed and shown, not simply told.

Here's another example from an old classic by Ngaio Marsh. By opening a mystery story set on an ocean-going ship, the author creates a closed-room mystery. She foreshadows the conflict by contrasting the POV of a minor secondary character, a police constable who is not on board, to introduce the Setting. This police officer, walking his beat, foreshadows the contrast between the idyllic belief that an ocean voyage is very attractive and desirable, and the upcoming reality of what can happen when a small group of strangers becomes trapped in a small environment with an unknown killer.

But before we get to Marsh's prose, let's look at how she might have built her words to maximize the Setting details.

The reader gets a vague idea of a ship waiting to sail. Not much here and certainly no sense of impending conflict.

In this draft, there's a hint of conflict between what the constable wants and what he is doing, but this was not the author's intention. Marsh's intention was to show one setting, the dockside where the constable is on his rounds, and the more romantic world of a ship about to embark on a cruise. In and of itself this does not imply conflict, only the contrast between what he thinks the ship represents and what it will become. This is where the tension, the conflict, is shown. Let's see how Ngaio Marsh uses Setting to foreshadow conflict.

Did you get the wonderful sensory details Marsh employs in the setting? The atmospheric details, the wistful sense of intrigue one has when thinking about a voyage from the perspective of a person trapped in the routine of his nightly rounds, these serve to heighten the sense of impending conflict, all in four sentences of Setting. The reader is in the scene, but this dockside vignette is not simply to show a cop on his beat. It uses this POV character to show the reader subtext by using specific word choices—
in and out of shadows, little worlds, watery globe, lonely
. What if Marsh had skipped these and her other word choices?

Ho hum. No emotion here. No conflict. No contrast used to punch up the sense of impending danger being raised in the reader's mind. A waste of a great opportunity.

A quick and easy way to create tension, or conflict, on the page is by using contrast. If a Setting is beautiful, you can create one set of emotions and reader expectations about what's going to happen as a result of the character in this Setting. But if the Setting is both beautiful and ugly, then a question is raised in the reader's mind as to what's about to happen. Tension drives the pacing of your story. A nifty way to show, not tell, inherent tension in your story is by using Setting, and contrast within it, to alert the reader.

In this first example we're looking through the POV of a young man who is resorting to illegal cage fighting as a quick way to make a buck and stay below the radar of very powerful and dangerous men tracking him (see the earlier J.R. Ward example). He's already been arrested, and is out on bail. He knows he needs to disappear now, but he's lost all his funds posting bail. So he decides to participate in one more fight. He arrives at the event's location, seeing the Setting for the first time. The character is used to these events being held in less-than-welcoming places, but this one is in a nearly-finished set of office buildings that look posh and finished on the outside, but are raw and empty on the inside. This reflects how he's feeling. Then he spots where he's going to fight.

Before we jump to the author's version, which shows conflict via the contrast between the external location and where this man must fight, let's assume an early draft was written.

In this version, the focus is on how the POV character feels about one aspect of the Setting. Not only is there no contrast, there's no tension, no sense of impending conflict. The two sentences are all about what's working, and nothing about what isn't working or might cause trouble for the character.

The focus on this second attempt shows the reader nothing, leaving her to wonder what the cage is or why being in one should cause problems. It's a classic case of the writer assuming there's more on the page than there actually is. As written, all the reader has is the word “cage,” which leaves it up to her to guess what that means. As a result, there's not a lot of conflict.

So let's see how author J.R. Ward brings the Setting to life, and through it ramps up the conflict, because the reader has no doubt why stepping in this “cage,” that's so very different than the ritzy, if unfinished, location, is dangerous.

Now we have contrast—
poor-man's MGM Grand
. In other words, the front of the building was for one type of person, but where the fight would take place was another world. He's stepping into cold air, not because he's too warm and it's welcoming but because the space is huge—
sixty-thousand square feet of huge
—with the cage, called the “octagon,” bolted in and sturdy. Now the reader is clearly shown what this man has to face even before he meets his opponent within that anchored trap.

Here's another short but powerful Setting description that not only foreshadows conflict based on the contrasts noted, but reveals a lot about the POV character's emotions as he thinks about where he is.

By using contrasting images to paint the city, Steinbeck shows the reader that people in this specific part of town have different expectations and different experiences. And where differences rub shoulders there's bound to be conflict eventually. Note also how Steinbeck starts and ends his Setting description on two positive images—
a poem
,
a dream
. By bracketing the description this way, Steinbeck makes it clear that the POV character is attracted to Cannery Row in spite of its negative elements. If Steinbeck had swapped his words around he would have transitioned the reader from a positive feel to a negative one:

Let's next look at how one author uses contrast between two principal characters in his story to heighten their differences, and thus the conflict between them, as they find themselves in the same Setting at the same time but with very different POVs.

First, from the antagonist's POV: The reader already knows this man is at odds with the protagonist, but the author reinforces that in the following passage.

Now we shift to the protagonist's POV. Compare what you learn about him because you've already been introduced to the Setting above.

Let's pull these two examples apart to see how Cotterill ratchets up conflict not only by using Setting, but by using contrasting POVs to show Setting.