A Writer's Guide to Active Setting (19 page)
Read A Writer's Guide to Active Setting Online
Authors: Mary Buckham
Let's look at another example of a young man's room. The POV character is a housecleaner who uses her job as a means to keep distance between her and others, but she is very much aware of other people by observing how they keep their private spaces. Here, author Charlaine Harris shows the relationship between Bobo, a young man, and the housecleaner. She also threads in a bit of their backstory and shows the reader a little about himâa recurring character in the story series.
I stood in the doorway of Bobo Winthrop's room and eyed it grimly. Bobo is a husky seventeen-year-old, full of hormones in overdrive, as I'd discovered last summer. He was at school today. But his room was evidence that Bobo had been home to at least sleep and change clothes often during the past week. There was furniture in the room, somewhere, under all that mess, and I remembered it was good furniture, just as Bobo, I had a gut feeling, was a good kidâunder all that mess.
In other words, he didn't leave his room like this to spite me after I thumped him in the guts for putting his hand on my bottom. It's just that Bobo has been accustomed all his life to having someone clean up after him.
Days like this, I feel like I'm following an elephant in a parade, armed only with a puppy's pooper-scooper.
âCharlaine Harris,
Shakespeare's Landlord
Did it matter to the reader about the size of the room? The color scheme? The quantity or placement of the furniture? Not at all. The reader gets a sense of the personality of Bobo from his room, the relationship between the two people, and some backstory about both of them. Plus the passage foreshadows ongoing conflict for the housecleanerâ
following an elephant in a parade, armed with only a puppy's pooper-scooper
âand adds in her emotional state of mind. Let's see what happens if we remove the Setting from the above passage.
ROUGH DRAFT:
Bobo is a husky seventeen-year-old, full of hormones in overdrive, as I'd discovered last summer. I thumped him in the guts for putting his hand on my bottom.
He was at school today. I had a gut feeling Bobo was a good kidâunder all that mess.
Takes a lot away, doesn't it?
Check out how, in the next example, Nancy Pickard manages to pull the reader deeply into the world and reveal the conflict of the storyâa mystery involving events that happened between the POV character's husband and a fellow student while all three were in high school. The POV character loved school and excelled at it. Her police-captain husband was one of the wild boys in that particular environment, and his experiences there were very different than hers. The son he did not know he had is a current student at this school and has just showed up on the POV character's doorstep. This backstory is revealed to the readers before they get too far into the book.
Much of the mystery element involves looking at what happened in this specific place, and what is still happening as a result of those key years. This approach slows the story and allows the reader to experience the school environment in a vivid way, through the first-person narrative POV. This includes some of the backstory of the school, which then pays off through the rest of the story. The theme of the novel,
Confession
, is understanding that one person's past is not the same as another's, yet that past can still define the present. Here the POV character starts to relate to the boy by understanding that not all her school memories were fun and exciting.
This passage, because of its length, slows the pacing of Pickard's novel, but because so much of the story is woven through what happened years ago in this school, Pickard takes the time to use the school Setting to foreshadow first from the wife, then from the husbandâtwo very different school experiences. This backstory helps create conflict in the current story events.
I had a sudden, startling memory of what it had been like to sit in those classrooms in late August, early September. Boys with their legs sprawled wide under their desks, their elbows taking up most of the aisle space. Girls with their chins in their hands, their other hands holding pencils, doodling on the cover of the steno pads they used to take classroom notes. All of us drooping, barely awake, now and then exchanging glances, arching our eyebrows at each other as the teacher droned at the front of the room. White chalk words on the chalkboard up front. All the windows open, but nothing moving in the stifling air inside where we were. A smell of bubblegum as somebody surreptitiously unwrapped a piece. The feeling of a scar in the wood of my desk, under my fingertips. The sense of the presence of the cute boy one row back to my left. The sweat at all the places on my body where my clothes were binding me. All of life on hold as if it were on hold waiting for the bell to ring.
âNancy Pickard,
Confession
While the POV character might have personally liked school, she also remembers there were times when it felt stifling. This reveals a hint of backstory and conflict between the good and negative memories of this place. The reader gets a stronger sense of the emotional state of the POV character shifting from one emotional stateâneutral memoriesâto stronger emotionsâa life on hold, waiting for the bell to ring.
NOTE:
Weigh your usage of narrative Setting description against your intention. The longer or more narrative description you use, the slower your pacing.
Here's an example of Setting used to show the reader about the backstory and conflicted relationship between a son and his father: a father who recently died, leaving the son to deal with unresolved issues between them.
Dad was obsessive about maintaining the house. He was a handy guy, always painting and staining, cleaning out the gutters, changing out pipes, power-washing the patio. He was an electrician by trade, but he gave it up to go into business, and he missed working with his hands, couldn't face the weekend without the prospect of manual labor. But now the paint is cracked and flaking off the window frames, there's an ugly brown water stain just below the roofline, the bluestones on the front walk rattle like loose teeth, and the rose trellises lean away from the house like they're trying to escape. The lawn hasn't been watered enough, and it's brown in patches, but the twin dogwoods we used to climb are in full bloom, their crimson leaves fanned out like an awning over the front walk. Consumed with Dad's slow death, Mom forgot to cancel the pool service, so the swimming pool in the yard glistens with blue water, but the grass is starting to come up through the paving stones around it. The house is like a woman you find attractive at a distance. The closer you get, the more you wonder what you were thinking.
âJonathan Tropper,
This Is Where I Leave You
Do you get a sense of the father-son relationship here by what the son remembers about his father's behavior and the father's own conflicted choices? And a sense of how the father's slow, lingering death impacted his wife, too? This is accomplished through showing the deterioration of the family home while the mom's focus was getting her husband through his last months.
This is a strong example of using themeâthe appearance of things versus what's really going on insideâto help the reader understand the emotional tenor of the story. This was not a sudden death, but a long, lingering one. The son had not made his peace with his father and is only now coming to terms with that issue. The Setting description thus reveals the emotional tone of the story, shows where the son is emotionally now, provides some backstory, and foreshadows conflict based on the realization that the POV character left his mother alone to deal with the dying process.
Next is an example of sharing backstory through showing the POV character's connection to a specific space. The author, Barbara Kingsolver, could have had the character simply respond verbally to the initial question and move along. She wanted to make a point that even though the POV character worked as a ranger in the nearby national park, she had chosen an isolated existence. As a result, her past belonged intimately to a nearby place, one she understands even if she doesn't choose to live there.
“That your hometown?” he asked.
She nodded, surprised he'd guessed it. They hadn't spoken for an hour or more as they'd climbed through the lacewinged afternoon toward this place, this view she now studied. There was a silver thread of Egg Creek; and there, where it came together like a thumb and four fingers with Bitter, Goose, Walker, and Black, was the town of Egg Fork, a loose arrangement of tiny squares that looked from this distance like a box of mints tossed on the ground. Her heart contained other perspectives on it, though: Oda Black's store, where Eskimo Pies lay under brittle blankets of frost in the cooler box; Little Brother's Hardware with its jar of free lollipops on the dusty counterâa whole childhood in the palm of one valley. Right now she could see a livestock truck crawling slowly up Highway 6, halfway between Nannie Rawley's orchard and the farm that used to be hers, and her dad's. The house wasn't visible from here, in any light, however she squinted.
âBarbara Kingsolver,
Prodigal Summer
Look at the details Kingsolver uses to show the reader that the POV character knows this town intimatelyâthe name of each creek, the store that sold a very specific item, a single vignette of the hardware store, the name of a neighbor's farm, and the fact that her farm used to (past tense) be there. Kingsolver has the POV character look at a specific Setting for several reasons: to reveal the relationship of the character to the place, to show her backstory, to anchor the reader into the emotional connection between memories and the character, and to give a clear sense of a specific place.
What would have happened if Kingsolver had written a more prosaic description?
ROUGH DRAFT:
Highway 6 ran from east to west through the valley and passed her neighbor and her own former farmland. The town was small with only one general grocery store and a small hardware store. Five meandering creeks wandered across the parceled farmland.
Do you get any sense of the place? Any sense of the relationship of the POV character and that place? Any emotion? You probably don't feel a lot. There's only a generic description, which is not active.
Now, lest you think that Setting must be delivered in larger paragraphs to show backstory, here's a quick, tight use in the opening of a chapter in a high fantasy novel.
Only sometimes in the long evenings of July as she watched the western mountains, dry and lion-colored in the afterglow of sunset, she would think of a fire that had burned on a hearth, long ago, with the same clear yellow light. And with this came a memory of being held.â¦
âUrsula K. Le Guin,
The Tombs of Atuan
And here is a final example from a historical mystery series set in Louisiana in the mid-1920s. The protagonist, Dassas Cormier, has brought his young nephew to New Orleans for the boy's first visit. For readers of the series, they already know that Dassas left the New Orleans police force under a bit of a black cloud and returned to his childhood home, deep in coastal Louisiana near the Texas border. Pay attention to how the author threads in a hint of this backstory in this next passage. Rather than stopping the forward flow of the opening of this third book in the series, the author, S.H. Baker, uses Setting to reveal so much.
Look closely at how she combines sensory details, characterization, and backstory while transitioning the reader from the POV character being on a train coming to New Orleans, to arriving in the city. Remember that when you move a character from one Setting that's been described to a new Setting, make sure readers are not left with only a vague sense of the new place. Orient them quickly with a few details. If S.H. Baker had been less experienced as a writer, she might have written it this way:
FIRST DRAFT:
I stepped off the train into New Orleans. It felt like I'd never left it. I glanced at my nephew and waved him forward toward the boarding house I'd selected to stay in.
No sense of Setting here. No hint of backstory, no sensory detailsânothing except an assumption that the reader already knows what New Orleans was like in the 1920s. Because of that erroneous assumption, later, when some detail of New Orleans is brought upâthe heat, the station house, the steam trainsâthe reader can be jerked out of the story because that's not what she imagined while reading the earlier passage.
So how did S.H. Baker approach it?
As soon as I stepped from the train onto the freshly swept platform, I had to smile. The city waited, as if nothing had changed since I'd left almost a year earlier. Heat carried scents of shellfish, jasmine and ladies' perfume, and hoards of people rushed to and fro from trains. Ahead, the massive brick station sprawled over a city block, and arched doorways beckoned like the arms of a woman. I took a deep breath, catching whiffs of freshly cut grass. Steam hissed from the trains behind me, momentarily overrunning voices raised in cheerful salutes and wailing farewells.
âS.H. Baker,
Death of a Dancer
Pulling it apart:
As soon as I stepped from the train onto the freshly swept platform, [
Here is a quick telling of transition, but the author doesn't stop with “from train to platform.” She added the small fact that it'd been swept, which creates a historical detail built on other historical details up to this point, and paints an image of a time when a clean platform was something noticeable.
] I had to smile. The city waited, as if nothing had changed since I'd left almost a year earlier. [
And here is where some backstory is threaded in. If left at this point, the reader would know he's been in New Orleans before but nothing moreâwas it for a few days or a few years? By continuing with more Setting information, the reader has a stronger sense of this man's connection to this place.
] Heat carried scents of shellfish, jasmine and ladies' perfume, [
And here are specific sensory detailsâtexture (heat), plus smells, which allow the reader to experience New Orleans more deeply.
] and hoards of people rushed to and fro from trains. [
Here's some specific action, plus the phrasing gives a historical flavor to the internal observation.
] Ahead, the massive brick station [
Now we have a clear visual of a historical building.
] sprawled [
Strong action verb which paints a better image.
] over a city block, and arched doorways beckoned like the arms of a woman. [
Fresh way of describing archways and clearly coming from the POV of a young man.
] I took a deep breath, catching whiffs of freshly cut grass. [
Another sensory detail but one not often associated with a modern train station, so this builds in a little more historical detail.
] Steam hissed from the trains behind me, [
Sounds and historical detail.
] momentarily overrunning voices raised in cheerful salutes and wailing farewells.