A Writer's Guide to Active Setting (7 page)
Read A Writer's Guide to Active Setting Online
Authors: Mary Buckham
The next example is a fascinating passageâit's a little long, which impacts the pacing of the story, but reveals so much about the protagonist Lisbeth Salander. In the first section, the author shows almost a full page of Salander's decision-making process as she contrasts her current apartment with where she might like to live. Notice what this decision-making process reveals about her character.
She had never thought about an alternative to the 500 square foot in Lundagatan, where she had spent her childhood. Through her trustee at the time, the lawyer Holger Palmgren, she had been granted permission of the apartment when she turned eighteen. She plopped down on the lumpy sofa in her combination office/living room and began to think.
The apartment on Lundagatan looked into a courtyard. It was cramped and not the least bit comfortable. The view from her bedroom was a firewall on a gable façade. The view from the kitchen was of the back of the building facing the street and the entrance to the basement storage area. She could see a streetlight from her living room, and a few branches of a birch tree.
The first requirement of her new home was that it should have some sort of view.
She did not have a balcony, and had always envied well-to-do neighbors higher up in the building who spent warm days with a cold beer under an awning on theirs. The second requirement was that her new home would have a balcony.
What should the apartment look like? She thought about Blomkvist's apartmentâ700 square feet in one open space in a converted loft on Bellmansgatan with views of City Hall and the locks at Slussen. She liked it there. She wanted to have a pleasant, sparsely furnished apartment that was easy to take care of. That was the third point on her list of requirements.
For years she had lived in cramped spaces. Her kitchen was a mere 100 square feet, with room for only a tiny table and two chairs. Her living room was 200 square feet. The bedroom was 120. Her fourth requirement was that the new apartment should have plenty of space and closets. She wanted to have a proper office and a big bedroom where she could spread herself out.
Her bathroom was a windowless cubbyhole with square cement slabs on the floor, an awkward half bath, and plastic wallpaper that never got really clean no matter how hard she scrubbed it. She wanted a washing machine in the apartment and not down in some basement. She wanted to have tiles and a big bath. She wanted the bathroom to smell fresh, and she wanted to be able to open a window.
âStieg Larsson,
The Girl Who Played With Fire
As I indicated, this was a long passage, occurring in the first one hundred pages, but the author consciously slowed the reading experience so that the reader could see how this young woman, Salander, was metamorphosing. He showed where Salander was coming from to highlight where she was going. She encountered obstacles while finding a new place, but she perseveredâwhich showed more characterizationâand managed to acquire a new apartment. Later the author spends several more pages showing Salander making quite an extensive trip through IKEA to purchase new furniture to replace her marginal leftovers. But the reader sees very little of the new apartment, except that it does have a view and she bought furniture for a spare bedroom. We're shown only what matters to Salanderâthat her apartment is large enough to have a spare room, all the furniture is new, and that's about it.
Later in the same story, five-hundred pages later, another character, Mikael Blomkvist, is asked to describe the protagonist's sofa as a means of verifying that he really did know her, because the protagonist has a well-earned reputation of guarding her privacy, which includes her home space, to an extreme degree.
On the occasions I visited her she had a worn-out, extremely ugly piece of furniture with a certain curiosity value. I would guess it's from the early fifties. It has two shapeless cushions covered in brown cloth with a yellow pattern of sorts on it. The cloth is torn in several places and the stuffing was coming out when I saw it last.
âStieg Larsson,
The Girl Who Played With Fire
Doesn't this description of one piece of furniture give you a unique perspective on who Salander is? The use of specific Setting details over the course of a book is used to symbolize changeâthe change in who Salander is from an earlier book and the start of the current story, what she valuesâor not. Setting reveals in small stages the growth of this character from totally isolated to one willing to live in a different way.
Later, Blomkvist has finally found Salander's current apartment. Here's his description:
Blomkvist was standing at that moment by a window looking out at a magnificent view that stretched far from Gamla Stan towards Saltsjon. He felt numb. There was a kitchen off the hall to the right of the front door. Then there was a living room, an office, a bedroom, and even a guest room that seemed not to have been used. The mattress was still in its plastic wrapper and there were no sheets. All the furniture was brand-new, straight from IKEA.
What floored Blomkvist was that Salander had bought the pied-a-terre that had belonged to Percy Barnevik, a captain of industry. The apartment was about 3,800 square feet and worth twenty-five million kroner.
Blomkvist wandered through deserted, almost eerily empty corridors and rooms with patterned parquet floors of different kinds of woods, and Tricia Guild wallpaper of the type that Berger had once coveted. At the center of the apartment was a wonderfully bright living room with an open fireplace, but Salander seemed never to have had a fire. There was an enormous balcony with a fantastic view. There was a laundry room, a sauna, a gym, storage rooms and a bathroom with a king-size bath. There was even a wine cellar, which was empty except for an unopened bottle of Quinta do Noval port National! âfrom 1976. Blomkvist struggled to imagine Salander with a glass of port in her hand. An elegant card indicated that it had been a moving-in present from the estate agent.
The kitchen contained all manner of equipment, with a shiny French gourmet stove with a gas oven as the focus. Blomkvist had never before set eyes on a Cornue Chateau 120. Salander probably used it for boiling tea.
[
The description goes on for another page until the author wraps up with the following paragraphs.
]
The arrangement was all out of proportion. Salander had stolen several billion kroner and bought herself an apartment with space for an entire court. But she only needed the three rooms she had furnished. The other eighteen rooms were empty.
Blomkvist ended his tour in her office. There were no flowers anywhere. There were no paintings or even posters on the wall. There were no rugs or wall hangings. He could not see a single decorative bowl, candlestick, or even a knick-knack that had been saved for sentimental reasons.
Blomkvist felt as if someone were squeezing his heart. He felt that he had to find Salander and hold her close.
She would probably bite him if he tried.
âStieg Larsson,
The Girl Who Played With Fire
I'm not advocating using so many words to describe the personal space of every character, or even using such long descriptions of Setting in every story, but in this 724-page novel, the author chooses to show much of Salander's personality via her living space, and it works.
The reader sees only three rooms, and only the furnishings of those rooms, because that's what matters to Salander. These rooms make her appear as if her life is full and positively changing. But because we are able to get a different perspective on Salander's private space, from another character, Blomkvist, it allows the reader to see her in a very different light and to feel, much like Blomkvist feels, that this young woman is very isolated and alone. By allocating enough words in his descriptions, Larsson brings home the shock of the contrast of those descriptions.
Here's another short passage from a science fiction story. The author's intention is not to contrast personal space as Larsson did in the last example, but to move the character from a public space to her private space (mostly private as she shares it with another character called March). The author also gives the readers a sense that they are really on a ship hurtling through space. If Ann Aguirre, the author, wrote a rough-draft version it might have been something like this:
ROUGH DRAFT:
I left the cockpit to go to my sleeping area, which I share with March. It's not much but it works.
Doesn't do a lot to pull you into this story's science fiction world, does it? So let's see how Aguirre ratchets up her worldbuilding, which makes it easier to see the rest of the ship based on this one private space:
With a jaunty wave, I leave the cockpit and head to my quarters. I share space with March. Despite cohabitation, it's still an austere environment: plain berth, terminal, lighting fortified with solar stimulators to compensate for lack of nutrient D3 if you spend too much time on board.
âAnn Aguirre,
Killbox
One sentence of details is all that is needed to go from bland to something very different. Does it matter whether we know what all the details mean? Not really. What we get is a stronger sense of the larger world of the story without miring the pacing.
Here's another example from mystery author Walter Mosley. The POV character, Easy Rawlins, has tracked down a lead on a missing person he is seeking. Instead of describing his impressions of the missing person directly, Mosley reveals the character through what he sees of the man's home environment.
It was a studio apartment. A Murphy bed had been pulled down from the wall. It was unmade and jumbled with dirty clothes and dishes. A black-and-white portable TV with bent-up rabbit-ear antennas sat on a maple chair at the foot of the bed. There was no sofa, but three big chairs, upholstered with green carpeting, were set in a circle facing each other at the center of the room.
The room smelled strongly of perfumes and body odors. This scent of sex and sensuality was off-putting on a Saturday afternoon.
âWalter Mosley,
Cinnamon Kiss
What if Mosley had decided to shortchange the reader here and go for a more abbreviated room description?
ROUGH DRAFT:
It was a messy studio apartment. The man must have been a low-life loser to live in such a place. Plus it stunk.
Sometimes that's all a reader needs, but that is telling, not showing. With a few more lines of Setting, the author brings the reader deeper into the missing man's character by showing who he is.
Let's look at the approach of another mystery author, Sara Paretsky, whose novels about private investigator V.I. Warshawski are classics for understanding the power of Setting in an ongoing series. Here the author reveals a great deal about a secondary character, a man who might have known something about an insurance scam the character may be involved in. Look at the specific details the protagonist hones in on when visiting this man's office for the first time. See how long it takes you to determine the financial status, success, and even the personality of the man by what Warshawski notes.
Midway Insurance was wedged between a dentist and a gynecologist. The black letters on the door, telling me they insured life, home, and auto, had been there a long time: part of the H in Home had peeled away, so that it looked like Midway insured nome.
âSara Paretsky,
Total Recall
And a paragraph or two later:
Four large filing cabinets took up most of the remaining space. A curling poster of the Chinese national table-tennis team provided the only decorations. A large pot hung from a chain above the window but the plant within had withered down to a few drying leaves.
âSara Paretsky,
Total Recall
Is this man up and coming in his chosen field? Comfortably well off? On his way down? Never once does the author come out and tell the reader this man had financial motives for the insurance crime, didn't care a whit about his business, or was one step away from possible bankruptcy. She didn't have to, as she showed the reader through two well-crafted and specific detail-loaded paragraphs.
NOTE:
The important element to remember is that place can and should be filtered through a specific character's emotions, impressions, viewpoint, and focus. How one character sees a Setting can be more important than the Setting itself.
Ignoring the powerful use of characterization and Setting can decrease the subtext of your story and diminish the potential for a reader to experience your story world.
- Refrain from shifting POV in the middle of a Setting description.
- Don't use your author POV instead of your character's POV.
- Avoid having multiple characters notice the same Setting details in the same way.
- Don't forget that what you, as the author, focus on via character sends a message to the reader to pay attention: this information will matter later in the story. If the Setting doesn't, or the detail won't, matter, do not spend too many words describing it.
- Don't allocate words on a page to describe Setting if that Setting doesn't matter to your story.
- Avoid confusing your reader with vague (or no) information as to where a character is in a story.
- Don't be inconsistent in your word choices to describe a Setting. If your POV character loves a Setting, let your word choices show that. If they hate it or are indifferent or wary, let your word choices reveal that.
If you are not currently working on a manuscript or feel more comfortable working on a generic situation, try Part 1 of this assignment. If you have a WIP (Work In Progress), feel free to try Part 2. Do whichever part works for you in order to understand the power of Setting to show characterization.
Choose a room in your home. Look for a more private or personal roomâa bedroom, writing area, kitchenâversus a public spaceâliving room, bathroom. This particular room should be anywhere you'd feel comfortable having strangers come in and walk through.