The Fire in Fiction (13 page)

In certain fiction, the setting lives from the very first pages. Such places not only feel extremely real, they are dynamic. They change. They affect the characters in the story. They become metaphors, possibly even actors in the drama.

Powerfully portrayed settings seem to have a life of their own, but how is that effect achieved?
Make your setting a character
is a common piece of advice given to fiction writers, yet beyond invoking all five senses when describing the scenery, it doesn't seem that anyone can say exactly how to do it.

Do you ever skip description in a novel? I do, too. Obviously, merely describing how things look, sound, taste, feel, and smell is not, by itself, going to bring a location to life. Something more is required. Is it a setting that is unusual, exotic, or unexpected? If so, our job would be easy. We merely would have to find a spot on the face of the Earth where a novel has not previously been set. The Gobi Desert?

Unfortunately, the Gobi Desert won't do when your novel is about pioneering the American West, coming of age in 1950s Minnesota, suburban angst, or vampires. If those are your subjects you will have to find new ways to bring to life Durango, Lake Wobegon, Levittown, or sexy urban nightclubs. Others have visited your setting before, too, and may even have colonized it.

Does anyone dispute that the tidewater Carolinas are the kingdom of Pat Conroy? After
The Prince of Tides
(1986) or
Beach Music
(1995), who would be crazy enough to set a novel in that unique territory with its Charleston gardens, Gullah dialect, and marshes of waving cattails? Yet Conroy is far from the only contemporary novelist who has effectively set novels in the coastal Carolinas. Sue Monk Kidd, Mary Alice Monroe, and Dorothea Benton Frank are just a few who come to mind. That Conroy got there first hasn't hurt those authors' sales, or even diminished their settings.

The trick is not to find a fresh setting or a unique way to portray a familiar place; rather, it is to discover in your setting what is unique
for your characters
, if not for you. You must go beyond description, beyond dialect, beyond local foods to bring setting into the story in a way that integrates it into the very fabric of your characters' experience.

In other words, you must instill the soul of a place into your characters' hearts and make them grapple with it as surely as they grapple with the main problem and their enemies. How do you do
that?
It takes work but the basic principles of powerful settings are not exceptionally hard to grasp.

Let's look at some examples.

LINKING DETAILS AND EMOTIONS

As a child, did you have a special summer place? A family beach house, or a lake cabin? One that's been in the family for years, rich in history, stocked with croquet mallets, special iced tea glasses, and a rusty rotary lawn mower?

For me the special summer place was my Great Uncle Robert's farm on a hillside near Reading, Pennsylvania. "Uncle Locker," as we called him, was, as far as I knew, born old. He loved his John Deere tractor but didn't particularly like children, especially not after my younger brother dropped the tin dipping cup down the front yard well.

Uncle Locker raised sheep. He stocked the lower pond with trout. He had connected a Revolutionary War-era log cabin with a Victorian-era farmhouse, erecting a soaring brick-floored, high-windowed
living room between them. In that living room was a candy dish that each day magically refilled itself with M&M's. (I suspect now that it was my Great Aunt Margaret who was the magician.)

In the evenings Uncle Locker would read the Reading newspaper on the glassed-in porch, classical symphonies crackling on his portable transistor radio as summer lightning flashed across the valley. That, today, is my mental image of perfect contentment. When I hear a radio crackle in a storm, I relax. I miss my Uncle Locker with a sharp pang.

Now, let me ask you this: Without looking back over what you just read, what do you remember best about what I wrote? Was it a detail, like the dipping cup, the M&M's, or the lightning? Or was it the feeling of contentment that, for me, accompanies an approaching storm? Whatever your answer, I would argue that you remember what you remember not because of the details themselves or the emotions they invoke in me, but because
both
those details and personal feelings are present.

In other words, it is the combination of setting details and the emotions attached to them that, together, make a place a living thing. Setting comes alive partly in its details and partly in the way that the story's characters experience it. Either element alone is fine, but both working together deliver a sense of place without parallel.

Father Andrew Greeley, an Irish-American Roman Catholic priest, is a durable novelist with some sixty novels to his credit, including
The Cardinal Sins
(1981), the science-fiction novel
God Game
(1986), and mystery novels featuring the Irish-American Roman Catholic priest (later bishop) "Blackie" Ryan. Needless to say, Father Greeley has had to deal with a lot of settings, though Chicago and Ireland recur frequently in his work. In one of his novels, though, a lake surrounded by summer homes is the main locale.

Summer at the Lake
(1997) is about three friends the Irish-American Roman Catholic priest "Packy" Keenan, university administrator Leo Kelly, and the woman whom as young men they both loved, Jane Devlin. Now turning fifty, these three return to the lake where one summer their lives and almost-loves were disrupted by a tragic car crash that was

no accident, that may have been intended to kill Leo and certainly led to Jane marrying (unhappily) the driver of the ill-fated auto.

Learning that Jane, now divorced, will once again visit the lake, Leo also returns to meet her again, to learn the truth behind the accident, and finally, he hopes, to lay to rest the ghosts of the magical and mysterious summer that was his life's turning point.

Half way through the novel, Leo contemplates the lake, or, rather, the homes surrounding it:

... All I can recall are images of the Lake, images perhaps shaped by nostalgia for the summer of 1948 when Jane and I loved and lost one another.

Our side of the Lake, as I came to call it, though nothing in it was mine except my friends, had been settled first, at our end before the turn of the century. Indeed some of the sprawling Victorian homes with their gables and turrets and porches and balconies dated to the first summer settlements of the late 1880s and early 1890s before the Columbian exposition in 1893. Each of the Old Houses, as they were called by everyone, boasted a neatly manicured lawn rolling down the hill to the Lake and a freshly painted gazebo and pier—usually with a motor launch of some sort, steam first, then internal combustion (idle during years of the War). On the road side of the house there would usually be a park of trees, all carefully maintained and landscaped and protected by a wrought-iron fence and gate with the family name scrolled always on the gate and sometimes on the fence too. Art deco swimming pools, with pillars and porches and fountains and classic statues graced some of the homes—though not the Keenans'. (Tom Keenan: Who needs a pool when you have a lake that's warm for three months?)

Then I thought the homes were the most elegant houses in the world, the kind of places I read about in English mysteries or ghost stories. Later I would realize
that they were in horrendous bad taste (and the people who lived in them for the most part new rich). Still later I would agree that they are interesting museum pieces from the Gilded Age and the Mauve Decade.

Is there anything more evocative of summer than Victorian homes with their wide verandas, wide lawns, gingerbread trim, and bright colors? The promise of badminton, lawn parties, and lacy parasols has probably seduced more homeowners into the money pit than any other style of architecture.

In the above passage Greeley invokes Victorian elegance with encyclopedic detail, skipping quickly over the "gables and turrets and porches and balconies" in favor of dates and a catalogue of decorative styles. His images are, to my eye, a bit generic: "wrought-iron" gates and fences, "classic" statues. Although I love American domestic architecture and enjoy spotting it the way some people identify trees or birds, to me this part of the passage feels dry.

What makes an impression on me is not Greeley's knowledge of Gilded Age style but Leo Kelly's changing perception of the "Old Houses" around the lake. Once splendid and romantic, in later life they seemed to him tacky, and still later academically "interesting." This progression of feelings about the lake houses mirrors Leo's own life: evolving from a young middle-class guest at a rich resort, to a jilted would-be lover, to a detached university functionary.

A summer home of the Arts and Crafts era is the focus of Susan Wiggs's
Lakeside Cottage
(2005). In this tale of returning home—in this case a summer home—Seattle journalist Kate Livingston brings her mildly difficult son Aaron for a restorative summer at the once brimming family cottage, now left to Kate alone by her dispersed family. There Kate takes in a teenage runaway and resists (sort of) her growing attraction to a secretive neighbor, JD Harris, a medic who is hiding a heroic self-sacrifice that led to national celebrity and the destruction of his privacy, poor guy.

As Kate and Aaron arrive at Lake Crescent in Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, Kate harks back to the treasured family summers of years past:

Some practices at the lake house were steeped in tradition and ancient, mystical lore. Certain things always had to be done in certain ways. S'mores were just one of them. They always had to be made with honey grahams, not cinnamon, and the gooey marshmallow had to be rolled in miniature M&M's. Nothing else would do. Whenever there was a s'mores night, they also had to play charades on the beach. She made a mental list of the other required activities, wondering if she'd remember to honor them all. Supper had to be announced each evening with the ringing of an old brass ship's bell suspended from a beam on the porch. Come July, they had to buy fireworks from the Makah tribe's weather-beaten roadside stand, and set them off to celebrate the Fourth. To mark the summer solstice, they would haul out and de-cobweb the croquet set and play until the sun set at ten o'clock at night, competing as though life itself depended on the outcome. When it rained, the Scrabble board had to come out for games of vicious competition. This summer, Aaron was old enough to learn Hearts and Whist, though with just the two of them, she wasn't sure how they'd manage some of the games.

Susan's memories of summer traditions are as sweet as her family's s'mores. (What is it about M&M's?) The daily dinner bell, solstice croquet, rainy-day Scrabble ... don't you wish you had been invited to spend an August with Kate's clan?

The details in this passage stand out because they are made highly specific: S'mores not just any old way but the Livingston way, charades not in the living room but on the beach, croquet played not simply at length but until sunset on the year's longest day. These details are not generic. They are the particular memories of a protagonist who has lived them.

But how does Kate Livingston feel about these memories? When she looks back on past summers, how do they appear to her now? Bathed in a rosy glow, I would say. This sweet nostalgia is nice, but

also exactly what we expect Kate to feel. What happens when less expected emotions are plumbed?