back to readings page



SETTING 

Setting is above all else, a sense of place. And that sense of place
demands specific sensory details but it's more than that. Specific
names of things, objects, animals, places, vegetation, make a sense
of place vivid and without them, it's just a generic setting which
means it has no depth. For example, I once received a story in which
the writer had described a setting with no place names, no specific
names of flora or fauna, and very little in the way of precise
description. The name Alaska was mentioned once at the start of the
novel, but after that, no place names, no names of rivers, mountains,
animals, trees, vegetation, nothing. It was Alaska sans details, which
made it no-place. One of those descriptions read, 'The river was a
fallen tree length away from the cabin.' Okay, what kind of tree?
Because it was Alaska, I assumed it wasn't a palm tree, but how big
was it? The "fallen tree" existed in the writer's mind as very clear, but
it wasn't on the page, so it meant nothing.

Change that line to something like this; 'Between the Koyuluk River
and the cabin, lay a thirty foot Douglass fir fallen sometime during the
last winter, when the icy blizzards howled down out of the Endicott
Mountains to the north." Even if you don't know where these places
are, the name 'Koyuluk' itself is a clue to the locale. The precise size
and kind of tree now shows exactly how close the river was to the
cabin. The fact that it fell "last winter" implies its condition. "Icy
blizzards" is also a clue. You don't have to be heavy handed and you
also have to assume your reader has enough intelligence to figure
things out, but you can't expect them to do all your work. The writer
of that line just didn't want to write. She was playing" guess what I'm
thinking."

However, you don't want to overdo it either. For example: "Esther
glanced at her Rolex, opened her dabbed a few drops of Chanel # 5
behind her ears, smoothed her Versace gown, picked up her Nokia cell
phone and called down for her Rolls Royce." This begins to read like a
uber yuppie catalog. 

So, use specific names for things like trees or flowers or
animals. Don't overdo it, but be specific enough so your fictional world
becomes real to the reader. Make them lose themselves in your
fictional reality. A sense of place is critical for a story to involve the
reader totally and if you can create a setting in which readers lose
themselves, you've gone a long way in writing a good story. Sense of
place is not, however, just the five senses, although that is the most
basic element. It also involves a feeling for the setting, either from
the distant voice or from the character, or both.

Also, using real places is not a problem, except in science fiction,
where you have to create it all from scratch. Use of real places
enhances a story incredibly, but you shouldn't feel tied to recreating
the reality exactly. You're not writing a travelogue. You can move a
place from one part of the country to another, or take a real
geographic location, and simply impose your fictional world on it, as
Faulkner did with Yoknapatawpha County. 

You can see that characterization and point of view will directly effect
setting, and vice versa. If you're in first person, the setting becomes
absolutely critical in revealing the character as he or she relates it to
the reader. In third person, your character is where he/she is by choice or not, which will effect the way they see the setting in opposition to the way the distant voice relates it to the reader. If you want the reader to react strongly to the setting, and you're in third person, you have to decide how much is going to come through your character and how much through the distant voice. Does your character love the setting s/he is in? If so, they can probably do a very good job of describing it accurately to the reader. As the writer, you have to decide if you want an objective or subjective view of the setting and where you want one or the other. You can shift between the two, going from emotional to intellectual, from subjective to objective. It all depends upon what effect you want to create in your reader.










.