Writing Active Setting Book 1: Characterization and Sensory Detail Read online

  –Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games

  Here we have more Setting details that allow the author to show some characterization of the POV character, reveal emotions based on her interaction with this room, and all by adding just a few more details of Setting.

  Note: As in painting, when you use a cool ultramarine color then dab a spot of warm orange on the blue, it makes it pop. The reader can suddenly be “popped” deeper into the POV character’s head with a clearer picture of how he or she sees the world.

  SUBTEXT IN SETTING

  Have you ever attended an event with a friend or family member and later in discussing the event, you discover that based on the description the friend seemed to have —been at a totally different event? Mystery writer Agatha Christie used this ability of people to focus in on what matters to them in one of her Hercule Poirot stories to great effect. The Belgian detective asked half a dozen participants of a party to describe the room where the murder took place. All of the characters, because they came from different backgrounds, with different interests, described highlights of the room from totally different perspectives. One noted the very valuable and esoteric collectibles scattered around on the tabletops. Another, a soldier who spent many years in the Middle East, could tell the detective the tribal names of the woven rugs on the floor, whereas another character saw the room in terms of colors, and another could describe the type of period furniture.

  Now if the reader had not “seen” the room through the detective’s eyes initially with a whole room image, but only saw the small snippets from the individual secondary characters the reader might see only a room with knick-knacks or just a room with carpets, but no furniture. By letting the audience see the whole room through Poirot’s POV first, and then revisiting the room through each character’s POV, the reader is led to solve the mystery of who killed the victim because only one character “saw” the weapon that was at hand.

  Note: The world Setting you are creating will be seen only through one character at a time, so it’s important to make sure that what your character sees matters.

  Let’s revisit an earlier point to see how a POV character that is miserable in a school environment will not see or notice the same items as a POV character who finds that same school a sanctuary and the center of his or her world.

  Example 1: I strolled down the empty hallway, hearing the slap of my hard soles against the worn linoleum, remembering the all too many times I had crawled this same route to Mrs. Pendragon’s office.

  One slap; you’re in trouble.

  Two slap; shouldn’t have got caught.

  Third slap; loser.

  The stink of sweat and cheap cleaning supplies gagged me back then and did the same today. The flicker of a fluorescent light sent a shiver down my back. But I wasn’t sixteen anymore and heading down the fast slope of trouble even as I stopped before the closed wood and glass door of the principal’s office.

  Example 2: The sounds caught me first. Laughter ricocheting off the metal lockers, the low rumble of a guy’s voice changing timbre, the kick slam of tennis shoes hitting stubborn locker doors. Then came the memories. Hand-lettered signs promising the next school dance, an orange and black banner urging the football or basketball team on to new heights, the crepe paper streamers still hanging from the last Pep Con. I’d been gone twenty years and in the space of twenty footsteps this hall tugged me back to the best times of my life.

  SETTING THE STAGE

  Remember to think of Setting as the stage that contains your story.

  Keeping setting lean and mean is important, but it can be dangerous to stuff all the details about a story setting into one paragraph. Often this will stop your pacing dead. However, it can be done well if your pacing is so strong that all the reader wants to do is get back into the story already. For example:

  It was a sunny April day. But Stark Street looked dreary. Pages from a newspaper cart wheeled down the street and banked against curbs and the cement stoops of cheerless row houses. Gang slogans were spray painted on brick fronts. An occasional building had been burned and gutted, the windows blackened and boarded. Small businesses squatted between the row houses. Andy’s Bar & Grill, Stark Street Garage, Stan’s Appliances, Omar’s Meat Market.

  –Seven Up – Janet Evanovich

  Let’s look more closely at the above and break the Setting down to specific elements. First off Evanovich describes this Setting in depth because it is the first time her POV character arrives at this new location and she wants to make her character’s world vivid to the reader. This is one of the places [pun intended] where the reader will allow the author to slow the pacing a bit in order to see where the character is so that the reader can feel and be in that place with the character.

  Let’s examine more closely how Evanovich uses her descriptive phrases to create the world of NJ Bounty Hunter Stephanie Plum — she does not leave it to the reader to guess about the neighborhood; she uses key details to make it come alive.

  It was a sunny April day. [Orient the reader to time of year and a general sense of time of day. It’s not night or early morning given that it’s sunny. Also acts as a contrast to what comes next, which makes the reader take notice.]

  But Stark Street looked dreary. [The author “tells” (versus shows) here what the POV character thinks about the Setting, but then goes on to show with specific details. Telling alone is shorthand and too much of it holds the reader at a distance from the story, but when telling is used with showing it can be effective. By telling us, Evanovich gives us a direction from which we can interpret what we’re going to see next on this street.]

  Pages from a newspaper cart wheeled [Action verbs, as opposed to passive “to be” verbs, make stronger, more concrete images in the reader’s mind.]

  …down the street and banked [action verb] against curbs and the cement stoops of cheerless row houses.[Specific types of houses — these are not bungalows or 80s ranch style homes and the reader can start to see the Setting more clearly by this small detail.]

  Gang slogans were spray painted on brick fronts. [Very specific details showing the neglect of the area and how the buildings were made which paints a distinct image. Change this one detail, from brick to concrete or faded lap siding and you have very different images of the houses.]

  An occasional building had been burned and gutted, the windows blackened and boarded. [By repeating the terms — burned and gutted, blackened and boarded, the author hammers home the images in this specific world.]

  Small businesses squatted [action verb] between the row houses. Andy’s Bar & Grill, Stark Street Garage, Stan’s Appliances, Omar’s Meat Market. [Notice the male names most common in the 50s. This tells the reader these are small, family-owned and probably older businesses.]

  Now what if Evanovich had simply written:

  It was a sunny April day. But Stark Street looked dreary. We looked for Omar’s Meat Market and found it.

  The reader would have felt rushed, and while knowing they were on a particular street in New Jersey because the story is unfolding in New Jersey, they would have no more sense of this world especially if the reader had never been to New Jersey. So instead of seeing the world of Evanovich’s story the reader could be inserting images from a Kansas town or a French city.

  Without clues the reader will default to what they know already and may get an erroneous setting image. One paragraph was all that was needed to anchor the reader to the world of the characters and make the setting come alive. Evanovich does not use a lot of Setting in her stories, but makes sure that at least once or twice in every story the reader experiences the world of New Jersey-bounty hunter Stephanie Plum.

  PACING AND SETTING

  If the character is returning to a place that hasn’t been described in depth earlier in the story, the reader will not be as open to the pacing slowing on the revisit so you as author can describe place. The reader has most likely already created their own visuals because as readers we nee
d to see the characters in some context. This is a small, but very important point and an error I see many newer writers make.

  * Waiting until too late to describe and orient the reader as to place.

  * Or forgetting totally that the reader has no idea where the character is in the story because they’ve moved from a known location to a new, unknown location.

  If I write “Joe left his home and went to the city,” the setting is so vague as to leave you clueless and frustrated. But if I write “Joe left his beach-side cottage and drove into Lake Forest City, a northern suburb of Seattle,” the addition of a few specifics gives the reader enough to inhabit the character’s world while keeping the main focus on what’s happening in the story.

  Note: Without clues the reader will default to what they already know and can get a totally erroneous Setting image.

  The following is an example of orienting the reader via Setting when moving a POV character from one location to another. Add more than a hint of Setting only when that new location has an impact on the story.

  The POV character is showing up to an interview for a job she didn’t apply for, but needs. Look closely at what the author focuses the reader on in describing this area of New York City.

  The office — or whatever it was — didn’t exactly inspire confidence. The address was a mostly kept-up building off Amsterdam Avenue, seven stories high and nine windows across. Brick and gray stone: that looked like the norm in this neighborhood. We weren’t running with a high-income crowd, here. Still, I had seen and smelled worse, and the neighborhood looked pretty friendly — lots of bodegas and coffee shops, and the kids hanging around looked as if they’d stopped there to hang on the way home from school, not been there all day waiting for their parole officer to roll by.

  –Hard Magic – Laura Anne Gilman

  Now let’s look closer:

  The office — or whatever it was — didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

  [Emotion=wariness. The reader gets an emotional feel for the area via the POV character’s impressions.]

  The address was a mostly kept-up building off Amsterdam Avenue. [For those who know NYC this small specific street name can say a lot, but those who don’t will skim over the specific name as having no context or assume the POV character is seeing an economic state of this particular area of town.]

  …seven stories high and nine windows across.[Now the reader has a distinct visual and physical image.]

  Brick and gray stone: that looked like the norm in this neighborhood. [The reader is beginning to be reassured, subtly, that the POV character can enter this building. This space is the norm means it doesn’t stand out as better or worse, and the POV character would not be stupid to enter.] We weren’t running with a high-income crowd, here. Still, I had seen and smelled worse, [Sensory detail (covered in more depth later in this book) — the reader doesn’t get a specific smell, but is subtly reminded that most of us are very aware that the smell of a building or neighborhood can also tell us what kind of world the character has entered.]

  …and the neighborhood looked pretty friendly — lots of bodegas and coffee shops, and the kids hanging around looked as if they’d stopped there to hang on the way home from school, not been there all day waiting for their parole officer to roll by. [Here the reader has been refocused from the wariness at the beginning of the paragraph to comfort — the buildings have not changed, but what the POV character focuses the reader on — kids hanging out after school — creates a different emotion and feel for the buildings and makes it understandable why the character now enters the building and doesn’t run away screaming.]

  And here’s a final example where the author chose simply to describe and not add much more. Why? Because the reader needed a sense of place in order to explain the events that happened in the story, but not more. Sometimes the author doesn’t want the focus shifted into too much detail about the Setting, and that’s fine.

  You’ll find this technique used more often in mysteries, suspense, and thrillers where the author wants enough detail to anchor the reader, but not enough to stop the fast-paced forward momentum or the tension being created. Other genre stories can afford more Setting details — historical and literary stories for example — because the pacing of these genres can be slower. But even in these stories, too much Setting description that adds little to the story can leave readers dead in the water.

  In the following example a young woman has gone missing after having car trouble near a well-known cemetery.

  Erin knew the road: a narrow strip of pavement that ran a few blocks alongside the sprawling cemetery’s high chain-link fence. There was a park on the other side of the road — with a smaller, unfenced, old cemetery for Veterans of Foreign Wars. Only a block away, quaint, charming houses bordered the park, but there was something remote and slightly foreboding about that little back road — especially at night. Surrounded by so many graves, it was an awfully scary spot to have car problems.

  –Final Breath – Kevin O’Brien

  The last sentence is the reason for the Setting description. If O’Brien had chosen to simply write:

  Surrounded by so many graves, it was an awfully scary spot to have car problems and skimped on Setting and word choices that created an emotional feel for where the incident happened, the tension and conflict in the story would have been lessened because you as the reader would have been told the Setting was scary, but not shown that it was scary. The story question raised — what happened to the missing girl — would not be as strong. But O’Brien did not need to go into other details about this cemetery — about the fact it’s the largest in Seattle, or is the final resting place for Bruce Lee and his son Brandon, or is one of the oldest cemeteries in the community. So a brief three-sentence description, followed by that key summation line, did its job to show you where the incident happened and why it was plausible that this girl disappeared in this location.

  ASSIGNMENT:

  PART 1: Describe a tree, a house, and a car from your own POV. No right or wrong here, as we’re trying to establish your baseline way to use description and Setting. Do this part of the assignment before you look at Part 2. If it helps, think in terms of your story and as you describe a tree, a house, and a car.

  PART 2: Notice your default way of describing elements of a Setting. Look to see if you write with too much information, not enough, with vague word choices. To help you, I’ve included some examples of these issues.

  Intention: This is to determine how you most naturally write Setting elements. It’s hard to change what we don’t understand.

  Some writers will write really long descriptions such as this tree description:

  A Utah pine, I suppose. I know it wasn't an alligator. Remembering, I'd say the trunk was about a foot through, but the reason for the tree's importance was a lightning strike that burnt out the core. So the tree was alive on the outside and dead in the middle. The lowest limbs got thick as trunks and the branches went out and up. The shape was perfect for a tree house. After the dead middle trunk was cut off level with the live limbs that is. Scrounged pieces of 2x4 and small offcuts of plywood formed the tree house, which we lined with gunny sacking to make it feel like a real house. Slept in that tree more than once. Now a road goes over where the tree was. I reckon it provided winter fuel for someone's fireplace. The old jailhouse, though, still stands not a hundred yards away.

  Lots of details in this description, too many as you the reader can get easily shifted from focusing on a specific tree to a lot of other issues, a character’s back story, how the character feels about the absence of the tree, a secondary building that’s now on the site. This example lets this writer know that he might need to pull in and focus the reader more on the tree description.

  Over-describing can cause you story issues that will impact your pacing and frustrate your reader. The most important world-building aspect in the above example is the description of the tree as alive on the outside, but dead on t
he inside. This gives enormous insight to the POV character’s world and his relationship to it — we assume the character, too, is alive on the outside, but dead on the inside.

  Another common Setting detail speed bump:

  Example: a blue tract home.

  Here we have too little detail. The author assumes the reader knows what is meant by a tract home, but since tract housing has been around since the 17th century there can be a huge difference between coal-miner homes in an 18th century Cornish town and wooden detached homes created in an American suburb shortly after World War II. Adding a few more specific words will pull your reader deeper into your specific story Setting.

  Rewrite:

  * A blue tract home in a 50s suburb.

  * A copycat row of brick tract bungalows built for the coal miners, some faded red, others painted blue.

  * Little wooden box tract houses built for single mill workers or families who couldn’t afford more.

  Note: A few small details can make a huge difference. Don’t think that adding Setting means adding paragraphs of details.

  Example: Tall evergreens

  Another example of too little information or too vague that does not give the reader a strong enough image to either see or experience this tree. What is meant by tall? Larger than a child or a second-story house? And since an evergreen tree can technically be any tree that has leaves all year round, one reader might imagine a Ponderosa pine while another sees a Blue Spruce and another a Live Oak — very different-looking trees.