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  CHAPTER 1

  WHY SETTING IS IMPORTANT

  Setting is a topic seldom discussed at length in writers' workshops or addressed in any detail in texts for creators of fiction. Like the weather, it's mentioned in conversations, but considered entirely out of our control. Yet setting is a vital component of any story, and it does involve a body of technique which you can learn and use to improve your creative work.

  Story setting is even defined too narrowly in those few texts which do consider it. It is not merely the physical backdrop of the tale. It may also include the historical background and cultural attitudes of a given place and time, the mood of a time, and how the story people talk. Also tied closely to setting may be such details as the author's style, a period's traditions, and the kind of story the writer wishes to relate.

  All of these factors must dovetail properly with the story's plot, its characters, the theme and the desired general emotional tone of the piece if the finished fiction is to "work" for the reader.

  Many classic tales are classics precisely because all these factors fit together perfectly. Most can scarcely be imagined in a different setting. Consider, for example, how profoundly different DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe would be if the author had chosen to have his hero shipwrecked on a barren arctic rock, rather than upon a tropical island. Could the story have been told at all in such a different setting? Would Dickens's A Christmas Carol have the same kind of impact if set in the English countryside? Or would the movie classic High Noon work emotionally for an

  audience if it were set in an early-day English colony—or in a big city in the year 1993?

  These are perhaps extreme examples, but you will discover, as you think about it, that setting does more than provide a framework within which the story is told. It makes some things possible, other things quite impossible. In a traditional Old West setting—to use another extreme example — one cannot have the hero leap onto a jetliner. By the same token, a detective in a gritty contemporary urban scene can hardly track his suspect the way Natty Bumppo might have done in one of the Leather-stocking Tales. Even character language can be a part of setting, or be tied to it. The kind of character talk that might be appropriate in an urban police mystery could destroy the credibility of a traditional historical romance because people in different places and times speak so diversely.

  The moral: When you choose setting, you had better choose it wisely and well, because the very choice defines—and circumscribes—your story's possibilities.

  In addition to its importance in terms of credibility, setting also contributes enormously to the general feeling or tone of a story. It creates a mixture of story mood, character feeling, and general ambience which eventually (in stories that work) become as much a part of the appeal and sense of "rightness" as the plot, characterization, or any other factor. Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms simply would not work if set in the Vietnam era, for example, because the emotions — so right in a novel of World War I —aren't at all appropriate for a story set a generation or two later. And of course the historical and cultural context of many recent suspense novels could only be believed if clearly dated in the period prior to the demise of the Soviet Union. If set "today," they simply wouldn't work because recent history has changed the feeling of the era.

  The setting of a story can affect the author's wording —the writing style, too. Compare, for example, the opening of a novel like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, a gothic-baroque romance, with that of a contemporary thriller like Darker Than Amber, one of the Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald.

  Rebecca begins:

  Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. . . .

  While the Travis McGee book opens this way:

  We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.

  The romantic backdrop of Rebecca fits perfectly with the dreamy, cadenced quality of its prose —a style which would not fit at all in a John D. MacDonald novel. And the opposite, of course, is also true. In both cases, the setting dictated style as well as many other story factors.

  Given the importance of a story's setting, it is surprising how often it is selected with little thought—just popping into the writer's head as part of the original idea, and never seriously examined thereafter. Even more amazing is how casually many writers treat setting in all its aspects.

  This book is an attempt to change all that.

  THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF SETTING

  Writers generally recognize that good handling of a proper setting can "decorate" a story, thus enhancing its color and general appeal as well as making it more convincing. Less often realized, however, are the following additional contributions setting can make:

  While we will look more deeply at most of these aspects, it may be well to consider each of them briefly at this early stage, to provide you with an overview of what is to follow.

  Reader involvement may be intensified by proper handling of setting because physical, sensory descriptions of the story world allow the reader to experience those surroundings through his own imagination —as if he were "really there," seeing, hearing, breathing, tasting and feeling the world of the tale. Vivid, evocative physical description of setting can transport the reader into the story's universe. The reader may also derive an additional sense of involvement and satisfaction if he is given, as part of the setting, factual data which fascinates him and makes him feel he is learning something.

  This kind of involvement and possible satisfaction not only predisposes the reader to be friendly to the writer, and generally relaxed, it also makes him more likely to believe the story's plot and characters because he is already having a pleasurable experience from the setting, and believes in the story world.

  These are not minor advantages for the writer. She should always be alert for ways to soothe, please and enchant the reader, because a friendly reader is more apt to accept uncritically other aspects of the story.

  Unity is another element upon which setting can have an obvious favorable impact. A story line may involve complex developments affecting a wide variety of characters; the issues may become very complex; there may even be multiple viewpoints and story lines taking place in different levels of the society. Yet a consistent setting can provide an unchanging backdrop against which even otherwise unrelated story developments or characters will be seen as related simply because they are taking place on the same stage.

  Thus the physical setting can provide a unifying background scenery. The consistent tone of language and general story atmosphere which grow out of the physical setting also provide a sense of unity. For example, once an atmosphere of gothic horror has been established, even the innocent play of children in the "great, gloomy house" may become frightening for the already-enchanted reader, who would not otherwise see

  the children as in any way scary or threatened.

  Plot or suspense can be advanced and complicated by setting. As one example, suppose your tale is about a wagon master who is leading a train of Conestogas across the prairie toward distant mountains. Your descriptions of the subtly changing scenery as the mountains become nearer act as a physical "score-card" showing how the story is advancing toward its ultimate conclusion. If the reader knows that hostile Indians await in the mountain pass ahead, your repetitive mention of the mountains will become a drumbeat of suspense.

  Similarly, the emotional atmosphere in an example cited earlier, the movie High Noon, was a vital component of the story's effectiveness. Some might quarrel with my definition of atmosphere as part of setting, and argue that the atmosphere grew out of the setting. I would reply that in a vivid setting, atmosp
here can become so palpable that it seems to assume an identity of its own. Whichever side you might come down on concerning this distinction, I think you can readily see that atmosphere can hardly be considered without relating it to setting, however you choose to describe setting. In High Noon, the town's fear and the citizens' cowardly indifference served to isolate the hero more and more as time passed and the moment of crisis loomed; they became as real as the heat and the endless horizon. Without the atmosphere of fear, suspicion and cowardice, the repetitious plot —the hero repeatedly seeking help and being turned down —could have been meaningless and insipid.

  Character is significantly linked to setting. The seafaring, whaling world of Moby Dick, for example, is crucial to an understanding of Captain Ahab and his mad quest for the white whale. Outside of the specialized setting Melville defines, Ahab's obsession makes no sense at all. And consider poor Amos Herzog in Saul Bellow's classic Herzog. The title character could hardly be believed outside the gritty, decaying, smog-plagued urban landscape in which he is depicted. He is a product of that environment, and his motives and thought processes are inextricably driven by it.

  One of my own novels, Twister, concerns an outbreak of tornadoes across the eastern two-thirds of the United States similar

  to the actual outbreak of April 3, 1974, when dozens of storms wreaked hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and injured or killed scores of Americans. In this book, the setting of the storm system was the novel's very reason for being, and a cold front spawning many tornadoes actually became the central character in a good portion of the book. Setting seldom becomes this central in a novel, but the fact that it can happen is another illustration of how directly setting can impinge upon characterization.

  Theme can also be directly affected by setting. The setting can become a central symbol or metaphor, not only unifying other aspects of the story but illuminating its central idea. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is one obvious example that comes to mind. When Huck and Tom step "onto their raft and set out down the Mississippi, their voyage becomes a story of life in microcosm. The river setting, so rich in religious and American symbolism, becomes more than a river, Huck's journey finally becoming a voyage into manhood —and life.

  The writer's imagination can benefit from setting research. Very often, researching factual information for a story, or visiting an actual site to experience it physically, will fire her imagination in unexpected ways.

  Perhaps you'll forgive another autobiographical illustration. When I visited California's Napa Valley several years ago," researching information about winemaking for use in the setting of my novel The Winemakers, I was quite concerned about how to open the novel in a way that would establish the setting and a sense of impending trouble at the same time. As I was walking through a winery with its owner one day, he cautioned me not to stumble over a number of heavy electrical cables on the concrete floor.

  "Those control the temperature of the fermentation tanks," he explained. "If you pulled the plug, we could lose five hundred gallons of wine."

  In that instant, my research into setting had set off my imagination and solved my problem with the opening of the book. If you read it today, you will find that it begins with a young winemaker arriving at her winery—and finding that someone has intentionally "pulled the plug."

  TAKE YOUR TIME

  Here we've looked at setting in a variety of ways, but in a cursory fashion. I hope I have managed to convince you that your handling of setting may be far more vital to your fiction project than you had previously suspected. In the chapters ahead we'll take a closer look at these and other aspects of setting, and how to maximize their potential in your story.

  Let me urge you to work through the chapters slowly, seeking out ways you can reconsider your own work in light of the matters being discussed. It may help you to have copies of some of your own completed stories at hand as you study. As a point is made here, you may benefit by pausing to absorb the idea, and then carefully looking at some of your own copy to see if you have considered the idea in your past work. If not, you should ask yourself why not; if so, you should ask yourself if your new understanding might improve what you did earlier, perhaps without knowing why. If you choose to rewrite portions of your earlier material before moving on through this book, so much the better.

  There's no tremendous hurry, you see, and hasty reading without action on your part might let important technical information go in one ear and right out the other. I encourage you to take your time and apply each chapter to your own work before moving on to the next.

  After all, you remember the cliche—"Rome wasn't built in a day." Your story's Rome, if it's to be convincing, can't be built overnight either.

  CHAPTER 2

  PRESENTING SENSE IMPRESSIONS

  When most writers think of the word "setting," they think of the physical impressions of the story world: the look, sound and smell of the place or places where the story takes place.

  As we move along through this book, we'll also consider many other aspects of fiction which can rightfully be considered part of setting, but first let's consider the sense impressions of the story world.

  Your use of description is vital in putting the reader into the story world. Use of vivid descriptions places him imaginatively inside the setting, transporting him to your story world through an appeal to his senses.

  Sense impressions, therefore, are tremendously important in presenting your setting and keeping your reader intensely, physically aware of it. An in-depth examination of descriptive methodology is beyond the scope of this book, but we'll take a cursory look at some techniques in chapter fourteen. For now, a brief overview might help.

  A truth every writer should keep in mind is that when she stops to describe something in fiction, the progress of the story usually stops while she does so. Fiction readers seek movement in their fiction, and so every "pause to describe" can be a dangerous one, threatening to weaken or even kill the reader's interest.

  What is one to do, then, given the equally compelling truth that description of the story setting is vital to reader belief and physical involvement?

  The answer is that descriptions generally should be kept to

  a few words or a few lines at any given spot. Sensory descriptions should be sprinkled throughout the story, rather than "dumped" in great gobs. Handled this way, descriptive passages won't slow the story for long, and the reader will be reminded again and again —in short passages —how the story setting feels.

  THE FIVE SENSES

  Psychologists have repeatedly shown that sight is the dominant sense for most normal people. Therefore, it stands to reason that your sense descriptions most often will be dominated by how things appear. Hearing impressions usually rank second, but one can easily imagine circumstances in which tactile impressions might rank higher in story importance. So let's look briefly at each of the five senses you'll hope to touch in most of your stories.

  Sight impressions may be of various kinds. There is a common misconception that one has covered the waterfront if she tells what colors can be seen in a given setting. Color is important, but —again according to psychological research findings — we know that a person's sight impressions of a given setting come into consciousness in a specific order.

  Spatial dimension is often noted first. How large is the area? How open or closed? How high is the ceiling, if there is one? How far away is the sight-horizon if we're outdoors? How big or small does this space that we're describing feel to the onlooker?

  The source of light is usually noted next or may be noticed simultaneously with dimension. Where does the light come from? How bright is it? Is it white light, or a mixture of subtle hues? (If we are "walking the reader" into a room, for example, is there a wall of high windows, or a single slit in a solid gray wall? And if a wall of windows, is the light that streams through sunny or cloudy gray?)

  The dominant color of a setting may be striking and important. In d
escribing a desert, for example, you may stress —after the vastness of the scene, and perhaps the glare —the monotonous tan of the terrain under a harsh, copper-colored sky.

  Texture may also play a role in sight impression. The play of shadows over a weather-shattered cliff face may be a crucial sight impression; so might be the perfectly flat and placid surface of a small mountain lake on a windless day.

  Contrasting shades of color are sometimes a dominant aspect of sight. The leaves of a tree might be green in actuality, for example, but in the context of your story they might look like sharply defined black shapes against the brilliance of the blue sky. That yellow fire truck might be more vibrant if it's seen parked in front of a red brick wall. Contrast often enlivens sight impression.

  Hearing impressions are also crucial. The loudness of sound in a given setting is, of course, important, but also consider what is the tonality of the sound. Is it harsh or melodious? Why?

  Is the sound a simple, single-source one, or a complex of many sounds? Should you transport your reader by concentrating on the single high wail of an ambulance siren, or would your setting be made more vivid if you depicted the siren sound almost lost in the groan of a garbage truck nearby, the honking of taxi horns, the roar of a diesel engine and the rumble of a subway beneath the pavement?

  The identity and direction of a source of sound may be im- portant. Is the sound coming from a distance, or close? Is it in the room or beyond the walls? Is it the muffled echo of a gunshot or the whimper of a child?

  Assuming you are telling your story from the viewpoint of a character inside the action, that character's interpretation of the sound or sounds may also be highly significant in your description of it. For example, your character in the woods hears a low, guttural animal sound. Does she interpret it in terms of remembering how her pet dog used to grumble at squirrels, or does the image of a hungry grizzly instantly leap into her mind?

  The sense of smell often ranks third in the hierarchy of sense impressions in a setting, usually far below sight and hearing because it is a more primitive sense, one we often tend to overlook or discount in real life. We often notice only strong odors, whether pleasant or unpleasant, and seldom form a