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A BRIEF RESTATEMENT

  A brief restatement of the principles mentioned here and in earlier chapters relating to the subject of viewpoint may be in order.

  • Use the "on high" omniscient viewpoint to establish general story setting, tone, the look and feel and possibly background of a place.

  • Move inside a viewpoint character to gain reader identification, and to reflect character outlook and mood.

  • Move from viewpoint character to "on high," if you must, at the beginning of segments, after a transition of some kind.

  • Return to character viewpoint at the earliest opportunity.

  • Always think about what the reader needs to know, not what you may know or want to inflict on the poor soul for no good reason.

  If you follow these principles, your story setting will be presented fully, vibrantly and convincingly. But your job in handling your viewpoint will not be done. What's left? Pegging your presentation of setting to feeling and mood. Which is the subject of chapter eleven.

  CHAPTER 11

  SETTING THE MOOD:

  HOW SETTING VIEWPOINT CREATES ATMOSPHERE

  Back in chapter six we briefly considered emotional focus of a character as a unifying factor in storytelling, and promised to get back to the matter at an appropriate time. Having looked at viewpoint in chapter ten, we can now look more carefully at emotional focus and story mood, and how both interact with your story's setting.

  It may be that you will choose to open your story, or relate parts of it, from the broad, omniscient viewpoint. In such situations, you still need to be conscious of the general emotional mood you wish your story to evoke in your reader; you will need to select details designed to create or enhance that general mood, be it joyfulness, sadness, fear, dread, anger, or whatever. More often, however, you will probably tell virtually all your story from the viewpoint of a character inside the story action, as discussed in chapter ten. In these cases, it is even more critical that you understand how the viewpoint affects story mood.

  Your character's emotional set and the general mood conveyed by a story at any given point are inextricably bound together. Given a central character who is sad and lonely, for example, the depiction of the setting must reflect details generally in keeping with that mood, even if you happen to be writing from an omniscient viewpoint at the moment. When you are in character viewpoint, the need to dovetail character emotion and story mood is much more vital.

  If you walk your sad and lonely viewpoint character into a bright and happy setting, the story mood will not be bright and

  happy despite the objective nature of the setting because your sad and lonely character will not see the setting in terms other than his own internal emotional set. Thus, walking into a joyful wedding, for example, he will see it all as a contrast to his own plight; you the author must show that the happiness around him only reminds him of his own sadness.

  Three crucial aspects—who the story is about, what you show about the setting, and how everything feels to the reader—must be consistent in mood and reinforce one another. Your viewpoint character, like people in the real world, will interpret the setting through the lens of his current emotions. If you want to write a story with a sad and lonely mood, you will write about a character whose feelings are sad and lonely. If you write about a character whose feelings are sad and lonely, then your setting will look (or be interpreted as) sad and lonely because your viewpoint is that of a character who cannot interpret things in any other way.

  Once you have recognized this dynamic interaction, you can consciously manipulate your story elements to give the story exactly the general mood you desire.

  In writing any story, you need to think about the following generalized questions, all of which are closely linked:

  • How do you want the reader to feel while experiencing the story?

  • What is the general mood you hope to convey from the setting?

  • How do your character's emotions color what he sees?

  • What setting details impact both the character's feelings and general mood of the story?

  Every story, you see, elicits a general feeling matrix in its reader. The poet T.S. Eliot, writing about this subject years ago, talked about what he called "the objective correlative," that precise relationship between what is presented and how it makes the reader feel. No story should leave the reader emotionally unmoved, or thinking, "So what?" Your setting must fit the desired feeling or your story won't work. So consciously analyzing how you want your reader to feel will help you plan and present your setting.

  You attain this reader feeling through story mood. If you want your reader to feel sadness, for example, you need to present your story in a setting which includes somber details, unhappy elements, dark shades of gray, items designed to create a mood that will lead to the desired feeling.

  And how will your character's emotions color what is shown of the setting? We have already seen how a happy character might "reach out" into his environment and notice happy things, while a sad one is likely to notice the sad, or interpret whatever he sees in a sad way. You can't simply depict a sorrowful setting, for example, without making sure that your character's feelings are such that sad details are what he will see because of the sorrowful tint to the emotional lenses through which he experiences the story world.

  And yhat kind of details do you need in your setting to reinforce the desired mood? If the story is to leave the reader angry and resentful about some wrong in society, and if the mood is to be somber and bitter, and if the character is to be hurt and rejected, what specific details do you have to locate and present in the setting to make sure the character —and through him the reader—gets the desired feeling clearly and forcefully?

  Sometimes, of course, a particular setting virtually demands a certain kind of emotional response in the character, a certain story mood, a certain reader feeling. A graveyard, for example, is difficult to imagine as a setting for a lighthearted, humorous story. Yet Peter S. Beagle achieved exactly this effect in his novel, A Fine and Private Place, through the viewpoint of an extremely unusual character. But Beagle's story is the exception which tends to prove the rule. More often than not, you should give some serious thought to the kinds of feeling a particular setting can predictably engender, and then make your setting decisions accordingly.

  But general thoughtfulness and planning will not necessarily get the whole job done for you in terms of emotion and mood.

  Your general questioning invariably must get down to specifics like some of the following:

  1. In the opening of your story —What aspect of the setting should be shown at the earliest possible moment in the story to establish an opening mood or tone? What specific details should be included in this opening? From what vantage point should the opening be presented?

  2. During the course of your story —What central unifying aspect of the setting should be shown repeatedly? What different views or experiences of this central aspect will be used to avoid obvious repetition? What other aspects of setting will be developed, and in what order?

  How many different viewpoints will be employed? If settings change drastically, how will each new setting be established, and with what mood or tone?

  If different viewpoint characters are to experience the setting, how specifically does each character's emotional outlook color his or her individual experience of the setting?

  How will all differing views and aspects of the setting be unified in a coherent, consistent story mood or tone, and how do you want this general tone or mood to make the reader feel?

  3. In the ending of your story, what feeling do you want to leave your reader with? What aspect of setting will you stress as the ending to help evoke this mood? From what viewpoint will this last look at setting be shown? Is there a possibility of developing story theme more clearly through employment of the closing look at setting?

  Many of these questions are intimately interrelated, of course, but let's try to se
parate them and consider them individually insofar as it is possible.

  STORY OPENING

  In deciding what general aspect of the setting should be shown to establish a story-opening mood or tone, it is important to remember that the opening feeling you engender in your

  reader sets up his expectations for everything that follows. You need to be quite sure what mood you wish to evoke right from the outset.

  Here we are talking about the broadest possible definition of mood, such as sadness, fear, joy, apprehension, isolation or engulfment. Every story feels a certain way, and this is what you need to define. Then, having defined it in your own mind as clearly as you can, you need to think about your setting and decide what you should present first to make the story feel that way to your reader right from the outset.

  Perhaps you have envisioned a large city with teeming traffic, streets alive with business people during the daytime and crime at night; rivers, trains, air traffic, skyscrapers and large wooded parks; rich neighborhoods and poor ones. If the tone or mood of your story is to relate somehow to the dynamism of all this humming activity and the nervous electricity of a complex city environment, perhaps your opening should stress all of these aspects in a broad-view look written in a staccato style that adds to the electricity and confusion. On the other hand, if your story is really the sad and nostalgic tale of a couple growing old in Brooklyn, perhaps your focus at the outset will be as narrow as the description of a single potted violet on a windowsill behind the dusty front window of an upstairs apartment.

  Suppose you opt for this second example. What other details besides the little potted plant will you show? A roach crawling on the glass or a small, silver-framed photo of a young serviceman killed in Vietnam? An old lamp with fringed shade on the marble-top table or the latest issue of Penthouse, folded open to the letters section? An unopened letter or an old-style telephone ringing? The distant scent of sachet or the stale odor of marijuana? Harsh street sounds or the soft sound of a recorded string quartet? Obviously, the specific details you choose will immediately serve to begin establishing your desired opening mood.

  Also in terms of your opening there is the question of viewpoint. As discussed in chapter ten, description from the omniscient view is best accepted by the reader at times when a character viewpoint is not firmly in the reader's mind. Certainly the prime time when this is true is in the very opening of the story. For that reason, you may well choose to begin with an omniscient viewpoint and only later go into a character viewpoint. It is also true that writers very often wish to establish a broad setting picture at the outset of the story, before narrowing their focus, so this too may dictate an "on high" viewpoint at the start.

  Your desire for a particular mood, however, may suggest the immediate presentation of setting from the viewpoint of a character. If, for instance, the emotional mood of the central character is vital to the feeling of the story throughout, you might plunge your reader into that character's viewpoint (which is to color everything) at once.

  As an example, compare and contrast the following opening lines of a story about a lonely person living alone in a squalid setting. What is the general story feeling conveyed by this:

  A cold, steady rain pounded the deserted streets of the neighborhood, making the chill night more bleak and lonely. An old man in a dark raincoat hurried along the crumbling sidewalks and vanished into the shabby yellow light of a tavern on the corner. A police car trundled slowly through the dark, its headlights yellow, like the eyes of a great cat. . . .

  As opposed to this:

  She bit her lip to keep from screaming. The pounding of the rain on the window of her small room was driving her mad. The night outside mirrored her feelings: blackness . . . desolation. Fighting back tears, she watched an old man in a dark raincoat hurry along the deserted sidewalk and enter the corner bar. Another derelict, she thought in despair, another loser like me, waiting to die. Her head throbbed with pain. She felt nauseated. She looked at the bottle of blue pills on the cheap plastic end table, knowing they offered what she wanted most: oblivion . . . death.

  Clearly the mood evoked by these two openings is quite differ

  ent. One is from the omniscient viewpoint and establishes a dark, lonely, brooding, and perhaps threatening feeling in the setting. The second is deeply in a character viewpoint, so that the setting is as much inside her head as anywhere in the outside world. The mood that's established is in contrast with the first example, here being more desperate, anguished, miserable and limited.

  What decisions will you make about your opening? Remember that you will be establishing reader expectations that you should be ready to meet with consistency in your handling of setting throughout the rest of the story. What you set up, you must follow through on.

  STORY MIDDLE

  Which brings us to the main course of your story, and some of the questions you have to consider for its progress.

  As noted above, selection of a central unifying aspect of the setting is almost always a "must." Earlier we looked at setting up an old clock tower as such a unifier. What aspect will you select? Will it be a specific thing like the clock tower, or a more general repeated emphasis on setting, such as its isolation, or its place in the mountains or near the ocean shore?

  It's important to avoid reader boredom as you return again and again to this central aspect of setting, so it will pay off if you plan carefully all the different ways you might refer to it. Can you describe or present it from differing locations which present different angles of view? From different viewpoints? Different times of day? Different emotional or intellectual perspectives? You will find it useful to plan some of these different approaches, making notes on how and when you might use them, including notations on how they will appear different to the reader, and perhaps the kind of wording that might be used.

  Again using the clock tower as a basis for an example, the beginning of your brief and preliminary list of different ways of describing setting might look something like this:

  Clock tower—

  Seen from street below; from window across street; from edge of town; in noon sunlight; lighted at night; on city stationery masthead; from passing car a block away; possibly from private aircraft?

  Vantage points to include omniscient, viewpoint of Stephanie and Roger.

  Omniscient vantage-point descriptions objective but evocative of small-town, the great age of the tower, the town's parochialism. Stephanie sees tower as dear, familiar, reassuring, always nostalgic, happy. Roger, however, sees it with anger, resentment, a symbol of how the town holds Stephanie so she won't go away with him.

  There will, of course, be many other details and aspects of the setting which will be presented during the course of your story. You need to know what most of these will be, so that setting references come instantly to your mind as you follow your character's journey through the plot. (It can badly slow down your plotting if you have to pause often in the first draft in order to think up what bit of setting detail should be inserted. If you know the details in advance, you will tend to drop them in quickly, without being distracted from your plot and character by the need to dream up something about the setting on the spur of the moment.)

  Naturally, if your story is going to move into several settings, you need to do this kind of planning for each of them. As you do, you will find yourself beginning to see each from various viewpoints, and this will improve your imaginative connection with both your characters and your story world.

  STORY ENDING

  Little needs to be said about questions like those mentioned above, because most of the points involved have already been touched upon in the context of earlier story development. It should be noted, however, that the concluding feeling or mood

  conveyed by your setting may be almost as important as the opening one because this is the emotional hook on which you hang the entire tale —the feeling you hope to leave with your reader at the story's conclusion. It may or ma
y not be precisely the feeling that you established at the outset. In a story of any length, it will have changed subtly because something has changed in the course of the story —events have taken place, characters' lives have been altered. For this reason, your characters are not likely to see their setting at the end of the story exactly as they saw it at the outset; their feelings have changed and they will see the setting differently, too.

  So don't mechanically assume the end mood will be exactly as it was at the outset. It may be close, but some variation, some dramatic progress, nearly always will have taken place.

  Finally, consider the possibility that some part of your setting — the clock in the old tower, for example once more — might ultimately be made to mean more than anyone realized it meant earlier in the story. Is it possible that your character, in the ending, suddenly sees the inexorable movement of the giant minute hand as the moments of her life slipping away? Does the tolling of the hour become the tolling of the bell "for thee," as in John Donne's poem which concludes, "Send not to see for whom the bell tolls,/ It tolls for thee." Or can the crumbling bricks of the tower come to be a metaphor for the crumbling dreams of your characters?

  ALL SETTING IS EMOTIONAL IN PART

  From all this you can draw an obvious conclusion: No mention of setting in fiction can be said to be wholly objective. Selection of viewpoint, as well as selection of the emotional lens through which the described place or event is seen, must be made with constant reference to the desired emotional feel of the story, its present plot situation, and the characters at the time of description.

  Obviously, you need to plan carefully in this entire area. It's planning that will pay off in consistency of story mood and maximum impact on your reader.

  CHAPTER 12

  SHOWING SETTING DURING MOVEMENT AND ACTION

  Most of the time up until now, we have been tacitly assuming that your handling of setting was being done in a kind of stop action — that you could present or describe setting details in relatively static terms. In writing fiction, however, you often confront situations where you have to show a character movement into a new setting, or where the action is swift enough that you can't realistically "stop to describe," and must get the job done on the fly, while things are happening. In this chapter we'll consider such common situations.