tmp1F72 Page 6

  Consistent and repeated reference to a single aspect of your setting will keep that aspect uppermost in your reader's mind. Then, as you show different characters noticing this single aspect, or as you play out different scenes near it, or include a reference to it, you consistently remind the reader that, "Hey, we're in the same place, see? The same story, see?"

  One example might be use of a clock tower on the main street of your story's small town. To transform the clock and its tower into a potential unifying device, you would first give it some considerable notice and description, perhaps something like this:

  Middletown's Main Street was dominated by the First National Bank's old brick clock tower, built in 1889 and a landmark to the present day. No other structure on the street stood more than two stories tall, but the clock tower extended a full three stories taller. Its dark red bricks were stained by generations of soot and rain, its conical copper roof was green from decades of corrosion. It had a clock face on all four of its sides, each face almost six feet in diameter, with ornate Roman numerals and hands festooned with spidery black curlicues. It struck every fifteen minutes and tolled out each hour, its vast and metallic voice an echo from times gone by. At night, four small spotlights shone on it, illuminating it like the rampart of a mighty old castle. Whenever anyone looked for a symbol of Middletown, they almost always came back to the clock tower, for it dominated the town; it always had, and it always would. Some said it was Middletown.

  Such a lengthy description, as useful as it might be in building up story mood, could hardly be allowed, even in a novel, unless the tower was also being set up as a constant unifying aspect of the setting. You can be sure that the reader would "latch onto" such an elaborate description, and remember it. (Remember that lengthy descriptions ordinarily are to be avoided. When you insert one such as this for a very special reason, the reader notices immediately.)

  Having thus gotten the reader's attention, you could use the clock tower again and again as a unifying reminder:

  • Characters could agree to "meet under the old clock."

  • Someone could hear the old clock striking the hour.

  • The author could comment that the tower looked especially dark today against the rainy sky.

  • Traffic might be described at some point as being backed up from First Street all the way down to the clock tower corner.

  • An elderly character might comment that he feels "as old as that clock downtown on the bank corner."

  I leave it to you to imagine many other ways the clock and its tower could be mentioned repeatedly in a story as a unifying factor.

  Repeated reference to certain aspects of the setting by one or more characters is closely related to the technique just discussed, but a bit different. In this case, the author does not focus on a single item in the story environment such as the clock tower, but on some angle about the setting which is dominant. This might be how isolated a setting is, for example, or how grungy, or how it might be sandwiched in between a steep hillside and a fast-moving river. In such a situation, the author (through her direct description) and the characters (through taking notice in viewpoint, or in making dialogue comments) repeatedly refer to the general angle that is set up early in the story as particularly noteworthy.

  Here's an example of how a general setting angle might be set up at the outset (here focusing on a town's isolation):

  Middletown stood on the prairie halfway between Junction City to the north and Emersonville to the south, eighty miles to Junction City, ninety to Emersonville. To the east and west, the next hint of "civilization" was much farther away. On a clear summer day, someone once said, you could look in any direction, for as long as you could bear it, and never see anything at all but sagebrush, rolling sand dunes, and an occasional dust devil.

  Having once set up this aspect of the setting in the reader's consciousness, the author might salt into the story dozens of references like the following:

  • The brilliant sunlight made her shrink from the vast distances.

  • "You can't get anywhere from here in less than two hours," he said.

  • She drove to the edge of town and looked out toward — nothing.

  • Sleep would not come. She felt like she had been dropped into the middle of the Sahara desert. . . .

  • An old pickup truck, coated with the red dust of a million desolate miles, rolled in from the empty prairie to the north.

  • The town felt like a place on a distant planet, so isolated was it.

  Again, you may come up with small references that would do a better job than any of these in referring back to isolation as a general, unifying aspect of the setting.

  Continual, subtle expansion on a detail or aspect of the setting will also serve to keep it in focus as a unifying element. How would such a process work? Rather than beginning with a large description, as in the case of the clock tower mentioned above, you would start small, and build. As the story went along, the element of the setting chosen for such treatment would grow larger and larger in the reader's awareness.

  As an example, in one of my earlier novels titled Katie, Kelly and Heck, I had five distinct plot lines and some dozen viewpoints working from quite early in the book. Although all the events took place in the same small town —one unifying factor —I worried that something further was needed to assure an additional sense of unity. The setting device I discovered, and built more importantly as the story progressed, was a back-alley whisky still which no single character considered centrally important.

  I first showed the still, freshly loaded and beginning to cook a new batch of sour-mash whisky. It was simply mentioned as being located in the alley.

  A chapter later, I showed a secondary character examining the still in more detail. This time I revealed the ownership of the apparatus and its importance to him. Two more sentences of description were added to what had been provided in the earlier segment, this time telling the capacity of the still, its temperature, and its internal pressure. I also described a pressure gauge on the equipment.

  Fifteen pages later, I showed the still being sabotaged — the pressure valves being closed, the heat starting to increase, and the aforementioned pressure gauge beginning to rise.

  From that point, with metronomic regularity, I returned in brief segments to the still, unattended in the alley; each time, a bit more description was added, and each time it was noted that the temperature was still higher, the internal pressure continuing to rise toward the red line on the gauge. While all the characters in the story went about their own business, and the physical setting changed from place to place around the town, the repeating, expanding progress reports on the still, described objectively from a viewpoint "on high," maintained a central setting detail focus point for the book until very late in the story when —you guessed it—the still exploded, bringing everyone's attention back to it.

  In your story the central aspect of setting might be a house, a room in that house, a street, a gathering storm. Whatever it might be, if you first merely mention it but then continually return to it with greater and greater attention to descriptive detail, you may be sure your reader will focus on it and cling to it as a unifying factor in your yarn.

  Ongoing references to different aspects of the setting which have something in common is slightly different again. Here, rather than seeking different ways to refer to generally the same phenomenon, as in our examples above about isolation, you provide the reader with different looks at various parts of the setting, building a complete and detailed picture, finally, by a process of accretion.

  For example, you might show a factory worker in a small town paying his home rent to an office operated by the same company that pays his wages. A bit later, you might show the same worker shopping and getting additional credit at the company store. Still later, you might have him taking his sick child to the clinic (the only one in town) operated by the company. And later yet you might describe how the local newspaper is run
by an editor who happens to be the brother-in-law of the owner of the local company. As you added references to other aspects of the setting, a composite picture would emerge which would give the reader a convincing picture of a "company town" where anyone trying to be independent would face grave odds indeed.

  Such a technique is very convincing to readers, incidentally, because it allows them to experience and draw conclusions about a story setting in the same way they operate with real-world environments: by collecting small bits of data and finally drawing conclusions from them. In addition, of course, the quiet drumbeat-like presentation of different aspects, all pointing to the same generality about the setting, give the story a wonderful cohesiveness.

  Careful comparison-reference back to what the setting was before it changed can allow setting to remain a unifying factor even when the actual setting changes. Suppose, for example, a basis of your plot lies partly in the stress caused to the characters because they are forced to move from the city to an unfamiliar rural area (change in setting causing the plot). In such a circumstance, you would be required to describe the city setting in order later to show how different it is from the new rural one. All well and good, but the sudden change from urban to rural in the middle of the story might create a sharp feeling of discontinuity—loss of unity —for your reader.

  In such a situation, the unity of the plot problem would be emphasized by your references to the conflicted feelings in the characters as caused by the move; by comparing new setting versus the old in an author-objective passage or two; by having characters talk about the new setting and how it differs from the previous one; or by having characters homesick for the old setting, talking about how good it was, how unfamiliar they are with the new. In this way, the change in setting would itself become a constant setting reference point!

  In my novel Katie, Kelly and Heck, mentioned earlier, Katie Blanscombe is dislocated from Cleveland, Ohio, to a sorry, isolated little outpost in Arizona, where she gets into all kinds of trouble because she simply does not understand the new territory. In the course of the novel, I found it useful to have Katie fall prey to homesickness again and again, and to criticize her new hometown as being barbaric when compared with Cleveland. Thus, even as Katie moved from a boardinghouse to a hotel, and from poverty to ownership of a restaurant, and from nervous self-restraint to a scene in which she danced and kicked up her heels on a cafe stage, her basic personality was kept unified and consistent —and her essential personal problem kept in focus—by the fact that she kept being homesick and kept moaning about "this dreadful little town," comparing the setting to the one she had left in Cleveland.

  You may think of other examples in which the very emphasis on change in setting becomes a unifying factor of its own. The story of a wagon train going west, for example, might pass through a number of contrasting macrosettings — grasslands, prairie, deserts, rivers, mountains —and might in part be held together because the microsetting, the wagon train itself, remained much the same. Additional unity might be given such a story also, by having the characters notice and comment on the changing backdrop during the journey, saying things like, "I thought the rainy weather on the prairie was bad until we reached this Godforsaken desert, where it never seems to get below a hundred degrees."

  Showing that the setting is contributing to the course of events can add unity to a story. Here the trick often is to have characters in the story point this out, saying things like the following:

  • "This couldn't happen except in Middletown."

  • "A company town always enforces its rules on troublemakers."

  • "If that wall of snow and ice starts to move, we're trapped."

  • "A mother-lode discovery like this one always brings in the lawless element, and we should have expected it."

  • "When the store was robbed last Tuesday, it changed our lives forever."

  There are occasions when it may seem like overkill to have characters comment on the impact of setting on plot—when it's so obvious that mention of it may sound silly. But real people tend to belabor the obvious when they're under stress, and realistic

  story people will, too. So as you build credibility sometimes by allowing characters to worry aloud about obvious problems, you may also improve the sense of story unity by pointing out to the reader that the setting is holding things together by contributing to story happenings.

  A SETTING EMPHASIS TO AVOID

  If you believe from this discussion that I consider setting a primary unifying factor in many novels, you are absolutely correct. As long as each mention of setting is done briefly —ordinarily a few lines at a time, at most—I believe constant reference to setting will have multiple salutary effects on your copy.

  However, there are times in your story when you must be careful not to dwell on setting, especially avoiding mention of any new aspects of it. This is when you are just opening a new story segment which involves transition in viewpoint or immediate locale.

  Suppose, for example, that you are writing a novel in multiple viewpoint, with multiple plot lines and numerous settings. Suppose further that you have been away from character Martha's viewpoint and plot for a number of pages, and now wish to return to her.

  Making such a transition in story focus and interest is difficult for your reader. It is incumbent upon you to make the change as painless and unconfusing as possible. The last thing you want to do is confuse him. If you open up your new segment returning to Martha's viewpoint and emphasizing the new setting she is in, the new and unfamiliar detail makes the reader's reorientation more difficult and potentially confusing.

  To put this another way, you're asking the reader to make a hard enough jump in going from, say, character Sam's viewpoint and locale back to Martha's. You want to make it as easy as possible. How would you do this?

  1. Avoid introducing new setting detail at the outset. This

  in itself will eliminate one possibly disorienting element in your transition.

  2. Remind the reader how your character was feeling when last seen. Given any clue at all, your reader will recall how your viewpoint character was feeling when the story was last in her viewpoint. By mentioning this same feeling again when you return to her viewpoint, you give the reader a vital "connection point" for a successful transition.

  3. Refer to a unifying aspect of setting already established. This will give the reader a familiar landmark as a point of reorientation. Only well after you have eased the reader into the changed viewpoint —and reminded him of the setting in terms already familiar to him —can you risk the potentially disorienting tactic of adding new details about the setting.

  Let's look at an example to clarify number three. Suppose you were returning to Martha's viewpoint downtown after you had devoted a few chapters to other viewpoints elsewhere, perhaps on the far outskirts of your town. You might ease the initial transition something like this (italics added for emphasis):

  Still angry and, worried as a result of her argument with Bill, Martha parked her car on Main Street a block from the center of town. As she got out of the car, the familiar sound of the old clock on the bank corner reached her ears. It was tolling noon. Fighting tears of frustration, she walked toward the tall, sooty brick tower where the clock had tolled for a century. . . .

  The first italicized words avoid any new detail and reestablish Martha's point of view by harking back to the last time she was seen in the story, reminding the reader of the exact same emotion Martha was experiencing then. This returns the reader to Martha's viewpoint in the least difficult way possible. (This matter of identifying a character's feelings —her emotional focus — is a subject we will consider in greater detail in chapter eleven.)

  The second group of italicized words further eases the transition by mentioning something in the physical environment that is already familiar to the reader from earlier parts of the story: the clock.

  The third and fourth brief segments elaborate briefly on the first two.


  This works. But imagine how confused the reader might be at such a time of transition if the author had begun the new segment by describing previously unmentioned aspects of the setting, such as, say, false storefronts along Main Street, advertising signs, small shrubs dying from a drouth, or a beggar often seen on the curb. Introduction of such new setting detail would only disorient the reader. When making a transition, the familiar must be emphasized first!

  Later in your story section, of course, you might well add a few new details about the setting, but only after you had written a reorientation paragraph (or two) would it be safe to do so.

  But how would such tactics work if Martha had really traveled far from her small town while we were away from her viewpoint for a chapter or two? What if she had gone all the way to London, for example?

  The same basic procedure would work. Here's how that kind of transitional opening might be worded:

  Still angry and worried a full week after her argument with Bill, Martha felt very much alone as she walked along the Thames. She looked across the river toward Big Ben in its ancient tower that so symbolized London. The great old clock began to toll the hour. It sounded so familiar, so much like the old clock on the bank corner back home, that her eyes filled with tears. . . .

  Later, of course, new details about the London setting would be added a few at a time, as necessary. But reader reorientation takes precedence over any such additional detail.

  SUGGESTED EXERCISE

  An exercise might help you firm up your understanding of the techniques outlined in this chapter. While no single bit of homework is guaranteed to touch all the bases, the following exercise is one that has helped a great many writing students. Perhaps you would like to try it:

  1. Carefully write an author-objective description of a major, noteworthy aspect of a setting, something like the clock tower used in illustrations in this chapter. Make this description, up to three hundred words, as vivid and detailed as you can, appealing to as many of the reader's senses as possible, and try to tie the physical description to some feeling or mood you want to set up in a story.