Read A Writer's Guide to Active Setting Online
Authors: Mary Buckham
Gerritsen effectively uses Setting as a symbol here. She uses place and the movement through place as a metaphor for the character's emotional growth and change. At the beginning of the story, Maura is in Bostonâunhappy, because of a no-win romantic relationship and her focus on work. Winter is approaching and her Setting is gray, growing cold, and shutting down seasonally. This echoes her life.
She travels to Wyoming on business, which affords her a spur-of-the-moment trip to a ski resort, a journey that is very out of character for the nonspontaneous Maura. The passage above is a metaphor for how this change opens up Maura's emotions and lightens her sense of who she is through Setting. When an unexpected accident occurs and she is stranded in the wilds of Wyomingâwhere the average population density is one person for every 5.5 square miles versus Boston's 13,041 people per square mileâthe Setting once again highlights how physically and emotionally isolated the character is.
By the end of the story, after her life-threatening and harrowing stay in Wyoming, Maura sees her hometown, her world, and her relationships in a very different light, much of which is shown emotionally via Setting descriptions. The story's theme of finding balance is achieved.
NOTE
: Using emotional contrast in describing a Setting can be a very effective way of showing the reader that the POV character is now in a different state emotionally than earlier or later in your story.
Take the following situational prompt:
Sue is driving down a road in her hometown.
Pretty generic, yes? Now add Setting and rewrite the prompt any way you wish in order to show the following:
See if you can write tight and focused sentencesâno more than three to four. Focus on what Sue might see and feel about what she sees around her, given her different emotional states. Have fun!
OR:
Look at your own WIP. Find a Setting that's currently devoid of emotion. Can you focus in and see any ways to add emotion to what you currently have on the page? Look to thread through your emotionally charged words, action verbs, and details with what you currently have, without adding too many words to the passage.
Once we start to see the power of using Setting, it's difficult to go back to simply stringing descriptive words together without looking at them critically. In this chapter we'll go a bit deeper and look at how to use Setting to show conflict or complications in a character's world through word choices. This will also show how to focus a reader on what's happening for the character.
Let's look at a master of Setting, Barbara Kingsolver:
The cluttered kitchen irritates her. The Formica countertop is patterned with pink and black loops like rubber bands lying against each other, getting on her nerves, all cocked and ready to spring like hail across the kitchen. Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica. She stares hard at the telephone on the counter, wishing it would ring. She needs some proof that she isn't the last woman left on earth, the surviving queen of nothing. The clock gulps softly, eating seconds whole while she waits; receives no proof.
âBarbara Kingsolver,
Pigs in Heaven
The above example clearly shows the POV character's emotions, but let's pull it apart to see the tension and conflict at play in this Setting description.
The cluttered kitchen irritates her. [
Look at the adjective and active verb here. This is not a woman who is in love with her home. Her growing awareness of dissatisfaction in her life is shown, not told, through her view of her kitchen, a room very often associated with the heart of a home.
] The Formica countertop is patterned with pink and black loops like rubber bands lying against each other, getting on her nerves, all cocked and ready to spring like hail across the kitchen. [
If the author stopped at the pattern it would still be a good visual, but she took the description one more step by describing what those squiggles mean to the characterâan image that's tense and poised for change.
] Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica. [
Telling that enhances, instead of replaces, the previous showing elements.
] She stares hard at the telephone on the counter, wishing it would ring. She needs some proof that she isn't the last woman left on earth, the surviving queen of nothing. The clock gulps [
Wonderful action verb that also gives a strong sensory image.
] softly, eating seconds whole while she waits; receives no proof. [
This last sentence alone is fresh but it still shows how this woman feels about her life. Kingsolver's word choices, and the choices of what to focus on in Alice's kitchen, highlight the conflict between where Alice is now and her yearning to be or feel something different. This feeling, in turn, sends her off on her story journey.
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This is where what you learned about weaving emotion into your Settings in the last chapter can be taken a step further. A gray day can simply be a gray day, or the rain can become a nuisance as a character runs from one location to another without an umbrella. But if you have a character who is experiencing dissatisfaction, which in turn sets her up to make a decision or act in a way that will complicate her life, using Setting to build or to foreshadow that conflict can be extremely effective.
Let's see how author Dennis Lehane foreshadows upcoming complications. In this short passage the POV character is moving from point A to point B, where he's due for a job interview. It's a job he really doesn't want to take, but feels he has no choice. Watch how the author makes that clear by noting what the character sees and how he describes the Setting with details.
On the walk to the subway, I drank my cup of Dunkin's under a low, clay sky and ragged clouds. Brittle gray leaves stirred in the gutter, waiting to fossilize in the first snow. The trees were bare along Crescent Avenue, and cold air off the ocean hunted the gaps in my clothes.
âDennis Lehane,
Moonlight Mile
A less-experienced writer might have rushed the character to the job interview and focused on using anticipation and internalization to show conflict. Lehane sets readers up emotionally so we know how this character feels, shows his resistance, and brings it home by his word choicesâ
low, clay sky, ragged clouds, brittle gray leaves, stirred in the gutter, fossilize, bare trees, cold air, hunted the gaps in his clothes
. These are not the observations of a man excited with his world or feeling optimistic about taking a nine-to-five job in corporate security.
NOTE:
Once you start using Active Setting, you'll quickly find yourself combining the elements we're studying in this book to create maximum effect without adding a lot of additional words.
The next example includes emotion and foreshadowing, both of which ramp up the conflict in the story.
But first, let's look at a possible rough draft.
FIRST DRAFT:
I drove down the dark road toward the crime scene.
The destination raises a story question, but the rest of the sentence isn't working hard enough. Let's see how Laurell K. Hamilton not only transitions her character from one location to the other, but also ratchets up the sense of conflict in the passage.
The trees curled over the road, naked branches bouncing in the headlight. Wet, icy trunks bent towards the road. In the summertime the road would be a leafy tunnel, now it was just black bones erupting from the white snow.
âLaurell K. Hamilton,
The Lunatic Café
Do you get the stronger sense of impending trouble or danger? Hamilton doesn't wait until the crime scene to show that things are going to get worse for this POV character; instead she leads the reader to that point step by step.
The author of this next example does the same thing in a different mystery. In this passage the POV character has tracked down the meeting location of a local AA group. He needs to find people within this building who might know something about a murder victim and a motivation for her death. The group is known to be reluctant to talk about what happens in their meetings, because that easily erodes the level of trust that is painstakingly built between them. The reader already knows this. A less-intentional writer might have jumped from that information reveal via dialogue straight to interviewing the members, which will show more conflict. But an opportunity would have been lost. Let's see how Louise Penny did not simply rely on dialogue for conflict, but enhanced it through the inspector's observations of his Setting.
Chief Inspector Gamache stood on rue Sherbrooke, in downtown Montreal, and stared at the heavy, red brick church across the street. It wasn't made with bricks so much as huge, rectangular ox blood stones. He'd passed it hundreds of times while driving and never really looked at it.
But now he did.
It was dark and ugly and uninviting. It didn't shout salvation. Didn't even whisper it. What it did shout was penance and atonement. Guilt and punishment.
It looked like a prison for sinners. Few would enter with an easy step and light heart.
âLouise Penny,
A Trick of the Light
Pulling out the specific Setting details might make the conflict clearer. As you read the key sentences, ask yourself: Does this look like the kind of place, foreshadowing the people who meet for mutual support within, that will give a murder investigator answers?
It wasn't made with bricks so much as huge, rectangular ox blood stones.
It was dark and ugly and uninviting. It didn't shout salvation. Didn't even whisper it. What it did shout was penance and atonement. Guilt and punishment.
It looked like a prison for sinners.
Powerful, specific, descriptive, and focused imagesâ
huge
,
rectangular ox blood
;
dark and ugly and uninviting
âadd to the character's interpretation of what he's seeingâ
penance and atonement
;
guilt and punishment
;
a prison for sinners
.
What the author did was use Setting in combination with interpretation of that Setting. It's a powerful one-two combination that leads the reader to expect exactly what the author wants them to expectâimpending conflict and complication.
This next example shows the conflict between the POV character, a mother whose daughter has been committed to a psychiatric evaluation home by the daughter's husband, and the psychiatrist treating the daughter. The mother feels that the husband is actively working against her daughter, and if her daughter remains at the home, she will be in danger. The mother has arrived at the home hoping to communicate with the resident psychiatrist who is friends with the husband. See how the author, Emilie Richards, imparts this conflict through Setting:
He led her down the hallway to the door he'd come through. His office was much as she expected. Leather furniture, dark paneled walls covered with multiple framed diplomas, a desk as massive as a psychiatrist's ego. She always wondered if professional men measured the size of their desks the way adolescent boys measured their penises.
âEmilie Richards,
Fox River
The reader is given a few key words of description, but most of the Setting is translated through the mother's POV. Thus the reader knows exactly how she feels about the man keeping her from her daughter, based on what she sees of his personal space.
What if Richards had chosen simply to describe the office space?
ROUGH DRAFT:
Leather furniture, dark paneled walls covered with multiple framed diplomas, a massive desk.
The above description is so generic as to be almost invisible. So let's look more closely at how Richards enhanced the generic to show the reader that the POV character knew getting her daughter away from the psychiatrist was not going to be easy, just by seeing his office.
He led her down the hallway to the door he'd come through. [
Not much Setting description here, but this line transitions the reader from one space to another and shows the reader that the male psychiatrist is in charge by forcing the mother to follow him to his space.
] His office was much as she expected. [
Telling, which if left on its own, would not place the reader deep into the passage, but does set the reader up to understand the space more.
] Leather furniture, dark paneled walls covered with multiple framed diplomas, [
Through this reveal we have generic Setting with a hint of ego revealed by the number of diplomas shown.
] a desk as massive as a psychiatrist's ego. [
Bam, right here, by using the piece of furniture to show something about the psychiatrist, this room comes alive.
] She always wondered if professional men measured the size of their desks the way adolescent boys measured their penises. [
The image of that massive desk is followed by a very scathing observation that leaves the reader no doubt about the emotional subtext in this passage. The POV character is not intimidated, impressed, or cowed, but she is aware that she's dealing with a man in power. By using Setting so skillfully, Richards has alerted the reader to the tension and conflict between the characters.
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