Read A Writer's Guide to Active Setting Online
Authors: Mary Buckham
So now the reader knows it is late afternoon, receives some great sensory details of this specific San Francisco location, is a little deeper into where this character comes from, and then moves right back to the external issues driving the plot of this story.
Mosley creates a great emotional check-in by specifically choosing a remembered childhood Setting with a good emotional connotation and creating a contrast between what this character usually feels in the current Setting that creates that same connotation, and what he's feeling now. Since childhood memories are so strong, whatever situation he's in now must be really intense if it's overriding those memories. Another reason why using deep POV to describe Setting can be so effective.
Another place where you can maximize Setting to anchor the reader is when you transition the character or characters from one location to another. Sometimes using a scene break works bestâthe spacing on the page alerts the reader that the scene you were describing has shifted in POV, time, or location. But in some situations that approach can be too jarring. The secret is to transition the reader quickly, and not simply by dropping in sentences of plain description that don't work hard enough.
Look at how Robert Crais drops names of specific locations along with strong sensory detail to transition his POV characters from one location to another, and to show there's a passage of time during this period:
⦠They climbed up through the Sepulveda Pass, then down the San Fernando Valley. The valley was always much hotter, and Pike could feel the increasing heat even with the air-conditioning. He watched the outside temperature rise on the dashboard thermometer. From Cheviot Hills to Van Nuys, they gained fifteen degrees.
âRobert Crais,
The Watchman
Look what happens if you remove the sensory detail of the heat in the above passage:
They climbed up through the Sepulveda Pass, then down the San Fernando Valley. From Cheviot Hills to Van Nuys they traveled.
You no longer feel “in the skin” of the POV character and lose a large sense of where you are. Instead you're oriented simply by place names, which can work sometimes, but if they're used every time, a character shifting from place to place grows stale and redundant.
Another point to keep in mind is that it's not necessary to go in depth with the specific locations in your story every time you're approaching a transitional orientation. These transitions occur when you are quickly shifting the reader from one story Setting to another. What you're trying to do in a few tight sentences is give a strong sense of time and location passing.
If, instead of the greater Los Angeles area that Crais used above, we used locations in England, the passage might read:
He drove south, catching the Clapham Road to avoid the jam of the A23, then down toward Croyden. The flat valley was always misty, and Pike could smell the tang of the salt air blowing off the Channel by the time he'd reached the M23 interchange. He watched the increase of seagulls and felt the decrease of temperature. From Pease Pottage to Brighton they lost seven degrees Celsius.
The reader might not know all these specific names or locations, but a few might seem familiar and she can get a strong sense of moving through a specific landscape over a period of time.
NOTE
: When an author is using Setting to transition the reader, the focus should be on moving from one place to another and not on the reader experiencing a particular Setting in great detail.
Here's another example, from the opening of
The Watchman
by Crais, who is a master at using Setting in many powerful ways:
City of Angels
THE CITY was hers for a single hour, just the one magic hour, only hers. The morning of the accident, between three and four
A
.
M
. when the streets were empty and the angels watched, she flew west on Wilshire Boulevard at eighty miles per hour, never once slowing for the red lights along that stretch called the Miracle Mile, red after red, blowing through lights without even slowing; glittering blue streaks of mascara on her cheeks.
âRobert Crais,
The Watchman
In this example, Crais opens using Setting to anchor the reader while keeping the action high; the reader knows only that they are in the skin of a female. Some names help anchor us to a specific locationâ
City of Angels
,
Wilshire Boulevard
,
Miracle Mile
âbut the focus is meant to be on the POV character versus the place. More of that will come later. For now the author wants a light brushstroke of Setting while keeping the focus on the character in action. In this particular example the author wants the reader to know the
where
and
when
of the story action through a secondary character's POV before transitioning to the protagonist's POV. In this story, Crais wants to show us this secondary character in action in a particular location before an accident happens that will change her life and the life of the protagonist. The reader needs to see this secondary character here before transitioning to the inciting incident (the event that sets off the chain of events that drive the story).
NOTE:
Transitioning happens when you need to shift the reader from one Setting to another, one POV to another, or one time to another.
What if Crais chose not to work so hard at his craft and removed the Setting entirely?
THE CITY was hers for a single hour, just the one magic hour, only hers. The morning of the accident, between three and four
A
.
M
. when the streets were empty and the angels watched, she flew west on the Boulevard at eighty miles per hour, never once slowing for the red lights, red after red, blowing through lights without even slowing; glittering blue streaks of mascara on her cheeks.
It's still powerful writing but, with this opening, someone reading this for the first time will remain at a distance from the story, waiting for a stronger sense of where this story is happening. The
where
helps define the character in a concrete situation. A female blowing through Kansas City or Sequim, Washington, is a different character than one driving, as this character is, through Los Angeles. This example shows the character in her ordinary world (the world of the character before the story gets under way) and before she's transitioned into the events of the story.
In this next passage from a historical novel set in the 1920s, the reader enters the story in Paris, a city the POV character adores but was banished from for at least a year because of a scandal associated with her name. What this means is that the reader sees and experiences Paris for at least two or three chapters before we are transitioned to the exile destinationâAfrica.
Notice how the author begins with what the POV character knows wellâcity lifeâbefore transitioning to the uniqueness of this new Setting. Put yourself in the shoes of the POV character, banished for at least twelve months and sent to an environment that she knows nothing about. Now she sees it for the first time.
The streets were paved and there were electric wires hanging overhead where colorful birds perched and monkeys swung hand over hand. There were plenty of motorcars, but the streets were choked with oxcarts as well, and rickshaws scuttled by, leaving the pushcarts to trundle in their wake, slogging through mule dung and rotting fruit. The air was pungent with both, and they combined with woodsmoke and the gum leaves and the sunburned red soil to give Africa its own unique perfume.
âDeanna Raybourn,
A Spear of Summer Grass
Let's pull this apart to see exactly how the author transitions the reader through this character's point of view.
The streets were paved and there were electric wires hanging overhead [
Because most of the up-to-date European and American cities of the time had electricity, this would be familiar.
] where colorful birds perched and monkeys swung hand over hand. [
Here the author follows the familiar with the unique in detailing new Setting.
] There were plenty of motorcars, [
Back to what the character is familiar with.
] but the streets were choked with oxcarts as well, and rickshaws scuttled by, leaving the pushcarts to trundle in their wake, slogging through mule dung and rotting fruit. [
In this last sentence there were fewer words allocated to the familiar and more used to describe the new with both sensory detailsâ
mule dung
,
rotting fruit
. There are also powerful action verbsâ
choked
,
scuttled
,
trundle
,
slogging
âthat all create a sense of urgency, movement, and life.
] The air was pungent with both, and they combined with woodsmoke and the gum leaves and the sunburned red soil. [
And the last sentence of the paragraph focuses 100 percent on the new Setting, using sensory details of sight and smell, with specific details of woodsmoke (familiar), gum leaves (exotic), and red soil (combination of exotic to some readers, but familiar to others).
] to give Africa its own unique perfume. [
Then ends on the admission that what the character saw, smelled, and heard was different, but not necessarily negative. This raises a story question about whether the character will learn to appreciate this new Setting or hate every day she's not in Paris.
]
This author uses one paragraph of powerful Active Setting to transition the reader to a new location and makes sure the reader is there with the character.
The following is another example from Crais showing how he maximizes the Setting to pull a reader deeper into the same story, this time from a different character's POV. The reader knows the initial events happened in Los Angeles, but now we are transitioning to the protagonist's POV as he arrives at the scene of the accident.
First look at what Crais could have written in a rough draft, followed by what he did write, in order to see that enhancing the Setting might take a few tries, but it's well worth the effort:
ROUGH DRAFT:
They drove toward south LA to the more industrial area.
Does this tell the reader much? What visuals are you getting? We know the characters are in Los Angeles, but the word
industrial
could mean strip malls to one reader, factories to another, or a green solar or wind field to yet another.
REVISED ROUGH DRAFT:
They drove south from Glendale into a dirtier, grittier, more industrial area of LA.
Now we have some stronger visualsâand sometimes this is all a story needs. There's just enough info to anchor the reader and let them know that since the characters are in this type of environment, they may not see small children riding plastic bikes on the sidewalk, or want to get out of their vehicle and have a picnic. But what if you want or need the Setting to show more, to really anchor the reader, or make a stronger point about the same story Setting experienced in a different way? Let's revisit how Crais uses Setting in the next paragraph:
The drive south from Glendale was tedious with the heavy afternoon traffic, and ugly with the power cables and train yards that bordered the river. It was a dirty, gray part of Los Angeles that never seemed clean, even after the rains, and when they finally crossed back to the west side, the area in which Larkin lived wasn't much better. The streets were lined with warehouses waiting to be brought up to earthquake standards or razed, and other buildings housing storage units or sweatshops where minimum-wage immigrants built cabinetry and decorative metalwork. Everything about the area was industrial.
âRobert Crais,
The Watchman
Am I saying that every time you move your characters from one place in your story to another that you want to stop and place as much emphasis on detail? No. In this particular story, the Setting plays a major role. It's the scene of a car accident that now has a wealthy heiress running for her life and Joe Pike and Elvis Coleâcharacters well known to Crais fansâtrying to figure out what happened in order to save the girl.
Setting impacts different characters in different ways. Using Setting as you transition the reader to a different POV in the same place creates a stronger world for your story. This is a different approach than the one we will soon discuss in the section
When Place Matters
. Here the story could unfold in any large city. Los Angeles, as a specific Setting, is not core to the story, but the author wants to create stronger characterization to create subtext on the page.
Here's how Jamie Ford uses Setting and the movement of one of the main characters to really place the reader in a specific place (Seattle) and time (1942). Look at how the small, specific details work extra hard:
As he walked along the damp sidewalks, his breath came out in a swirling mist, adding to the fog rolling in off the water. He tried to stay in the shadows, despite the fear that crept into his mind and curdled his stomach. Henry had never been out this late by himself. Though with the crowds of people that bustled up and down the avenues, he hardly felt alone.
All the way down South King, the street was awash in the stain of neon signs that defied the blackout restrictions. Signs for bars and nightclubs reflected greens and reds in each puddle he jumped over. The occasional car would drive by, bathing the street in its dim blue headlights, illuminating the men and women, Chinese and Caucasian, enjoying the nightlifeâdespite the rationing.
âJamie Ford,
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Let's deconstruct these two paragraphs to better understand how Ford uses Setting to anchor the reader deep into the time frame and specific location of the story: