A Writer's Guide to Active Setting (3 page)

Pretty bland description. The reader is not deep into this character's POV because the character is not experiencing the room.

Better because now we're given a little more insight into what the POV character is feeling based on the response to the room. But we still have no idea why the character feels this way. Nor can we see the room. Plus instead of being shown the place, we're only told about it.

Let's see how Suzanne Collins used the Setting to enhance the opening of her story:

Here we have more Setting details that allow the author to show some characterization of the POV character and reveal emotions based on her interaction with this room, all by adding just a few more details of Setting. The Setting information is also bracketed by the emotion of the paragraph, like this:

• The first sentence is all about choreography. She's moving the POV character through space from one location to another.
  
• The second sentence starts with internalization that cues the reader into how the POV character feels and ends on Setting.
  
• The third sentence picks up the hint of Setting detail from the previous sentence with a key word—
  velvet
  —and reveals a hint of backstory.
  
• The fourth sentence expands on the Setting imagery and adds body language to show emotion.
  
• The fifth sentence brings the reader back around to the larger story question of what's going to happen next to this character.
  

Can you see how the author uses Setting to give the reader a breathing space, deepen the emotional stakes of the story, and then move the story forward?

Here's another example. This passage is from a debut author who, instead of telling, shows the reader that the POV character has arrived at her husband's new home. It's a home that doesn't look like much but is better than anything she's ever had.

In the above example, the author did an outstanding job of letting the reader see a house that's not all that great—
back end, strip of land, peeling shingles, saggy roof
—since these negative words are qualified—
funny brown, a little saggy
—then follows with the clear qualification that the character had never lived in a real house before. This allows the reader to see that, for this particular character, this not-so-great house was better than she'd ever had. A whole lot of characterization is revealed via Setting.

Have you ever attended an event with a friend or family member and later, in discussing the event, discovered that based on the friend's description, you each seemed to have been at a totally different event? Mystery-writer Agatha Christie used this ability to great effect. She allowed her characters to focus in on what matters to them in one of her Hercule Poirot stories,
Cards on the Table
. The Belgian detective asks half-a-dozen participants of a party to describe the room where the murder took place. All of the characters, because they come from different backgrounds with different interests, they describe highlights of the room from totally different perspectives. One notes the very valuable and esoteric collectibles scattered around on the tabletops. Another, a soldier who spent many years in the Middle East, could tell the detective the tribal names of the woven rugs on the floor; another character saw the room in terms of colors, and another could describe the type of period furniture.

Now if the reader had not already “seen” the entire room—in all its detail—through the detective's eyes, but saw only the small snippets from the individual secondary characters, the reader might see only a room with knick-knacks or just a room with carpets, but no furniture. By letting the audience see the whole room through Poirot's POV first, and then revisiting the room through each character's POV, the reader is led to solve the mystery of who killed the victim because only one character “saw” the weapon that was at hand.

Let's revisit an earlier point to see how a POV character that is miserable in a school environment will not see or notice the same items as a POV character who finds that same school a sanctuary and the center of his world. The first example will be through the POV of a character visiting the principal's office. See how quickly you get the emotional tenor of the passage and what else the passage reveals about this character?

Did you notice the key details used? Word choices—
empty, slap, hard soles
,
worn
—and sensory details (sounds, smells, visual cues) and then ending on a story question raised via the POV character's internalization about the Setting. The above example is all it took to layer a lot of subtext on the page using Setting.

Here's the second example.

A world of difference based solely by what the POV character is seeing in this Setting and his response to it. That's the power of Active Setting.

Remember to think of Setting as the stage that contains your story. Keeping the Setting lean and mean is important, but it can be dangerous to stuff all the details into one paragraph that's describing only Setting. Often this will bring your pacing to a halt. However, this method can work if your pacing is so strong that all the reader wants to do is get back into the story. For example:

Let's break down the Setting in the above example into specific elements. First, Evanovich describes this Setting in depth because it is the first time her POV character arrives at this new location and she wants to make her character's world vivid to the reader. This is one of the places (pun intended) where the reader will allow the author to slow the pacing a bit in order to see where the character is. Doing so allows the reader to feel and be in that place with the character.

Now let's examine how Evanovich uses her descriptive phrases to create the world of New Jersey bounty-hunter Stephanie Plum. The author does not leave it to the reader to guess about the neighborhood; she uses key details to make it come alive.

Now what if Evanovich had simply written:

The reader would have felt rushed, and, while knowing they were on a particular street in New Jersey, since the story is unfolding there, they would not have any sense of this world. Instead of seeing the world of Evanovich's story, the reader could be inserting images from a Kansas town or a French city, especially if the reader had never been to New Jersey.

Without clues, the reader will default to what they know already and may get an erroneous Setting image. One paragraph was all that was needed to anchor the reader to the world of the characters and make the Setting come alive. Evanovich does not use a lot of Setting in her stories, but makes sure that the reader experiences the world of New Jersey bounty-hunter Stephanie Plum at least once or twice in every story.

If the character is returning to a place that hasn't been described in depth previously, the reader will not be as open to a slower pacing on the revisit so you can describe Setting. The reader has most likely created her own visuals, because a reader needs to see the characters in some context. This is a small but important point, and an error many new writers make.

Beginning writers often:

• wait until it's too late to describe and orient the reader as to place;
  
• or totally forget that the reader has no idea where the character is in the story, because the location has suddenly moved from a known to a new, unknown location.
  

If I write,
Joe left his home and went to the city
, the Setting is so vague that it leaves you clueless and frustrated. But if I write,
Joe left his beachside cottage and drove into Lake Forest City, a northern suburb of Seattle
, the addition of a few specifics gives you enough to inhabit the character's world while keeping the main focus on what's happening in the story.

When you move your character from one location in your story to another, it's easy to forget that the reader has never been to this new location and needs to be quickly anchored.