Make A Scene (7 page)

Humans have a funny tendency to look for verisimilitude—elements of real life—in fiction. Though the fun of fiction is that you can make up the world and the characters to your specifications, even fantasy writers know they must develop a believable and rich culture, history, and physical geography to sell the idea that their fantasy world is real. Place is one of the first things that make your story real to the reader.

SETTING THE STAGE

Settings are as varied in fiction as they are in the world: A humid Southern bayou; icy Norwegian fjords; a crumbling Victorian mansion; a stable, pungent with the stench of animals. These are just a few of the infinite number of places in which you might set your characters. Though they may seem like merely the backdrop to the action and drama of your narrative, they are more like the rich soil in which you plant your seeds.
Do not
forget to set the scene. Unless you have a good reason to set your novel or story in a vacuum, establishing a physical setting is one of the most important and literal ways to ground the reader and keep characters from being floating heads.

There are so many details to consider when writing fiction that setting can seem like the least important, and, therefore, an obligation, something you dread or do only because you have to. Yet you don't have to have the setting perfectly figured out at first. You can begin with a vague idea and flesh it out over further drafts. If you've ever seen or starred in a stage play, you're familiar with the ambiguous visual details that constitute settings and places onstage. Often a vague cut-out outline of a city is meant to represent a sprawling metropolis, or a couple of paper trees, a forest. If you struggle with setting, there is nothing wrong with sketching it out loosely to begin with and then, later, when you have a better feel for it, filling it in.

You can make notes to yourself in your scene, such as: "Set in some kind of park with lots of loud children and a pond," or "They're in some kind of Italian cafe. Research foods and smells for later."

Setting may not come to you all at once, because there are many layers to it. Just make sure your sets are finished before the final draft. Some of the basic setting types you should keep in mind include general geographic location, nature, and homes and buildings.

Geographic Location and Natural Settings

Do you know where in the world your story is set? Is it a world you've made up, like the planet Rakhat in Mary Doria Russell's novel
The Sparrow,
off in the Alpha Centauri solar system? Or is it Memphis, Tennessee, USA, Earth?

The geographical location is the one thing you need to decide as quickly as possible, as it will have more bearing on your characters than other details of setting. Every location comes with information that is useful to the reader (and to you as a writer) from dialect to politics to climate, and that information bears on the characters who turn up there. A born Southerner, for instance, is likely to feel at home in Alabama, while a character from California might struggle to handle its heat, politics, or racial inequality.

It makes sense for scenes to take place in nature, the most prolific of all natural settings, but remember that cool, snow-piled ski slopes affect characters far differently than scorched desert. If someone takes a drunken spill into a lush garden full of flowers, the results will be different than if that character had tumbled into a wall of cactuses. It is your job to attend to these specifics. The reader cannot be physically transported to the sharp cold of Vail, Colorado, or to the dry heat of the Mojave desert by reading your book, but you want him to
feel
as though he is. On the other hand, you don't want to have to give a lengthy geological explanation for the formation of mesas in Arizona if your goal is simply to have a character leap off one of them.

Author Arundhati Roy uses natural settings in her novel
The God of Small Things,
which is set in India. There, the weather and nature—in particular the constant activity of monsoon rains—have a profound influence on the characters.

Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds. The grass looked wetgreen and pleased. Happy earthworms frolicked purple in the slush.

In this small paragraph, Roy creates a feeling for what it's like to experience a monsoon rain in India (with wonderful descriptions, no less). Imagine having to set your schedule around these torrential rains, and how this might shape your characters' relationship to natural forces, and each other.

Houses, Buildings, and Rooms

In the course of a novel, characters might live in houses, huts, and yurts; they might enter and exit bathrooms, mad scientists' laboratories, and hospitals; they might gather in restaurants, bars, and bedrooms. Rooms and homes must be real, because these are the most essential of living and gathering spaces, and most people are familiar with them, whether they live in shacks or large estates, eat at gourmet establishments or bring home pizza. These spaces are telling and should reveal details about characters.

You've heard the old adage that seeing is believing? Well, how will the reader know for sure that a bedroom bears a woman's touch unless a character in the scene sees perfume and lingerie and lovely flowers on the window-sill? How will he know a home is homey unless he can see the fire burning in the hearth and feel the soft rugs beneath his fingers?

Houses are often representative of the characters that live in them. By describing the state of a house, you can also speak to the soul of a character. Lonely characters often live in lonely quarters. Passionate characters often have a taste for the flamboyant, the colorful, or the warm. Use your rooms, buildings, and houses to add to your scenes, not just to serve as flat backdrops.

SETTING DETAILS

Every setting type comes with its own unique setting details that are just as important as basic physical details for creating a vivid and believable environment in which to situate your protagonist. From the historical period to cultural references, settings are more than just the way things appear—they comprise values and mores that you can work into your narrative to create a truly vivid, believable world for the reader to become deeply involved in.

Time in History

It's important not to forget
when
your novel takes place, because this also has a major influence on your setting. Medieval England will provide a setting completely different from that of 1960s Congo, Africa.

When you pick a particularly memorable time in recent history, say the Free Love and anti-government movement of the 1960s in the United States, remember that there are people out there who lived during these times and who will have strong feelings about the accuracy of your portrayal of that time period. Not only will your details need to be especially accurate, but the time period itself, whether you intend it or not, will make a comment on its people and events.

If you choose a historically benign year or decade (if such a thing is possible), or at least one that has seen fewer dramatic events, you may have more room to sketch details broadly. Depending on how important the time period is to your storyline, you might be able to get away with generalities like "the early nineties," or "the middle of the nineteenth century."

Cultural References

Culture defines how people behave and what their beliefs are; the West Coast of the U.S. differs in many significant ways from the East Coast, from accent and manner of speech to political values. Cultures come with icons of worship, social and religious traditions—or lack thereof—and language patterns. If your characters are living in a culture that you personally have never lived in, you will be in the position of having to do some research to get details right. If it's a culture you know well, then you have the bonus of being able to draw on rich material that will authenticate your scenes.

A good example comes from Michelle Richmond's lyrical novel
Dream of the Blue Room.
In it, protagonist Jenny is on a cruise down the Yangtze River in China in a last-ditch attempt to save her failing marriage and to say goodbye to her deceased friend Amanda Ruth, who wanted her ashes sprinkled there. Richmond builds a gorgeous and surreal mood out of these foreign elements with descriptions and images, but she does so in a way that renders the scene accessible and authentic. It is easy to believe you are there on that boat, cruising down this mysterious river in China:

In the night the river turns silver, the mountains shine down upon it, the air goes cool and wet. This is the China Amanda Ruth wanted, her moonlit landscape, her Land of the Dragon. The villages we pass become magical in darkness, carnival-like and throbbing, though in the day they seem filthy, overcrowded, rubbed raw by industry. Apartment rows crouch like creatures gone dumb with hunger, and in the air there is a stench of coal. The mist mingles with black ash and factory smoke. It takes all of my energy just to breathe.

You do not have to become an expert and present a brief history or cultural overview of the territory of your novel or story, but you do need to provide enough information, description, and cultural detail to allow the reader to believe they are really there in that country, even if it is on another planet. When in doubt, try to lean into the senses, rendering the foreign land and its culture visible, audible, and even smellable.

PURPOSEFUL PLACEMENT: EVERY OBJECT COUNTS

Another aspect of setting is the placement of props, or objects that have significance. Most people who went through public school as children had, at one time, to construct something known as a diorama—a still life representing a book they had read, re-created with tiny props, and presented in a shoe box. You could not possibly fit all the details of a famous novel, for instance, into a diorama, so you would have to pare down to the essentials that were most representative of the book. This is a good way to think about the objects that will show up in your scenes: Imagine that each scene is a diorama. You should strive to add only the props that will bring a scene to life—a mechanic will have his tools, a musician his instrument, perhaps—without imbuing these objects with unnecessary power.

If you make the effort to put an object in a scene, the reader will believe that object has significance. This is not to say that every comb, pack of cigarettes, and cup of tea needs to get up and dance the tango, or that you should keep your settings bare, but remember that the more attention you give to descriptions of objects, the more readers will assign import and meaning to those objects. From art on the walls to cigarettes left burning in an ashtray, objects carry emotional weight and may often appear as clues. This is important to consider if your intention is simply to describe a man's possessions to reveal his character; the reader may assume that a cigar is a lot more than just than a cigar, depending on how much description an object gets.