Setting (13 page)

STORY MEANING

Selection of setting can profoundly affect story meaning because some themes may be difficult or even impossible to examine in a certain kind of setting, while a different setting could make these same themes seem almost inevitable as a concern of the characters in such a place and time. If you begin planning your story to be played out in a rough, isolated wilderness setting, for example, that choice may at the outset be nothing more than a convenience for you, or the first idea that leaped into your mind.

But selection of such a setting virtually eliminates some story themes and makes others likely.

For example, if you choose to set your story in a rugged, isolated mining town in the Klondike a century or more ago, it's hard to imagine that your story's meaning could have much to do with any of the following:

• The pressures of high society on a young woman's marriage plans

• The difficulty of choosing a college curriculum

• Country club exclusion due to racism

• The desperation of urban slums

• The choice of an apartment complex roommate

• Finding a date for the prom

• Lost airline tickets

• Harrassment by telephone calls

• Concern about AIDS

• Worry about environmental pollution and endangered wildlife.

The first six themes in this list relate to physical location of the setting. The situations listed would not likely exist in a place like the Klondike. The next three themes on the list relate to the time of the setting. Airlines, telephones and AIDS would not exist in a Klondike setting.

The last theme on the list, environmental pollution, would not be likely because of the attitude existing in such a setting: Until fairly recent times, environmental concerns were not much of a worry, and certainly old-time miners repeatedly raped the environment with no thought whatsoever of the consequences in pollution and destruction of wildlife. As a matter of fact, prevailing frontier attitudes toward wildlife were the opposite of today's; killing off all wolves, coyotes and bears was a positive value in those days.

So choice of a setting limits the themes you can deal with.

Conversely, choice of a setting immediately suggests themes which are possible. Using the same isolated, old-time Klondike setting, some possible ideas and themes come to mind at once:

• Greed for gold

• The threat of starvation in the wild

• The danger of wild animal attack

• The quest for food and shelter

• The value of friendship

• The terror of being lost in the wilderness

• Homesickness for civilization.

Once you realize this interdependence of setting and thematic ideas, you can better tailor your setting to your ideas. That wilderness setting might be chosen and developed consciously in order to state as clearly as possible a realized theme involving courage against great odds, perhaps, or the saving strength of religious faith in a time of isolation and trial. If you also emphasized certain other aspects of the wilderness — the cruel and random death of prey animals, as one illustration, or the seemingly hostile persistence of the killing winter gale —you might more clearly develop a theme about personal courage.

We often see this relationship between setting and meaning most clearly in movies, because so much has to be shown and not explained in words. In the
Treasure of Sierra Madre,
for example, the war between good and evil impulses in the characters is emphasized and made clearer because of the savage and primitive conditions under which the men exist, leaving little or no room for pretense or manners. The recent
Batman
movies derived part of their meaning from the dark, towering, crumbling city infrastructure that formed their setting. Many critics saw serious ideas about the human condition depicted in these films. The setting put the audience in a somber frame of mind, and gave outrageous activities a semblance of verisimilitude. Played in a less menacing and terrible urban setting, the stories might have been seen merely as comic book nonsense.

This relationship between setting and story meaning was brought home to me most vividly when I was writing a novel a few years ago titled
A Boat Named Death.
The story is of an old mountain man, quite mad, who stumbles upon a woman and her small children in a cabin in the wilderness. Through being touched by their total vulnerability and dependence on him to save their lives, he is changed from practically an animal to a love-filled man who faces his own death for the sake of others.

The novel met with some success, but probably could not have done so if the choice of setting had not been right. Most of the story is of the man's attempt to get the little family to medical help by taking them down a wild river in flood in an old rowboat with the word "Death" painted on its side. The trapper's struggle against the river—which seems to him a character bent on their annihilation —becomes a symbol of his entire life struggle, and explains how he became the man he is. But, at the same time, his journey down the river becomes a spiritual one, his heart changing as the river batters and almost destroys him. The setting, the boat in the careening river, makes possible the themes of man against nature, and man against himself. A final change in the setting, to a small and hostile town bent on the trapper's destruction, makes possible an emphasis on the transforming power of love, even on a man whom the wilds had practically turned into a beast.

Every writer comes upon situations like this, where the choice of setting not only defines the kinds of ideas that can be explored, but suggests ways that all or part of that setting can be transformed into a symbol that contributes to story meaning. In an example earlier in this book, we used an old clock tower, visible from all over a small town. One immediately thinks of using the clock tower as a symbol for the passing of time, or for a town's living in the past as if time had stood still, or to illuminate the story's meaning.

In such ways, setting can have a profound impact on your story's meaning. You should be alert to this fact, and remember it in matching plot to character, and both to setting. In a proper blend of the three, a story meaning and depth of ideas will come much more clear. To put this another way, the perfect setting can make all the difference in what your story ultimately means.

You should also remember, however, that conscious manipulation of the setting and other story elements does not mean that you should set out on a mad quest for symbols and metaphors in your setting. Symbolic meaning, when it occurs, is usually an outgrowth of the creative process itself. Such meaning usually develops fully in your mind only as you write the story. It's very dangerous to set out on a piece of fiction with the idea of "making something a symbol." The result too often is artificiality.

What should you do, then? Simply remember that setting can affect meaning in the ways we have mentioned here. Work to make setting harmonious with your other fiction elements. If symbolic or metaphorical meaning comes clear to you as you write the story, consider ways you might point it out more clearly. But never force it; that way lies disaster.

STORY IDEAS

We've seen in earlier chapters how good setting makes the story world vital and vibrant and real to the reader. But there's also a quite different advantage of good setting: The impact it can have on the writer herself as she researches and creates her tale.

Many writers have experienced the "turn-on" that research digging can bring. What happens is that new and previously unsuspected facts turn up during the research, or some new detail or anecdote provides unexpected delight. In either case, the writer gets newly excited, and sometimes gets new story or character ideas from the experience. What can also happen is that the writer imaginatively gets so deeply into her setting as she writes, that she actually sees possibilities in it that were previously not seen.

The late Clifton Adams, one of our most gifted western writers mentioned earlier, told me once with great pleasure how he had stumbled upon a historical record of French foreign legionnaires actually assigned in south Texas during frontier times. This unusual historical sidelight so fascinated Cliff that he did considerably more research about it and found material for use in several later novels. Phyllis A. Whitney has remarked that she researched a setting for an adult suspense novel and found enough material for an additional young adult book. In my own career I have had numerous similar experiences: Medical research done for my novel
Halls of Dishonor
gave me considerable additional information about the medical setting, which was one of the inspirations for a later book called
Miracleworker,
another medical story. The germ of the plot for
Miracleworker,
as a matter of fact, came from an accidental encounter with a medical supply "detail man" (salesman) during a research visit for the other novel.

Careful research is required to make sure your setting is accurate and believable, as discussed back in chapter three. But such research very often pays the considerable dividend of inspiring new ideas for setting, as well as indicating how story people in such a setting might think and act, and how a plot in such a setting might play out.

The moral? Never shirk research. Learn to love it. Even when you think you have done enough research for your story setting, try to dig just a little deeper—conduct that one more interview, visit one more site, write one more letter or read one more book on the subject. Trust the process of research. It will feed your imagination in ways you may never have dreamed of.

You may indeed find that the inspiration continues through the writing process, even after you thought learning about your setting was finished. In a curious way, the process of writing sometimes intensifies a writer's vision. In fact-writing, putting the words on paper sometimes helps clarify the very thought the writer is struggling to record. In fiction, it is even more common for a writer to begin writing a description or factual passage about a setting, and suddenly find herself imaginatively transported into that setting in a more vivid way than was possible before she started writing it down.

So research provides inspiration, and writing down ideas can help the imagination focus and crystalize the very imagining. The ideas form words and then the words, as they are written, clarify the ideas. It's a strange process and I don't begin to understand it. I just know it happens, and very often it happens when the writer is describing a setting, and suddenly finds herself so deeply immersed in that setting, in her imagination, that she is amazed.

Try it. Write a detailed description of a setting you know a lot about. Put down concrete physical details, emotion-packed observations of feelings about the setting. As you write, you will almost certainly find your imagination further stimulated by the process itself.

Many writers, knowing how research and writing can fuel the imagination, take the learning process a step further. They become a fond joke among their friends because they always seem to be making an unnecessary trip or going to a meeting they don't have to attend, or starting with great vim and vigor into some new hobby which their previous life gave no indication about.

Such writers do these things because they want to seek out new experience. They know you can never predict when such an experience might suggest an entirely new backdrop for a story. They also do these things because they have learned to love information for its own sake.

I admit to being one of those who constantly leaps into new hobbies. I have been at one time or another a photographer, a guitar player, a hunter, a fisherman, a private pilot, a camper, a ham radio operator, a golfer, a tennis player, a pigeon-raiser, a carpenter and a model train enthusiast. (And I've probably forgotten some hobbies that should be mentioned, too.) I went into each of these activities with enthusiasm, wanting to learn just as much about it as I could. I've had a great deal of fun. But I've also derived great benefits in terms of story settings because every specialty or hobby exists in its own arcane little world.

I think, for example, of standing in an airport hangar listening to pilots swap flying stories; there is a characteristic preoccupation here, and special lingo based on special shared skills and knowledge. Then I recall the days with amateur radio operators at events like the annual American Radio Relay League "Field Day," when operators set up in the out-of-doors to train for emergency situations; again the interests are unique, the people are unusual, and the lingo specialized. Each hobby's microworld has its own informal oral library of folk tales and jokes, some of which can stimulate your imagination with ideas for plots as well as settings.

Entering such a hobby world can bring all sorts of new information and ideas for story settings. And it can also be a lot of fun; such new experiences and learning keep you young . . . keep your brain nimble and eager.

In addition, your enjoyment of learning new things and meeting different kinds of people will help you maintain your enthusiasm, help keep your mind open to new experiences and ideas, and, quite simply, help you maintain a focus broader than your own private world of work and family.