Authors: Jack M Bickham
Your desire for a particular mood, however, may suggest the immediate presentation of setting from the viewpoint of a character. If, for instance, the emotional mood of the central character is vital to the feeling of the story throughout, you might plunge your reader into that character's viewpoint (which is to color everything) at once.
As an example, compare and contrast the following opening lines of a story about a lonely person living alone in a squalid setting. What is the general story feeling conveyed by this:
A cold, steady rain pounded the deserted streets of the neighborhood, making the chill night more bleak and lonely. An old man in a dark raincoat hurried along the crumbling sidewalks and vanished into the shabby yellow light of a tavern on the corner. A police car trundled slowly through the dark, its headlights yellow, like the eyes of a great cat. . . .
As opposed to this:
She bit her lip to keep from screaming. The pounding of the rain on the window of her small room was driving her mad. The night outside mirrored her feelings: blackness . . . desolation. Fighting back tears, she watched an old man in a dark raincoat hurry along the deserted sidewalk and enter the corner bar. Another derelict, she thought in despair, another loser like me, waiting to die. Her head throbbed with pain. She felt nauseated. She looked at the bottle of blue pills on the cheap plastic end table, knowing they offered what she wanted most: oblivion . . . death.
Clearly the mood evoked by these two openings is quite differ
ent. One is from the omniscient viewpoint and establishes a dark, lonely, brooding, and perhaps threatening feeling in the setting. The second is
deeply
in a character viewpoint, so that the setting is as much inside her head as anywhere in the outside world. The mood that's established is in contrast with the first example, here being more desperate, anguished, miserable and limited.
What decisions will you make about your opening? Remember that you will be establishing reader expectations that you should be ready to meet with consistency in your handling of setting throughout the rest of the story. What you set up, you must follow through on.
STORY MIDDLE
Which brings us to the main course of your story, and some of the questions you have to consider for its progress.
As noted above, selection of a central unifying aspect of the setting is almost always a "must." Earlier we looked at setting up an old clock tower as such a unifier. What aspect will you select? Will it be a specific thing like the clock tower, or a more general repeated emphasis on setting, such as its isolation, or its place in the mountains or near the ocean shore?
It's important to avoid reader boredom as you return again and again to this central aspect of setting, so it will pay off if you plan carefully all the different ways you might refer to it. Can you describe or present it from differing locations which present different angles of view? From different viewpoints? Different times of day? Different emotional or intellectual perspectives? You will find it useful to plan some of these different approaches, making notes on how and when you might use them, including notations on how they will appear different to the reader, and perhaps the kind of wording that might be used.
Again using the clock tower as a basis for an example, the beginning of your brief and preliminary list of different ways of describing setting might look something like this:
Clock tower—
Seen from street below; from window across street; from edge of town; in noon sunlight; lighted at night; on city stationery masthead; from passing car a block away; possibly from private aircraft?
Vantage points to include omniscient, viewpoint of Stephanie and Roger.
Omniscient vantage-point descriptions objective but evocative of small-town, the great age of the tower, the town's parochialism. Stephanie sees tower as dear, familiar, reassuring, always nostalgic, happy. Roger, however, sees it with anger, resentment, a symbol of how the town holds Stephanie so she won't go away with him.
There will, of course, be many other details and aspects of the setting which will be presented during the course of your story. You need to know what most of these will be, so that setting references come instantly to your mind as you follow your character's journey through the plot. (It can badly slow down your plotting if you have to pause often in the first draft in order to think up what bit of setting detail should be inserted. If you know the details in advance, you will tend to drop them in quickly, without being distracted from your plot and character by the need to dream up something about the setting on the spur of the moment.)
Naturally, if your story is going to move into several settings, you need to do this kind of planning for each of them. As you do, you will find yourself beginning to see each from various viewpoints, and this will improve your imaginative connection with both your characters and your story world.
STORY ENDING
Little needs to be said about questions like those mentioned above, because most of the points involved have already been touched upon in the context of earlier story development. It should be noted, however, that the concluding feeling or mood
conveyed by your setting may be almost as important as the opening one because this is the emotional hook on which you hang the entire tale —the feeling you hope to leave with your reader at the story's conclusion. It may or may not be precisely the feeling that you established at the outset. In a story of any length, it will have changed subtly because something has changed in the course of the story —events have taken place, characters' lives have been altered. For this reason, your characters are not likely to see their setting at the end of the story exactly as they saw it at the outset; their feelings have changed and they will see the setting differently, too.
So don't mechanically assume the end mood will be exactly as it was at the outset. It may be close, but some variation, some dramatic progress, nearly always will have taken place.
Finally, consider the possibility that some part of your setting — the clock in the old tower, for example once more — might ultimately be made to mean more than anyone realized it meant earlier in the story. Is it possible that your character, in the ending, suddenly sees the inexorable movement of the giant minute hand as the moments of her life slipping away? Does the tolling of the hour become the tolling of the bell "for thee," as in John Donne's poem which concludes, "Send not to see for whom the bell tolls,/ It tolls for thee." Or can the crumbling bricks of the tower come to be a metaphor for the crumbling dreams of your characters?
ALL SETTING IS EMOTIONAL IN PART
From all this you can draw an obvious conclusion: No mention of setting in fiction can be said to be wholly objective. Selection of viewpoint, as well as selection of the emotional lens through which the described place or event is seen, must be made with constant reference to the desired emotional feel of the story, its present plot situation, and the characters at the time of description.
Obviously, you need to plan carefully in this entire area. It's planning that will pay off in consistency of story mood and maximum impact on your reader.
CHAPTER 12
SHOWING SETTING DURING MOVEMENT AND ACTION
Most of the time up until now
, we have been tacitly assuming that your handling of setting was being done in a kind of stop action — that you could present or describe setting details in relatively static terms. In writing fiction, however, you often confront situations where you have to show a character movement into a new setting, or where the action is swift enough that you can't realistically "stop to describe," and must get the job done on the fly, while things are happening. In this chapter we'll consider such common situations.
It's possible that you may be able to stand back in the omniscient mode to reorient the reader to a change in setting, or even rapid character movement through setting details. If you are moving the character into a new setting at a time of transition, as at the opening of a chapter, you of course have the option of doing an "on high" omniscient introduction, then moving into viewpoint. In such situations, principles we've already discussed will see you through the transitions involved. More often than not, however, you may find yourself already in a character viewpoint during such times of change. Then, you have to stay in viewpoint and at the same time show as much broad detail as possible in order to reorient the reader.
STAYING IN VIEWPOINT WHILE MOVING
The thing you have to remember in such cases is that your viewpoint character is probably in movement, and has other things
beside the setting on his mind. Therefore, for the sake of realism, you must carefully pick broad-brush details that will stand for the whole setting, evocative brushstrokes that you can paint in a very few words because the character can't stop and "notice things for you" endlessly.
In such cases, ask yourself the following questions:
• What two or three broad details will best suggest the new setting to the reader?
• How can I capsulize these details in a few sharply evocative words?
• What is my character's preoccupation right now—what is he probably concerned with, in terms of the plot, which might color his perception of the new setting?
• What is my character's mood right now, and would this likely color his perception of the new setting?
Here is an example of a chapter opening written with these questions in mind. It's from a recently completed novel of mine,
Double Fault.
(Tor Books, New York, ©Jack M. Bickham.)
The cosmic question (Brad Smith Faces Life, Chapter 600) was answered for me when my flight into Los Angeles was delayed several hours and I didn't clear the airport until almost
1 a.m
.: I would not call Beth tonight.
In the morning there was nothing much to do around my motel in Burbank, and I could have called her at her office. I didn't, and this time there was no handy excuse. She would ask why I was in LA and I didn't like lying to her but telling her the truth would only restart the disagreement that had already begun to feel old.
There would be time to call her later during my visit, I told myself.
Whether I would do it or not was a question still occupying a part of my mind early that afternoon when I drove toward Whittier and the tennis club where the FBI report said Barbara Green always played tennis on Thursday.
It was a hot day and the air quality wasn't very good. I couldn't see the mountains. The sun looked like a big silver cottonball through the heat-haze. Traffic on the freeway was dense as always. I watched my mirror, but saw no signs of being followed. In the traffic, that meant nothing. This entire mission seemed to me today to be a classic waste of time. I tried to convince myself that I was just feeling sorry for myself because of the simmering anger at Beth, the continuing erosion of hope.
The Redlands Racquet Club turned out to be a medium-sized facility parked behind the palm trees and lush grass of a municipal golf course. The builders had tried to make it look like San Simeon, or maybe an old-time movie theater. I found a parking place among the glittering Toyotas and Volvo station wagons — mommy's day at the club, children — and went in with my racket bag slung over one shoulder and my duffel over the other.
I hoped for an observation deck, the better to spot her and stage our "accidental" encounter, and I was not disappointed. Walking out onto the utility-carpeted upper deck, I had a nice view of the sixteen courts, cement with green plastic paint, all in use. For a few seconds, scanning, I didn't see her.
Then I did: out on Court 8, two women slugging it back and forth in a singles match far more vigorous than any of the games on nearby courts; a tall, lithe, leathery blonde in pink, blasting every ball with a controlled ferocity, and Barbara —a slender, pretty brunette with a red headband and graceful oncourt movements that made it appear she never had to hurry to make a return. Thank you, FBI. You have done good and now my deception can begin. I looked for the staircase that would take me down to court level.
The problem I faced in this segment was how best to handle a transition in both space and time, from the character Brad Smith's home near Missoula, Montana, to Los Angeles, after a day's air travel. Needed: the speediest possible setting change that would reorient the reader, leaving him feeling comfortable in the changed story environment.
First I selected the two or three broad details about the southern California setting that I thought would "say Los
Angeles" to the reader in a few words. I picked
hot weather, smog
and
heavy freeway traffic.
In terms of time reorientation, I decided simply to mention the time of day or night without resorting to such tricks as showing clocks or having a character reset his watch.
This still left the question as to what familiar attitudes, feelings, character preoccupations or physical objects I might use to show the reader that some things were the same although the physical setting had changed. In this case I chose the character Brad's habitual glum preoccupation with his friend Beth, and the deterioration of their relationship.