Setting (17 page)

The first paragraph thus mentions Brad's characteristic preoccupation immediately ("The cosmic question," etc.). The remainder of the sentence establishes both place and time in a factual way: "It is now later, dear reader, and we are in Los Angeles."

The second paragraph continues to focus on the preoccupation, moves the setting to a Burbank motel, and changes the time setting to the next day. The third brief paragraph is a bridge designed to move the character —and the reader —off the preoccupation for the moment in order to let the story proceed on another line. The fourth paragraph changes the time setting again, this time to afternoon, and puts Brad in a car moving from the motel setting to a tennis club setting.

Paragraph five, beginning "It was a hot day" is the one designed to put the reader more concretely into the new physical setting. Here the selected broad details — heat, smog and traffic—are inserted. Brad's emotions are shown as another help to the reader, to keep him feeling he is on familiar emotional turf during this setting change.

Then the picture of setting is narrowed from the broad Los Angeles area to the specific tennis club. Again, suggestive details are used rather than a detailed description, and the character is kept on the move.

The following paragraph, beginning "I hoped for an observation deck," again narrows the focus of setting, this time to a specific part of the club, and shows the character's motive for making this move inside the setting. Finally, at the very end, he reaches his new specific place in the setting, and the stage is set for interaction with other characters to resume.

Note the specific wording and phraseology designed to make the new setting as vivid as possible with the fewest suggestive words, and at the same time to keep place movement and time defined. Some of those specifics include the following:

• didn't clear the airport until
1 a.m.

• in the morning

• around my motel in Burbank

• early that afternoon

• drove toward Whittier

• hot day and the air quality wasn't very good

• couldn't see the mountains

• sun looked like a big silver cottonball through the heat haze

• traffic on the freeway was dense

• Redlands Racquet Club

• medium-sized facility

• parked behind the palm trees and lush grass

• San Simeon

• glittering Toyotas and Volvo station wagons

• my racket bag and duffel

• observation deck

• sixteen courts, cement with green plastic paint.

Please understand that I don't offer this excerpt as a particularly wonderful piece of scene-transition work, but as one that might be instructive. As with most of the illustrations in this book, my own work is used as illustration because I can at least tell you what I was thinking when it was written. And here my memory of the transition problem, and how I chose to work it out, is quite fresh.

The brief approach used in the excerpt you've just studied will work equally well from first person or third person perspective, and from a limited or a broad, "on-high" viewpoint. The overriding concern you the writer should have with scene transitions is clarity: The danger of reader confusion is serious at such times, and so is the danger of losing your story movement. Brevity, and new plot development as soon as possible, will help you avoid loss of forward movement. Key broad details, shown vividly, will help provide quick reorientation for the reader. Remembering your character's mood or preoccupation will help the reader stay oriented to the continuing problems which the change in setting do not alter.

With awareness of these principles and a bit of practice, I think you'll find such transitions becoming easier to handle.

DESCRIBING SETTING DURING SWIFT ACTION

A more difficult problem with setting can come when there is rapid character movement inside the general setting, or when the setting itself is changing with great speed (as when a storm is developing, for example). Most such situations occur within the body of a chapter or section, after you have established a character viewpoint. Telling the reader everything he needs to know during such rapid action is a challenge to any writer in terms of clarity and brevity.

To help you handle these situations, remember that your viewpoint character will be preoccupied with the action and therefore able to catch only fleeting, dominant impressions and sense images. Detailed description will be out of the question.

In planning and writing such a sequence you must keep yourself imaginatively wholly within the viewpoint, seeing only what the character sees, hearing only what he hears, and so forth. A danger during very rapid change in setting, or character movement through the setting, is loss of contact with the viewpoint. In other words, the movement may be so swift and exciting that you the writer may slip, in your own excitement, and include setting observations that the viewpoint character could not know. You must work hard to immerse yourself deeply in the viewpoint, and deal only with what he can possibly experience.

You must remember also that the viewpoint character will often experience setting impressions that are fragmentary and confusing; the source of a sound may be unknown, for example, or various impressions may seem to crash in simultaneously and confusingly. Don't worry if fragmentary impressions seem confusing. Your character may be confused, and if so, that's precisely the view of the story environment you want to portray.

Broad, dominant impressions may be all the character can experience at the moment. At time of such rapid movement, your character realistically won't have time to notice a great many fine details. Therefore, you must content yourself with including only the dominant, overwhelming impressions —all the character could realistically be expected to take in.

Strong action verbs will help carry the reader swiftly along with the movement. At all times of rapid movement in the setting, one of your aims as a writer is to convey that movement not only in what you show, but how you show it. Nothing can kill the sense of swift movement more surely than passive verbs or weak, limping sentences. You must strive for the strongest possible action wording.

Any descriptive segment must be extremely brief. There is never time for much description at such times. A pause to describe something can destroy the very sense of speed you must convey.

The character's reaction to the setting stimulus may be more important to the reader than the actual stimulus, but you have to show the setting stimulus or the reaction won't make sense. What happens in the setting at times of high action may not be nearly as important as your character's impressions of it and its impact on him. Is that loud bang a gunshot or a car backfiring, or possibly a firecracker? No matter; if identifying the source ruins the story, then the viewpoint can't know, so you
can't
tell. What's important is that the sound makes the character jump and run to the window to look outside. So you must always focus on the result inside the character.

Here's an example of a rapid-fire action sequence using these principles. It's also from
Double Fault:

Running outside to his rented Taurus, he glanced south and saw that the Buick had already vanished around

a slight turn in the highway where it started to ascend into the foothills. He grabbed his door handle and almost broke some fingers, forgetting he had locked up. Getting the key in the lock and jumping inside took another few precious seconds. Backing out seemed to take an eternity.

Floorboarding the Taurus's accelerator, he swung onto the pavement and headed in the direction the Buick had taken. Startled faces looked up from an open-air vegetable stand as he rocketed past them, the Ford's transmission screaming in protest at such violent treatment.
All I need is for the town constable or somebody to arrest my ass for speeding.

Reaching the curve where the Buick had vanished, he had to ease off a bit and allow the transmission to upshift. Then he poured power to the engine again, and it responded sweetly, the speedometer going up around
70.

Ahead — well ahead, too far ahead — Davis could see the Buick nearing the outskirts of town, brake lights flaring brightly in the evening gloom, then swinging to the right and off the highway. He kept standing on the gas until he was almost on top of the place where the Buick had turned, seeing only at the last second that the intersecting road was gravel. He swayed violently onto the gravel, half-losing it as the back end slewed around, then catching control again and pouring on more power. The guy in the Buick with Brad had turned on his headlights, which made two nice red tail-light signals for Davis to watch for. He kept his lights out to avoid detection if possible.

The gravel road swung through a series of curves and came out in the deep canyon of a shallow river off to Davis's left. He was having a bad time seeing the road in the dimness without headlights. A pale cloud of whitish powder put in the air by the Buick ahead didn't help matters.

Sweat stung Davis's eyes. He was walking a tightrope, and knew it: get too close, and the bald man would realize he was being followed and possibly kill Brad—if he hadn't already done so; fall too far back in an over-abundance of caution, on the other hand, and you could lose him altogether. Davis took several gravel curves in controlled drifts, and was rewarded with a glimpse of the Buick tail-lights well ahead. The bastard was driving like a maniac.

Which he probably was, Davis thought. Davis hadn't had time to see much, but he had seen enough to know that the driver of the car ahead fit the sketchy description he had of the conspirator who was still at large.

What did he want with Brad? Revenge? If so, for what? Far more likely, he had learned somehow that Brad might know where Kevin Green was. But how could abducting Brad help the loony in any way —abduction being far and away the best Davis could assume this was?

Sheer red rock walls closed in tightly on the road, which had begun to get worse, narrower and washboarded by traffic and erosion. Ahead was a tighter curve to the right around an outcropping of the hundred-foot rock face. Davis eased off a little and then swung wide into the turn. At the last possible instant he spotted the yellow glare of headlights just around the bend somewhere. Jamming his weight hard on the brake, he spun the wheel and felt for an instant that he was losing the Taurus altogether.

Dirt flew around the windows as the Ford skidded, swinging over jagged bumps in the dirt. Davis spun the wheel the opposite direction and got a semblance of control just as he went into the deepest part of the curve. A little Jeep, headlights yellow, poked its snout around the turn ahead of him. It immediately veered right as far as it could go without hitting the shoulder dropoff into the streambed. Davis took the Taurus back right, over-correcting as he regained full control and hitting the gravel shoulder nearest the cliff face. The right side of the Taurus brushed the rock wall with an ugly crunching sound, and then Davis was free again and speeding on into the thicker dust-cloud left by the Jeep.

The dirt road narrowed and straightened out for several hundred yards, paralleling the rocky stream on the left. Davis didn't see any sign of the Buick's tail-lights ahead. Gritting his teeth so hard they ached, he floor-boarded the accelerator again, making the Ford leap anxiously into passing gear as the tach needle swung into the red.

Another curve —Christ, it was almost impossible to see now! — and a side road right that was little more than a cow

path back into what appeared to be a shallow box canyon, part of it fenced, choked with willows or some similar tree. As he roared past, Davis looked for dust in the air down there, but didn't see any. He wondered if it was too dark to see it if it were there. He had no time for speculation. Every ounce of his energy was funneled into the job of driving.

The roadway became narrower still and the canyon walls closed in on both sides, the stream much narrowed, marked by water rushing through a narrow rock ravine with such speed that its whitewater looked silvery even in this terrible light. No turnoffs here, Davis thought. The Buick had to be still ahead.

Up ahead he caught a momentary flash of pinkish red light—the Buick, surely. He could get closer than this. He eased the Taurus a bit faster, feeling the back, end slip and slide in minute losses of rear wheel bite. He didn't have time to glance at the instruments again, and maybe now he couldn't have read them in the gloom anyway.

The river canyon suddenly began to widen, and Davis drove out onto a broad meadow area, the stream off to the left somewhere behind a grove of aspen, a fenceline along the right to protect perhaps as much as sixty acres of what looked like cultivated field of some kind. The mountains seemed to have receded all around, were off in the dark where he couldn't pick them up now.

Ahead he saw the lights of the other vehicle flare for braking. He could not allow for much time if the bald man stopped; he might be stopping only to finish Brad off and dump his body in the ditch. Davis maintained speed.

The other car did stop, pulling off to the side of the road. Davis didn't know what the hell to do now, but he knew it wasn't a good time to count eenie meenies. Flicking on his headlights, he tipped the high-beam switch and started braking hard as the lights came fully onto the Buick on the roadside less than a hundred yards ahead.