Authors: Jack M Bickham
Only it wasn't the Buick.
It was a dark-colored Japanese 4x4 pickup, and a youthful man and pretty girl with flaxen hair had just clambered out onto the roadway, fishing poles in hand. They
looked up and froze with alarm as Davis skidded the Ford to a halt on the shoulder behind their truck, fixing them with his brights.
Rolling his window down, he yelled at them, "Did you see a Buick sedan on this road somewhere?"
"You'd better be careful!" the boy replied hoarsely. "I've got a gun in the truck!"
"Goddam it, did you see a dark-colored Buick back up the road?"
It was the girl who answered. "Yes, but we passed him when he turned off at Box Canyon."
"Shit!" Davis cranked the steering wheel hard left, pulled partway across the narrow roadway, backed around, and spun the wheel left a second time. The racket of his tires in the dirt and gravel was far worse than what the bald man had made back in town. The Taurus held a straight line, however, and pressed Davis lightly back in the seat as it accelerated.
Within ten or fifteen seconds he was going so fast that the car felt decidedly light on its springs, almost a projectile out of control. Davis did not ease off. He had screwed up. Maybe he had lost the trail altogether. Caution was the last thing he could afford now.
The situation portrayed here is roughly as follows: The viewpoint character in the chapter, Collie Davis, a close friend of hero Brad Smith, has just seen an unconscious Brad in a car speeding away from a motel in the small Colorado mountain town of Lake City. Davis recognizes the driver as a man intent on killing Brad, so Davis must pursue and try to prevent it.
The setting problem: Show rapid character movement during a car chase; remain focused on the desperate, high-speed action of the chase; yet keep the reader physically oriented to the movement through the setting, as well as to the car being pursued and the micro-environment inside Davis's vehicle. Consider some details in the excerpt: In the first paragraph, words like "running" and "grabbed" establish the high-speed, hectic quality of the action to follow. The direction, south, is established, along with the make of the other car and the existence of foothills in that direction. The last sentence sets Davis's car in motion for pursuit.
In the second paragraph, Davis gets the briefest glance at bystanders, a necessary detail to prevent the setting from being abstract at this point. Then the sound of the transmission is added for realistic impact on another of the reader's senses. (While most of this sequence stresses sight perceptions, you may notice a continuing attempt to mention other senses such as hearing whenever it seems appropriate.)
The fourth paragraph, beginning "Ahead . . . ," establishes spatial dimension, in this case the distance between the cars. The mention of red tail-lights and gravel gives the reader further concrete physical details —to put him into this setting.
The next paragraph, beginning "The gravel road. . .,"compresses a few moments, but gives additional details ("a series of curves" and "deep canyon") to keep the reader oriented. Dimness and the powdery dust thrown by the other car are again very specific physical orientation markers.
The sixth paragraph, beginning "Sweat stung," moves description of the setting almost inside Davis's brain, focusing on minutiae of the setting in such a way that a transition is then possible all the way out of the physical environment for a moment and inside Davis's thoughts. The remainder of this paragraph and the ones immediately following it are for reader contact with character emotion and thought process.
Later, an attempt is made to get the reader back into closer touch with the broader setting. "Sheer red rock walls" and the "hundred-foot rock face" plunge him, we hope, into physical awareness of the deepening canyon and the worsening condition of its "narrow and washboarded" road. In the next paragraph, the near-collision with a Jeep coming from the opposite direction is designed to put the reader more intensely in contact with the speed and dangerous lack of control involved in the setting. When Davis's car brushes the rock wall, we again become aware of sound.
In the paragraph starting with "Another curve," the reader, does not know it at the time because the viewpoint character doesn't know it, but the small canyon is where the pursued car actually turned off. It is important to orient the reader to this bit of the setting so that a return to it later will not come as a total surprise, but at the same time the view must be fleeting. Note that the viewpoint character looks for dust, does not see any, but wonders if it's too dark to see it even if it were there. Also notice a later sentence —"He had no time for speculation." You will find that inserting such statements into fast-moving descriptions of setting will help greatly in keeping the details brief and vivid; if the viewpoint character has no time to notice details, you can't be tempted to put them into your copy, and the reader is more likely to accept the ongoing rush of brief glimpses and impressions.
A few paragraphs later Davis moves out of the tight canyon setting and into different terrain with details such as "broad meadow area," "sixty acres," and "cultivated field." When he sees lights ahead, he reacts in action, rather than with any fine description, his response to the stimulus being the important thing.
The setting detail of the 4x4 vehicle and the two passengers changes the dramatic situation in a startling way. Details are brief, but the "dark-colored" pickup, "youthful man" and "pretty girl with flaxen hair" give enough evocative detail that the reader can imaginatively fill in the picture.
The remainder of the excerpt deals almost exclusively with a plot twist, returning Davis's, and the reader's, mind to the small box canyon mentioned so briefly but importantly at an earlier stage of the action. As Davis gets back into new violent action, the desperation of his inner setting—his mood —is shown by the startling expletive. The "racket of his tires in the dirt" is a concrete appeal to hearing, and is compared with the sound Davis heard earlier (prior to the portion quoted here) when the abductor's departure first alerted him to the situation. Davis's mood of intense worry and haste is emphasized again for several reasons: to motivate continuation of the chase at dangerous high speed (plot); to continue to characterize Davis's internal feelings (characterization), and to keep the reader mentally prepared for brief, fragmentary description as rapid movement through the story environment resumes (setting). This, it seems to me, is an excellent example of how setting can seldom be considered in isolation from other elements of storytelling; it relates to all of them, and they relate to it.
Although it is not readily apparent in this excerpt, the brief descriptions here set up reader orientation for much of what is to follow. The reader knows the next action will probably be in that box canyon glimpsed earlier; he knows the area is remote, that it is mountain country, that there are few people around, and that darkness has fallen. Thus one part of your story's description of setting can set up reader orientation for what is to follow in a subsequent section.
As a suggestion for further detailed study: You may wish to go back through this excerpt and study the language. For example, you might underline the strong action verbs in red and the sharply specific noun phrases (such as "hundred-foot rock face" and "crunching sound") in green. Count the number of words in many sentences and compute an average sentence length for my description of high-speed movement through setting. Can you draw any conclusions which might help you in your own work?
CONCLUSIONS
If you began this study of setting with the idea that it's a static physical backdrop for your story, this chapter more than any other so far should have opened your eyes. Setting is a dynamic aspect of storytelling. Movement can drastically alter your method of dealing with the setting. How you handle the setting can have a direct effect on your reader's story involvement and sense of plot pace. Setting is not a piece of canvas stuck on the back wall of your story; it is a moving, changing, exciting part of your total story fabric.
Most of the time, when you are showing a quick change of setting or rapid movement through a setting, you will be in a character's viewpoint. It may sound paradoxical when I say it, but the quality of your handling of setting at such times may be as dependent upon what you don't tell as on what you do. You must always remember how limited and fragmentary a viewpoint character's awareness may be . . . how overwhelming may be the sense of haste or confusion . . . how strong may be a few broad-brush impressions which can block out character awareness of any fine detail. Your ability to use highly selective detail may "make or break" your story sequences in which movement is part of the experience.
CHAPTER 13
THE STORY BEHIND YOUR SETTING
At the opening of chapter one
, we defined setting as including historical background and cultural attitudes of a given place and time. Implicit in much of the discussion throughout later chapters has been the assumption that setting can indeed affect characters and their behavior. And we have mentioned history briefly, as well as mood and tone. In this chapter, however, we will look more specifically at the history of a setting and how such history might develop certain prevailing attitudes and feelings in its people, aspects you need to understand if your total story setting is to be convincing.
Now, you might assume that if your story setting is a totally imagined town and local area, knowledge of any real history or cultural attitudes is irrelevant. Nothing could be further from the truth. Except in science fiction, where you may be creating a wholly alien setting, your stories will be set in an identifiable region — the South, say, or eastern seaboard metroplex. So even if your particular town doesn't exist, it has to be convincing to the reader. And it can't be convincing if its history and cultural attitudes are totally at odds with what the reader knows and expects about the actual region.
STORY BACKGROUND
In an earlier chapter I told you about a tour of Oklahoma I did once, and the differences I found between people in the hills
and on the plains. That's one example of how regional setting affects attitude. Here's another aspect of the same idea: Can you imagine taking the history and resulting cultural attitudes of a small midwestern town in the United States and trying to create a setting in South America based on the same kind of background and value system? The history of a place, and the outlook that history has created, is as vital and unique a part of story setting as any other factor —and it has to be right.
Your story setting in terms of past time — and the likely general attitudes and feelings the past will engender in its people — has to be correct if your story is to convince the reader. Even if you're writing a science fiction tale of an alien universe, you'll have to know the prevailing attitudes there, and you'll have to invent a history that would credibly create those attitudes. More often than not, however, you'll be dealing with an imaginary place in a very real region of the world, and your imagined microcosm has to be in harmony with the realities of that region.
The importance of history and regional attitude was forcibly brought home to me years ago when I moved from my native Ohio to central Oklahoma. I knew little of Oklahoma history, either long- or short-term, and had a devil of a time understanding how most of the people seemed to feel and think about some things. Only when I began to understand the history of the region could I see where some of the puzzling comments and behavior came from.
Here is what I started out knowing, or
thinking
I knew: Oklahoma was a western state, probably with a lot of cowboys in it. There were Indians there, and oil production. I thought it was prosperous and optimistic, with at least traces of a frontier ad-venturesomeness.
What I found in general was somewhat different. One of the first things that struck me was racism; there were still segregated lunch counters and restricted sections on public buses, and in the county courthouse I was shocked to find a restroom marked "White Men Only." Jokes based on racial stereotyping were all too common. I didn't see many cowboys, and the Indians I saw were generally acculturated into the lower economic strata of white society, and the victims of a racial bias quieter but even more pervasive than that afflicting blacks. The small towns seemed broken-down and poor, and large sections of the larger cities looked bright and shiny, as if they had been built yesterday. Most surprising of all, perhaps, most of the white people I met in all walks of life seemed angrily defensive about being Oklahomans, and went to great lengths to protest that they were
not
"Okies." The state seemed to have a galloping inferiority complex, and an anger to go with it.
As I listened to the people, thought about my experiences and studied the history a bit, many of these surprising attitudes were explained.
Oklahoma only became a state in 1907, less than half a century before I first moved there. It had seen a continual cycle of booms and busts in the oil business, and was at that time in something of a bust. The small towns looked run-down because I was seeing the original housing in many instances, cheap pioneer construction now falling down after a life-span of almost fifty years and not being replaced because times were presently hard. In the more prosperous cities, some of the buildings that looked like they had been built yesterday
had
been built yesterday; the cities were in the process of rejuvenating themselves after the initial cycle of poor construction and subsequent decay.