Setting (3 page)

• a character shivering and wishing for a heavier coat • a stray dog shaking miserably from the cold

• tingling pain in ears and fingers

• eyes watering from the chill wind

• smoke billowing densely from every chimney in sight

• the crunch of hard-frozen snow under a man's boots

• cold-reddened faces and hands

• low, thick snow clouds overhead

All of these small details will say "It's cold!" without ever saying it directly or in a repetitious manner.

In like fashion, suppose you need to say that the town which is your setting has a hostile feel about it—that the people distrust strangers. The reader is likely to get infuriated if you say this straight out more than once or twice. But, again, you can create any number of small details to show this trait of the setting in different words. (As a small exercise, you might wish to pause here and compose a list of possible setting details that would continually emphasize the town's hostile nature without boring repetition of the same words.)

With the selection of small but accurate details like these you can provide continual emphasis on setting without becoming repetitious. Use of this technique, along with cognizance of plot pressure to keep things moving along at a good pace, will put setting in its place as a critical but never obtrusive aspect of your storytelling.

THE VIEWPOINT

In order to be precise and convincing, you must be aware of another angle in your presentation of setting, and that's the viewpoint from which the sensory information is seen.

Beginning writers sometimes thoughtlessly assume an omniscient viewpoint—the see-everything and know-everything viewpoint of a godlike creator standing over the entire setting. Sometimes such a viewpoint is economical and the simplest way of putting down relatively large quantities of data in the smallest possible space.

Virtually all fiction, however, is told from a viewpoint, from the head and heart of a character inside the story action. Therefore, very often your job as a writer depicting some aspect of setting is to determine what the viewpoint character can realistically know or experience at any given moment—then to limit your presentation to that.

How can you know when to deliver information "from on high," and when from a character's viewpoint? The simplest answer might be found by following this three-point procedure:

1. Determine which impressions must be given "from on high" because (a) no character can see or experience them all, or (b) they can be given much more simply and vividly from outside a limited viewpoint.

2. Present descriptions "from on high" only at the beginning of story chapters or sections, when there has been a break in the time or action and you have not yet reestablished a character viewpoint since the break.

3. After establishing a viewpoint in any given section, present all further descriptions from inside that viewpoint, only as that viewpoint person could experience them.

Looking at each of these points in more detail:

As stated in No. 1, above, some sensory information cannot realistically be seen or known by any character inside the story. Suppose you wish to set up in the reader's mind the threat of a dam breaking and possibly flooding a town. If any character inside the story knew about this threat, he would surely sound an alarm. Therefore, in order to show the reader the cracks in the dam and the rising water pressure behind it, you have no choice but to get out of that limiting character viewpoint at the beginning of a chapter, say, and to present your description of the situation from an anonymous, godlike viewpoint. Then, having established knowledge of the setting threat in your reader's mind, you can enter the viewpoint of an innocent character inside the town.

Or, you might wish to portray a gathering storm. A story character
might
see this coming. But in order to alert the reader through a character viewpoint, you would have to drop in some references to clouds on the horizon, a freshening wind, the sound of distant thunder, or a drop in temperature to make the character aware of the storm so that the reader could become aware through that character's observations. Sometimes you might go through all this; other times it might be far more economical to adopt a godlike viewpoint and simply describe the gathering clouds and rising winds on a broader scale than anyone in the story could sense them.

Moving to No. 2, when you do choose to describe from an omniscient viewpoint, you should do so only at the beginning of story segments where no viewpoint for that segment has yet been established.

Why? Because readers like to get into a viewpoint, and once they do, they imaginatively experience everything in the story world from inside the character's head and heart. If you are in a chapter, say, and in character Joe's viewpoint, it's extremely jarring to the reader if you suddenly drop out of viewpoint and start describing things on a broader scale than Joe could possibly know.

Between sections or chapters, the reader tends to relax his viewpoint focus. After a break in the time or action, he'll more readily accept an omniscient passage. So this is the spot where you can most gently drop out of character viewpoint in order to present setting description from a broader perspective.

Note, however, the advice given in No. 3: Once you've established a character viewpoint in a given section, it's important to present all information from inside that viewpoint.

Perhaps two additional illustrations will further clarify these points. Both are from my novel,
Twister,
and in both cases my objective was to describe a part of the setting that was at the heart of the story: a storm spawning multiple tornadoes across more than half the United States. I wanted to describe what such a storm would be like to an individual trapped in it. But I also wanted to show "the big picture" that no single individual could experience. Therefore, I had to assume different vantage points.

One of the limited vantage points I chose was that of a farm woman named Milly, and my primary intention was to show how a tornado might be experienced by someone like her, in the storm's path. Therefore, the segment began in Milly's viewpoint as the tornado approached —this part of the dynamically changing setting being described as she would experience it, in viewpoint. I have italicized the words which establish or reinforce her restricted viewpoint:

Out in front, not far across the road, a perfectly vertical column of blackness spun wildly. Its hollow interior was lighted by the strange bluish-white light that bathed everything else. The column seemed to be composed of rings of spinning clouds, one on top of the other like a stack of pale tires, and
as Milly watched, she saw
one ring near the bottom work its way upward, seeming to slip over others above it until it was out of view. Boards and small trees and other unrecognizable objects hurled around and around in the rotating column.
She saw
a small tree fly out of the column and flop to the ground like a killed fish. The sound was either
too great for Milly's ears,
or they had been broken by
the intense pain she felt in them. . . .

There is nothing here that Milly cannot logically and credibly experience. (You may also notice that shape, light and movement are described first, with hearing noted at the end.) This passage achieved the goal set out for it, describing a single person's experience of this part of the setting.

A chapter or two later, however, my intention was to show

a broader view of a storm approaching a town. In this case, no single individual could possibly know everything I wanted to tell, nor could any single character see the panorama I wished the reader to experience. Therefore, the following passage opened a segment after a time-and-space transition clearly marked by extra white spaces in the text:

The Thatcher tornado, one of three suspended under a single enormous thundercloud cell some nine miles in diameter and towering more than seventy thousand feet in altitude, was at its peak of life as it reached the southwest edge of Southtown, on a northeasterly path that would take it through the heart of the city. It was one mile wide at its mouth, with winds of two hundred miles per hour crushing, smashing and destroying everything in its range, and could not be seen as a classic twister, but rather as a gigantic ebony obscuration from ground to sky, swirling, shrieking with a sound like none other in the world. . . .

Thus you make your viewpoint decisions based on your intent at the moment in the story, and you place them in the most advantageous structural locations. There will be more about these decisions in later chapters, as the need to discuss them arises.

A FINAL WORD ON THE SENSES

Before closing this look at sensory description, one point should be emphasized yet again, and that has simply to do with accuracy. However hard you strive to be vivid, or whatever device you may choose to put the reader into your physical story setting, please remember that you must never deviate from verifiable facts. A single slip —describing a certain known flower by the wrong color, for example — might so offend your reader that many of your subsequent descriptions might be met with skepticism, or worse.
Never
deviate from the factual in your physical descriptions.

Accuracy! It's so important.

In the next chapter we'll look at another aspect of setting where accuracy is also supremely important, one closely related to what we have been discussing here. That involves setting information based less on physical senses and more on hard, cold fact.

Which doesn't have to be cold at all, as we shall see.

CHAPTER 3

PRESENTING FACTUAL MATERIAL

Factual background is often as essential
to a story as its physical look and feeling. Thus one of your major jobs as a writer is to know how to handle the presentation of facts in your fiction.

Some aspects of factual background may be simple, such as knowing what kind of weather to portray in west Texas in August. Others may become more esoteric, such as knowing how many strands of barbed wire a rancher would realistically string in your western novel set in the year 1875. And still others might be more demanding yet, such as the need to portray with great accuracy the facts of a surgical procedure being done in your medical novel. Whatever factual material you choose to present as part of your story fabric, it must first of all be right.

ACCURACY

It's disturbing to me how often fiction writers say that they don't have to worry much about factual information in their setting because "I made the town up," or "I never specify exactly where or when it is." Such ideas don't hold water. Factual data about the setting must always be as accurate as practicality allows.

For example, even if you're presenting a fictional town in an unnamed region, there must be an internal factual consistency about the setting. The town should at least be identifiable as being in the South, let's say, or in the Rocky Mountains. Within

this general frame of reference, you must be factually accurate.

By way of illustration: In the southern setting you might show crape myrtles in bloom, but you'd better know they bloom late in the summer, and usually have pink or orchid-colored flowers, or they might also be white. In the high mountains, crape myrtles winter-kill; there you may have lilacs —but in the spring. Similarly, it might be possible for your imaginary town to have a snowstorm in June if it were set in northern Montana, but if your general reference area were in the South, such a snow would require a lot more explaining!

Thus even a very vague story setting requires general factual accuracy. And most story settings are much more specific and require far greater attention to factual detail. You as a fiction writer must always remember this principle: even a single factual error in your setting may destroy all credibility for your story ... all reader belief.

One example: Several years ago, there was a novel (whose title and author have long since escaped me) with a plot about the abduction of the president of the United States in his Air Force One. Much was made in promotion copy and advertising about the research the novelist had done to make the aircraft setting accurate. This might have been quite true. But in reading the novel, I noticed a careless and fundamental error: The author had thoughtlessly guessed about the transmitting range of a communications device on the plane, and he worked out a key aspect of his plot by making a tiny radio transmit farther than it ever really could have done. This error, small as it was in terms of the total factual background in the novel, was so crucial that it destroyed all my faith in the accuracy of the rest of the background —and I was not the only reader who noticed; reviewers did, too, and the novel was not successful partly because this single bad mistake had wrecked its air of verisimilitude.

I once encountered a more serious factual error in setting when a young woman brought me a novel set in Saudi Arabia. She had carefully researched that Arab nation, and her story brimmed with fascinating facts about the country as well as vivid descriptions of exotic sights. Unfortunately, she had overlooked one crippling fundamental error. The whole plot of her book was based on the idea of a young woman visiting Saudi Arabia as a tourist. The author had not uncovered the fact that Saudi Arabia does not allow tourists to enter the country. Thus the novel was factually impossible.