Setting (6 page)

The trick, it seems to me, lies in seeing what might ring false to your reader —and never taking a chance in such a case. If you can construct part of your setting from memory of a real place, or from your imagination, it can be perfectly all right as long as you don't stray too far from what the reader knows is real. You can set your story in the fictional town of Bickham, nineteen miles outside of Houston, for example, and if you do so, you can make up street names and everything else since the town does not really exist. But you can't have a blizzard in August in that general locale, and if you have a character drive to Houston to shop, you'll have to have the street names and all other details of the real city accurate in every detail.

So, you can see that accuracy is a prime requisite even in an imagined setting. Imagined setting must be just as consistent and detailed as one built on an actual place or time. It cannot deviate from realities about the region or era. You may, for reasons of convenience or legality, obscure the actual identity of a place, or you may play loose with certain aspects of an actual place's history. You can make up a setting from memory or imagination. But your job always is to convince the reader. Specific detail is convincing, and generality is not. That's why made-up details of a setting are so often extrapolations, not wild invention, and why writers so often research heavily into a real setting before making up a similar one of their own; they want to have a lot of detail, and they want to be very close to what's really "out there" someplace.

A "DEPARTURE CHECKLIST"

Assuming you are considering making up part of your setting or deviating from actuality in some ways as you depict an actual setting, here are a few questions you might want to bear in mind —a sort of safety checklist for your departure from reality.

1. "Do I have good reason not to use the actual place or time?" If the only reason you're making up a setting is to make it easier on yourself, you may be making a mistake. You'll probably end up researching a real place, and then basing your imagined setting on hard facts, anyway.

2. "Am I sure that my imagined setting will be more vivid and believable than the actual place might be?" As useful as imagined settings may be, credibility is gained by placing your story in an actual, recognizable place and time. Don't carelessly assume that a made-up town, for example, would necessarily be more interesting than a real one you know well.

3. "Is my imagined setting close enough to a real one to be believed?" In other words, is your imagined setting credible? Are the details close enough to an actual place to be accepted without question by the reader?

4. "Do any of my imagined details fly in the face of reality?" Are you sure the weather is right for your region, for example, and if you are using real people in cameo roles, are you absolutely certain you have basic details about the real people perfectly correct?

5. "Do I have enough detail to be convincing?" Have you thought deeply enough about every aspect of your setting? Do you know everything you possibly could about it? Do you have mental or, preferably, actual drawn maps, for example, as well as biographies, dates and descriptions of places in your imagined history? Are there vague spots in your planning which must still be filled?

THE VALUE OF BUILDING FILES

Clearly, even if you don't fear the harassment of lawsuits, you will want to make your story settings and people as credible as

possible. To that end, for professional pride, if nothing else, you should start setting up some files, whether you intend to work primarily with actual settings or imagined ones. In either case you'll need background facts.

These files may be very general, with headings such as "Science," "Homes," "Rivers and Lakes," "Historic Romances," or whatever. As you read newspapers and magazines, be alert for material that might go into one of these files, or into a new one. I don't want you to become a file clerk, but a growing store of factual data for possible use in future story settings can become a priceless resource.

Even if you deviate far from actual places, persons and times, you need the background actuality as a support for your imaginings. As you move along in your fiction-writing career, you will find that you are building more and more of these files. This is all to the good because it will make your future work on settings easier. Most of us who have been in the business for a while have file drawers full of all manner of factual information that might be useful in a setting someday. Some of the clippings in my files go back many years and have never proven useful as yet, but I keep them because one never knows what strange byway his imagination may take.

CHAPTER 5

SETTING IN SPECIALIZED STORIES

As
mentioned in the last chapter
, readers come to certain genres —types of stories —expecting certain kinds of settings, certain details, certain intensities and lengths of description. In the example used earlier, it was noted that readers of traditional westerns expect—and even demand —that the setting have certain prototypical aspects.

This was brought out to me most forcefully early in my writing career when I myself was writing westerns. I wrote a novel set in a Colorado town in the middle of a severe winter when an avalanche cut the area off from all outside assistance. Although seemingly acceptable in every other regard, the manuscript was rejected several times on the basis, as one editor put it, that the story setting "lacks the traditional feeling of the warm West."

Since that time, the importance of meeting reader expectations about setting in certain genres has been brought home to me again and again. It's an aspect of setting seldom addressed by the experts, but it's very real. You, as a writer interested in improving your handling of setting, should be aware of how various genres bring with them built-in expectations about the setting that should be used.

The late Clifton Adams, one of the best western writers who ever lived, told me that the advantage of the traditional western setting lay in the fact that "The police won't come in and break up your fight just when you've got it going full-blast." That's one of the hard-core, practical reasons why most westerns take place in isolated settings — no one will break up the fight or jail

the bad guys or rescue the hero from his plight.

Another reason for the isolation so typical of the western novel setting, however, is simply this matter of reader expectation. From the time of James Fenimore Cooper's tales of the early frontier, readers of western adventure have expected an isolated setting. Such readers aren't aware of the practical plotting advantages such a setting provides for the action writer; it's simply what these readers are used to, and it's what they want to find again in every new novel of the type that they read.

There are other aspects of setting that fit the western genre, too. Some were mentioned in chapter four. But there is also the matter of expansiveness . . . grand vistas . . . vast, open country. This sort of physical setting and open
feeling
is characteristic of nearly all such books.

The kind of people found as part of the setting in westerns is usually predictable, too. Sympathetic female characters, until the most recent time, were quiet, loyal, long-suffering and hardworking characters whose main function was to serve as romantic interest for the more-important males in the story, or to act as mirrors whose adoration made the men look more heroic. That's changed a bit in recent years, and today you can occasionally find a female in a western who is her own person and has some spunk. But the background cast of most westerns is male to this day, the masculine ethic forming part of the story's setting.

The males tend to form a story backdrop based on traditional values, including the work ethic, belief that right makes might (and not the opposite), and the heroic ideal of a lone man against heavy odds for the sake of justice. While the real West might have had a great number of strong and admirable black men, they seldom appear as part of the setting in a traditional western. And while in truth more men might have been shot in the back with a shotgun than killed in street duels, the setting of a western still often depends in part on the unexamined assumption that Marshal Dillon really did stride out into the middle of the street and outdraw a bad guy every once in a while. In the real West, six-guns misfired with dismaying regularity; in the traditional western, six-guns are as reliable as the finest modern weapon. In the real West, the women who made it as far as the frontier towns tended to be a bit on the tough, gnarled side. In the traditional western setting, they're more likely to resemble Michelle Pfeiffer. And so it goes.

The point here is not to disparage the western or any of the other genres we're going to examine. The point is that you as a writer should be aware of what your genre reader expects, and then remember that it is incumbent upon you to deliver the goods expected, whether they're in line with actual fact or not. Thus, in writing genre fiction, you have to be accurate in terms of the reader's expectation or the myth of the genre, rather than the actual truth.

Knowing your genres, then, will tell you where "accuracy" is located.

So let's briefly consider a few others.

ROMANCE

Readers of romance often turn to this genre for escape from the humdrum, relief from grim reality, and reassurance that life can be both beautiful and romantic — that dreams do indeed come true. What do these expectations say about romance settings?

Perhaps above all else, the romance depends on a philosophical setting—a group of beliefs assumed as true by the people in the story—based on the ideal of romantic love. The heroine may indeed be a young career woman quite capable of taking care of herself, and may even speak against "silly romantic love." But she is proven quite capable of being "swept off her feet." A belief in love-at-first-sight, so celebrated in popular songs, is essential to such a story; it is the bedrock belief-setting on which everything else is built.

Further —and bearing in mind that there are exceptions to every generalization — most romances play out in a physical setting which is in some way exotic or faraway or sharply different from the assumed reader's everyday world. Warm, flower-filled Caribbean islands were once the most popular setting, with small European kingdoms (peopled by princes and wealthy heirs) a close second. When these settings were used in too many novels, Central and South America came in for considerable play. There was a brief vogue for the hot Southwest, and Hawaii, and some romances continue to take place in mountain settings, including ski resorts. An occasional useful setting is the large city, but when such a setting is used, the author usually tries to make it out of the ordinary and exciting by stressing fabulous restaurants and clubs, great mansions of the rich and powerful, or the inner workings of some presumably intriguing business firm, a law office, perhaps, or bank.

What all these settings have in common is concrete detail in abundance showing a lifestyle environment far from that known in the everyday life of the average romance reader. Thus the physical setting provides a voyage of escape into an imagined world rich in wish fulfillment.

Because these escape settings form such an important part of the appeal of such stories, they are often written with a loose plot structure that puts relatively slight immediate time pressure on the characters, which in turn allows the author to dwell lovingly and at length on her descriptions of the setting or settings. Because the characters are not pressed to take immediate action in the plot, they have time to notice details of the setting, and the author can credibly devote lengthy passages to description while the characters presumably are doing little if anything.

This softness of plot tension in romances and its resulting opportunity for lengthy descriptions of the setting tend, in turn, to encourage a writing style which is comparatively loose, discursive, heavily ornamented and sensuous. When setting details are described from inside a viewpoint, such descriptions are often tied directly to strong emotional response in the character, so that further coloration of the prose results.

The total effect: Stories in which physical detail is heavily, even sumptuously described, and in which plot tension is usually slight in order to allow for such handling of setting. Thus, if you intend to write romance, you must not only observe acutely for colorful, exotic setting detail, you must also cultivate a full and rich prose style, and you should be careful not to create plot situations which put too much immediate pressure on the characters. For these elements — setting, style and plot —as different as they might appear on the surface, are inextricably tied together in the romance.

SUSPENSE

Readers of suspense fiction bring quite different expectations to this genre. Here the basic appeal is usually either intellectual puzzle (the mystery) or dire physical threat (the classic tale of espionage). While such stories may be very specialized, demanding a deeply researched and meticulously presented setting involving technology or the expertise of a specialized field, the background is not the primary reason why people read them. Here the plot and perhaps the characters are the thing.

What does this imply for you if you want to handle setting properly in such a genre? Three things:

1. The physical detail you present should be described briefly.

2. Your style should be crisp and understated.