Writing Active Setting Book 1: Characterization and Sensory Detail (6 page)

*
F
iltering the Setting
through one character’s experience,
emotions and mind
set at a time.

*
Not
stop
ping
the story flow to show place
, or details of a place,
unless that place reveals something tha
t’s important to know about
the characters.

Note
: Adding Setting description is not necessarily an intrusion on the page, but can be an extension of the character’s communication. Important to realize if your first drafts are heavy on showing characters
via their dialogue or movement.

R
EVE
ALING CHARACTER THROUGH SETTING

Here’s the beginning of a
Setting
passage from a Nancy Pickard mystery
.
 
This
novel is
part of a series,
so
the author chooses to reveal character via
Setting
rather than simply repeat what readers of the series may have already learned
.
You
discover
so much
about this couple by what the POV character
sees just
by looking around her
own
living room.

Our furniture didn’t match, at least not in theory, but it fit together perfectly in practice. We’d used my favorite clear, bright colors
—
yellows, oranges, reds
—
and mixed them with his favorite deep brown wood tones, so the house had an autumnal atmosphere all year long, kind of crisp and cheerful and cozy all at once. There were always books and magazines littering the rooms like scattered leaves, and often a week’s worth of newspapers trailing from the kitchen to our bedroom upstairs and the bathrooms down to the living room and finally into recycling. And books, so many books it looked as if a convention of librarians had dropped by with armloads and joyously tossed it all up in the air and dumped everything, leaving us to sort through the detritus on our deliciously erratic quest for wisdom.

–
Confession – Nancy Pickard

The passage continues on
,
but serves so
well
revealing
who these characters are.
It gives the reader a broad
er understanding of who they
are, as a couple, and individually by what they surround themselves wit
h
—
t
hese two are comfortable with themselves, casual and intelligent
.

What if Pickard chose to tell
,
not show? What if she wrote:

Our home
reflects
the fact we
are
intelligent people comfortable with our lives and who we are.

S
ince this novel is part of a series, as the stories move forward Pickard does not necessarily need to describe this room in this much detail because the readers of the series will remember this room. In another book the author could choose to highlight a different room in the house
—
the kitchen, bedroom
,
or even the garage
—
so new readers to the series,
as well as the series readers,
can experience this home on a deeper level, see these characters by their environment and feel a part of the world of the story.

I’
m not saying that in every story you want this
much
Setting
description
for every character,
or that you have to reveal character every time
,
but I do want you to think in terms of how would this one specific POV character relate to
this
Setting
versus a different character?
It’s a great
place
to
open up opportunities to
reveal your character to the reader
in different ways.

Let’s examine another example of characterization being shown through
Setting
.

“Ou
t of the way, please.
Sheriff
investigator. Come on now. Out.”

Merci Rayburn ducked under the ribbon and continued down the walk. Her heart was beating fast and her senses were jacked up high, registering all at once the cars hissing along Coast Highway to her left, waves breaking on the other side of the building, the citizens murmuring behind her, the moon hanging low over the eastern hills, the smell of ocean and exhaust, the night air cool against her cheeks, the walkway slats bending under her duty boots. She figured a place like this, ocean front in
San Clemente
, would run you two grand a month and you still got termites in your walkway and
spider webs
high in the porch corners.

–Red Light – T. Jefferson Parker

This one paragraph description opening the story shows a lot about the character
through
how she looks at the
Setting
.
The reader is not introduced to the crime scene as a laundry
list of narrative description
—
building, location, time of day. No, the author threads all
of
this information
throughout the character’s description of the Setting
in such a subtle way that the reader is pulled deeper into the story and the skin of the POV character while actively moving the story forward.

We learn that Merci can multi-task and take in many different details at once, a good characteristic for an investigator to have, and something the author can use to slip in other important details later in the story without the reader feeling its strange for Merci to notice. The paragraph also lets
us
know that Merci covers
her
uncomfortable emotions with snarky thoughts
—
a place like this, ocean front in
San Clemente
, would run you two grand a month and you still got termites in your walkway and spider
webs high in the porch corners. Later, if Merci does this again, the reader can assume she’s uncomfortable in some way.

In the next example,
the author
uses Setting description to show
the POV character’s thought process and where he’s coming from as well as
filtering
in insights
about
a secondar
y character. T
he POV character, Joe Pike, has been assigned to protect the life of a spoiled rich girl. Two attempts have already been made on her life, the latest one while she’s been in Pike’s custody, so he’s now taking charge of where he’s stashing her and they are moving to a new location [remember when you shift your characters you shift your readers and they need to become anchored in place all over again].
Look at
what
Joe Pike
reveals about himself, and about his impressions of
the girl,
in this one paragraph of
Setting
.

The girl was moody getting out of the car, making a sour face to let him know she hated the shabby house and sun-scorched street smelling of chili and epazote. To him, this anonymous house would serve. He searched the surrounding houses for threats as he waited for her, clearing the area the way another man might clear his throat. He felt obvious wearing the long-sleeved shirt. The
Los Angeles
sun was too hot for the sleeves, but he had little choice. He moved carefully to hide what was under the shirt.

She said, “People who live in houses like this have deformed children. I can’t stay here
.”

–
The Watchman
– Robert Crais

W
e not only get a sense of Joe Pike looking for threats and assessing safety issues
, he’s here not because the neighborhood is safe
,
but because he can keep her safe here.
The house is anonymous. He doesn’t think about the people in the houses or the paint job or anything but security.
This
als
o shows
a lot about the intrinsic differences between him and the girl he’s g
uarding by her response to the
Setting
and what he’s seeing of her response.
A lot going on in one paragraph
and it
never stops the forward momentum of the story.

Let’s look at a
nother example
, this time
from an author I always study for her ability to make every word do double duty.
In this description we’re about a third of the way into the story and the POV character is looking for a tenuous lead on her missing ex-sister-in-law.
See
if
you can tell about what the POV character thinks about her ex-sister-in-law by what she observes of the surroundings
and interior
of the woman’s cabin.

But first l
et’s look
as if the author was writing
from First Draft to Finished Version.

Note
: Since I am using a published author’s work, I’m imagining a rough first draft. No telling how the author wrote initially or how many drafts the author used to get to the final product. What I want you to look at are the possibilities you can apply to your own work
if
you’re currently lacking in Setting detail and ways to add Characterization via that detail.

[First Draft]
I drove my vehicle into the hills to my sister-in-law’s house.

Bland. No sense of location. All the writer did was get the character from Point A to Point B.

[Second Draft] I drove my rig into the hills above
Santa Barbara
and when I arrived at my sister-in-law’s place
,
I stopped and checked it out.

A little better. Now the reader knows where the POV character is
,
but we’re not experiencing any of what that character is experiencing
or the interaction she’s having
with what she’s seeing.

[Final Version]

The sun was flaring red in the west when I drove my white Explorer up a gully toward Tabitha’s house, past sandstone boulders and gray-green brush. The air smelled thick with mustard and eucalyptus. The view of the city, two thousand feet below, was spectacular. Santa Barbara lay like a velvet sash between the mountains and the Pacific, smooth and glimmering.

The house itself looked neglected. Faded gray paint curled from the wood siding, and weeds spread across the lawn, humped and matted, like an overgrown beard. When no one answered my knock, I looked in the front window. The living room held some thriftshop chairs and a work table covered with pens, pencils, and drawings. In the dingy kitchen, shopping bags bulged with cans of creamed corn and SPAM. Was that what she cooked for Brian? No wonder he had requested sea duty
.

–
China
Lake
– Meg Gardiner

Notice the author uses contrast
—
between what the city
—
Santa Barbara, known
to be one
of the nicest and most exclusive of California coastal towns,
(
also know
n
for its red til
ed roofs which creates the red
of the red sash imagery
)
—
and
the area surrounding the home
to show the world the POV character came from to
enter
the world of the sister-in-law
.
Gardiner also doesn’t leave the reader to guess the POV character’s impressions or emotions
surrounding her ex-sister-in-law
, choosing words
to describe her living place
such as neglected, faded, humped, matted, Thriftshop
and
dingy
.
She
even
names
the
specific
food stuff visible
—
creamed corn and SPAM.