Writing the Setting Fiction Sketch

This post draws on "In the Cemetery where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel and "Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa" by Barry Hannah.  If you'd like, you can also visit my article "Setting to Illustrate Conflict and Character" from March 2008.  It goes a little more in-depth regarding the subtle effects for which setting is well-suited.

Setting.  It's the easiest aspect of fiction to identify.  The author describes a landscape or an object, and it's setting.  Deciding the importance of that setting to the story is somewhat more complicated, but it's an important consideration as you write your own fiction.

The first area of importance is the use of setting to establish place.  And this choice of place should reflect the themes and nature of your story.  A story about a New York City Girl becoming a "fish out of water" would probably be best set in a rural setting, away from the big city.  Amy Hempel's story about watching a friend die takes place mostly in a hospital, with short forays to the beach and the restaurant nearby - it wouldn't make much sense to have them experiencing death at Disney World, or going on a cruise.  At least not during these final days, when the friend is basically leashed to the IV drip.  Likewise, Barry Hannah's story wouldn't make much sense if "the genuine Elsworth" lived in a condo off Broadway - instead, we see his poverty and hopelessness through the stacks of beer in the fridge and the hubcap grill, through the way he sticks his foot through the porch.  These tragic details emphasize his loneliness, revealing why he would clean the house and prepare a barbecue for people who might not even come.

The age of the characters often determines the scope of your setting.  Stories about young children will often take place across their home, their neighbor's homes, and the park.  Teens tend to get out more - they have school, they Burger King, they have that haunted graveyard after curfew.  College provides a special realm of its own - an entire life can take place on a single campus, and that campus can provide lonely dorm rooms, crowded classrooms, imposing faculty offices, and raucous (or is it righteous?) parties.  For these pre-adult-life stories, a wide variety of conflicts are available, but the conflicts must almost always be resolved in places accessible to the main character.  For example, if it's a story about lost love - the really cute neighbor boy moves Indonesia with his parents - then the story can't simply have the girl moving to Indonesia to be with him.  Say she's 14 - she's old enough to have that desire to move, but she'd have no experience purchasing a house or finding a job overseas.  (though she can filch her mom's credit card and book herself a flight and get lost at Jakarta International...)

There are of course special considerations for science fiction, fantasy, supernatural, and international espionage stories (to name a few).  In stories like this - ones that go outside the realm of everyday realism - an unusual setting must be described in order to provide a believable place.  Adults, of course, have more "freedom of setting" than younger characters, but they are chained in their own ways to homes, jobs, and families, and the setting should reflect this.

After place, the next most important aspect of setting is tone.  This, perhaps, is hardest part to master.  It's largely a matter of diction - a train station can be "spacious, sleek, and efficient," or "cavernous, bare, and too quick."

Part of mastering the tone involves the use of specific details which relate directly to the plot at hand.  Let's say we wanted to really reveal a train station - it would be better to zoom in one one small corner and really explain it than to give a blanket description of the whole place:

Bill sat on the bench near the ticket counter.  His sole companion was a plastic ficus with dusty leaves.  On the floor, someone had spilled a milkshake.  The milkshake has been smeared across the tiles by a half-dozen footprints.  Earlier, a janitor had come by to throw out the trampled Cold Stone cup, but he left the real mess behind.

Note that these specific details have all been related back to Bill through proximity - all of these are things that he sees himself.  The dusty ficus is in fact "his sole companion."  There are tinges of loneliness with the irrepressible sense that this world simply doesn't care that Bill exists.  Now let's use this same setting to cast Bill in a very different light:

Bill sat on the edge of the bench near the ticket counter.  Someone brushed against the ficus, and he batted the dusty leaf out of his face.  Some idiot had spilled a milkshake across the floor - Bill shifted further down the bench to keep his wingtips out of the sticky mess.  He'd seen a janitor come by earlier to toss the crumpled Cold Stone cup, but the man had been too lazy to get a mop to clean the mess.

As you write, provide these specific setting elements and then have your characters respond react to them.  Zero in on where exactly your character is and what exactly he sees or experiences.

Finally, in your setting piece, strive to go a step further by turning the story into a multi-sensory experience.  Touch, taste, smell, and feel are often overlooked in stories, but these experiences provide the most intimate details for the human experience:

The ridged metal bench was cold and rough under Bill's butt.  Every time someone walked past the ficus, dust from the leaves made his eyes water with the need to sneeze.  Otherwise he couldn't smell it - the plant was as plastic and sterile as the the ticket counter.  But everything, now, stunk of sour milk.  Someone had dropped a Cold Stone shake across the floor - there was a squeak every time someone tried to step over the sludge only to slip instead.  And it made Bill's ears hurt, listening to this place - the feet clomping across the floor, the whistle of trains arriving and departing, the flick-flick-flick of the arrival schedule every few minutes.  And the janitor who came by to pick up the Cold Stone cup had been too lazy to clean up the sludge, so Bill had to smell the sickening-sweet artificial strawberry scent as he waited.  And, worst of all, he couldn't even smoke in here.  His mouth was already dry with the need for nicotine.  He could almost taste the smoke, he needed a cigarette so badly.

So there it is: set your place, set your tone, and use specific details which your characters can respond to.  If I can answer any questions, please let me know.

Ryan

1-2-Writing Workshops Online

Writing the Voice Sketch

Today's topic addresses the approach we use for writing voice in fiction, and is a continuation of "What Is a Voice Poem." The pieces we cover in particular for this topic include Bobbie Ann Mason's "Shiloh" and Bernard Malamud's "Angel Levine."  The IFP Voice Sketch is a minimum of two pages double-spaced.

In my experience, one of the most difficult parts of writing a voice piece is finding a way to capture a unique voice without exaggerating that voice to the point of disbelief.  And the two pieces we read for class cut a very fine line here, managing to capture some of the extremes of local dialects without inflicting a cliche.  "Angel Levine," in particular, captures a wide of voices, from Manischevitz's colloquial "My dear God, sweatheart, did I deserve that this should happen to me?" to the very intellectual diction and tone of Levine's early speech: "It was given to me to understand that both your wife and you require assistance of a salubrious nature?"  Later in the story, in the synagogue in Harlem, Malumud exposes us to still more variations of dialect, from "Let's git on wid de commentary" to "On de face of de water moved de speerit.  An' dat was good.  It say so in de Book.  From de speerit ariz de man."

To understand what Malamud has done with voice here, we must consider the purpose of the story: we have a Jewish tailor confronted with a angel who happens to be Black.  And in the Harlem synagogue, we see Jewish gentlemen - each one Black - discussing the "immaterial substance" of the soul.  And this reveals that, regardless of dialect, an individual can discuss and believe in Manischevitz's Judaism.

The key here is that the diction may come from dialect, but the topics of discussion come from the needs of the characters.  And this is crucial.  Stories which are considered "cliche" or "overdone" often try to enforce voice at the expense of characterization.  As a veteran, I tend to notice this most when I'm reading stories with military personnel.  For example, you might read a conversation like this:

They'd been fighting for days. Private Joe was happy to get a few hours when he saw the Master Sergeant walking up with new orders. "Hey, Sarge," the private called. "What's cookin?"

The Master Sergeant whipped out her map.  "Our orders," she said, looking every man in the eye, "are to take this hilltop."

I know from experience that few soldiers actually speak like this.  (The term "sarge," especially, will earn a private in today's army a whole lot of push-ups...)  Another problem with this dialogue is the way it divides the private from "The Master Sergeant."  This examples gives the difference in rank between the two men as more of a matter of social class than of age and rank - it sounds almost as if they're from entirely different world's, culturally speaking.  Then we have the line of this sergeant "looking every man in the eye."  Yes, it sounds very steely-eyed-heroic, but not exactly realistic.

To truly capture the voice of these soldiers, we would need to see them as people first and soldier's second.  The best way to do this is to first zero-in on a single point-of-view (POV) character.  In the previous example, we have confusion about which character holds the true POV.  Private Joe gets the most POV exposure with "he was happy," but we have no idea what he thinks as the Master Sergeant is looking everyone in the eye.  If we really take on his point of view, we can get a stronger feel for how he and his buddies are actually feeling.

Joe watched Sims as she pulled out the map.  He didn't want to look at the paper again.  He didn't even need to, know - they'd fought back-and-forth across those hills for so many days that he could have sketched the ridge in the sand with his eyes closed.

Note that we've dropped most of the "army" jargon - now it's just two people looking over a map.  But we can feel the grit of this situation much better - Joe is tired, he's been fighting a lot, and he already knows his job.

Point-of-view established, we can now move on to developing this POV to reveal the voices of other characters:

Sims flicked her eyes up from the map to meet Joe's gaze.  She seemed so small, for a moment, hunched forward under the weight of all that Kevlar, but then she straightened.  She brought up her carbine and clunked the weapon down over the edge of the map as a paperweight.  She cast her eyes over the rest of the men.  She looked angry and tired, as usual.

"Our orders," she said, "are to take this hilltop."

The emphasis here is still on the people.  Without the weight of ranks and steely-eyed looks, we can see this sergeant as she really is - tired and angry.  And it sets up some good tension for later.  Why, if she's so unhappy, is she now a Master Sergeant?  Does she really want to take this hilltop, or is she literally just following orders?

Note that we've introduced some military jargon here, but it's not the cliche jargon of a John Wayne movie - instead we see some of the equipment that these soldiers would use and carry every day.  To them, this stuff is as familiar as air.  For minimalist fiction, just mentioning these words might be enough, but I recommend providing enough explanation that all readers would understand what these objects actually represent.  Here, it might help to know that Kevlar is the polymer used in military body armor, and hence a common nickname for the armor itself.  A carbine is a shorter version of an M-16 - the kind of weapon everyone now recognizes from movies and popular culture.  But do we really need to be told these things?  Depends on the audience, really.  Think about whether this knowledge would have helped you understand the short piece a little better, and then try to keep in mind which of your own references your readers might not know at first.

As always, please feel free to reply or e-mail with any questions or comments.

Happy Writing,
Ryan

1-2-Writing Workshops Online

Links to Literary Terms

I had a very good question today about how to know which terms to identify.  Given the snow, we haven't gone over as many of the literary terms and techniques as I would have liked, so I've included a list here of useful websites for literary terms.  As the semester progresses, I will focus in on the literary terms which I find the most important, but you may discover that additional terms are needed to describe the works from The Hopkins Review.

Ten Essential Poetic Techniques from a Middle School Lesson Plan

It's likely you're already familiar with these terms, but it's a good idea to review these.  Good definitions and examples are provided for Simile, Metaphor, Personification, Hyperbole, Alliteration, Assonance, Consonance, Onomatopoeia, Repetition, and Rhyme (Internal Rhyme and End Rhyme).

"Poetry Techniques and Lyric Lesson" by Kellie Hayden

McGraw-Hill offers some very complete lists literary terms.  I recommend reading over the poetry glossary for Friday's essay, and then referring to the other glossaries throughout the course.

Poetry Glossary

Fiction Glossary 

Drama Glossary (note that many of these terms are applicable to fiction and poetry)

Complete McGraw-Hill Glossary

Poets.org provides an overview of the different kinds of poems (the large-scale forms which encompass regular patterns of meter, rhyme, and stanza lengths) along with their own glossary of poetic terms.

Poetic Forms
Glossary of Poetic Terms

The University of Richmond Writing Center also provides a list of 32 general terms applicable to both poetry and fiction:
"A List of Important Literary Terms"

If you have any questions about specific literary terms or their applicability to a given work, please let me know.

Have a good day,
Ryan

1-2-Writing Workshops Online