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 Tone

A friend of mine e-mailed today asking about how to teach tone to her students.  And this is a very important question for any writer.  In your stories, physical descriptions, actions, and character details will carry the reader only so far.  Besides understanding and "seeing" the story, the reader needs to feel the story.  This is where tone comes in.

I usually explain tone as being a product of setting and diction.  It really boils down to the feel of the piece - do the lines feel happy?  Sad?  Do they provide the feeling of tension as opposed to just the intellectual knowledge that something bad is about to happen?

One way to illustrate this is to take a sentence that says one thing and then change the words so that the tone doesn't match.  For example:

"The yippy-yappy dog ran up to me with his tongue lolling out and then jumped up and nibbled a hole through my rib cage.  My heart rate was quite elevated until he took a healthy bite out of my left ventricle, and then I was lying down the ground.  I felt really light-headed as I passed away in a soft puddle of red wetness."

Naturally, for a description like this we need words like "growling" and "sharp tongue" and "tore through my chest with half-inch canines."  (and I'm sorry it's a bit gory - the more extreme the difference between tone and action, the easier it is to show).  Also, sentence length is a critical component of tone and pace.  Longer sentences tend to be more relaxed, languid, and intellectual - shorter sentences convey more urgency and tension.

On revision:
"The doberman charged me, teeth bared.  He lunged for my chest and dug into my rib cage.  My pulse raced.  I had to get him off.  Then he took a chunk out of my heart.  I staggered back.  The world spun.  Then I was on the ground.  I felt the blood pooling under my back as I died."

Note that the revised lines here still don't convey the real urgency of having one's still-beating heart ripped out by a doberman.  It's clear the narrator has somehow gotten over this moment, and is maybe telling this story from the afterlife.  That, too, can be a subtle trick of tone.  But here it was largely an accident.  I couldn't find a way to tell the narrator's "moment of death" with that kind of urgency.  So I cheated and detached the voice a bit.  But that's all right - you can't do much with a story after the narrator is really (and completely) dead.

And with that cheerful thought...Happy Writing!

Ryan

1-2-Writing Workshops Online

What is a Setting Poem?

Today's discussion will focus on Philip Larkin's "Church Going" and  Yusef Komunyakaa's "Sunday Afternoons" (Magic City version).

Before I discuss the specifics of setting poems, I'd like to introduce a major concept in poetry which is often overlooked when trying to categorize poems.  Essentially, any poem has elements of every poem.  For example, in Bishop's "In the Waiting Room," it's a narrative poem, but we have the elements of a child-like voice and the setting details surrounding her narrative.  In Larkin's "Church Going," we have a similar effect, but it's a setting poem because the narrative is somewhat less important, but we still have some elements of narrative along with the voice of a man who's detached from religion and church in general.

Komunyakaa's "Sunday Afternoons" takes this a step further.  In "Sunday Afternoons," we have a strong narrative movement - the poem starts with the children being sent out to the yard, it reflects back on the family events surrounding this, and then comes back in the end to that last view of the house: "If I held my right hand above my eyes..."  The events are generalized to reveal the pattern of Sundays rather than just a single Sunday, but there is a story being told.  The voice, too, is exceptionally strong.  Phrases like "we were drunk & brave" and "Where did we learn to be unkind...?" reveal the narrator's older perspective looking back on a younger time.

"Sunday Afternoons" is considered a setting poem not due to a lack of narrative or voice, but because the setting is the dominant element in this poem of setting, narrative, and voice.  From the first line, "They'd latch the screendoors / & pull venetian blinds,"  the narrative in this poem is driven by these setting details.  The sense of formless anger is revealed through "Speckled eggs, blue as rage," and "...gospel on the radio, / Loud as shattered glass."  The voice, too - the character's sense of realization - comes out through metaphors drawn from the setting: "The backyard trees breathed / Like a man running from himself."

As you write your own setting poems, I'd like you to bear in mind this idea of combined forms.  Often, the temptation in writing a poem like this would be to start and end with the setting.  For example, I could write a poem about my childhood room that would go something like this:

Desk so cluttered
there was no desk.
The lamp was a spindled island
of aluminum
and light.

It's a nice image, yes, but this short poem goes little farther than that.  The idea of an "island of aluminum and light" seems to imply something, but it's impossible to say what.  Is this a commentary on childhood?  Or maybe regret due a lack of clerical organization?  Let's expand this to see if we can't develop something further:

They told me
to clean my desk.
Out my stuff would go:
the papers, the cheap sci fi pulps,
that beanie green turtle thing from Shelley at Christmas.
The black bag waited,
plastic and Hefty,
thirty-gallon maw
of hunger.

"You need space to work,"
they said,
pointing to the lamp,
that spindled island
of aluminum
and light.

Right away, this poem develops a great deal more tension (granted it has more lines to work with - this helps).  We have "they" in that first line - a very malevolent presence in this poem.  The Hefty bag represents a "thirty gallon maw / of hunger."  There's a kind of narrative tension here - the narrator versus "them" and "their Hefty bag," but we don't know from where exactly this tension arises.  The setting has established the situation, and it's given us elements of voice in the line of "Out my stuff would go."  There's a sense of resignation here, with the possibility of resistance, but it's uncertain.  If we wanted to pick it apart, we could say that "would" implies an older voice looking back, whereas using "will" could have given the sense of a child facing the Hefty bag here-and-now.

But let's not go that far today.  Instead, I'd like you to focus on what it is you'll write about.  The real problem with setting poems is that they are very rarely about the setting.  "Church Going" uses churches and their decay to reveal a larger truth about human society.  "Sunday Afternoons" uses the house and the yard to reveal a complicated family situation.  For your setting poems, I'd like you to do something similar.  Find a story or a truth from life that you'd like to explore (and it doesn't need to be from your own life by any means).  Think about a place to reveal this truth (if it's a story, just consider where it happened).  Write a list of the setting details from this place.  Consider how each one reveals the tension of the story/situation.  And from there, write your setting images to reveal the narrative and the voice together.

Please feel free to post questions below or send me an e-mail.

Happy Writing,
Ryan

1-2-Writing Workshops Online