Read A Writer's Guide to Active Setting Online
Authors: Mary Buckham
You'll also learn how to make sure your reader focuses only on details that are pertinent to the story.
NOTE:
The details of your Setting must matter to your story.
For example, if you're showing the reader a room in a house, that room, and the details in that room, should show characterization, conflict, emotion, or foreshadowing. The description should be there for a reason instead of simply describing placement of objects in space.
Let's start with an overview of what Setting is and what it can be.
In this book we'll focus on keeping in mind three key elements in crafting Setting to make it active:
What this means is that your role as a writer is to create the world of your story so that the reader not only sees it, but experiences every important detail.
Active Setting means using your Setting descriptions to add more to your story than a passive visual reference. This book will explain in greater detail how to make this happen regardless of what type of story you're crafting.
NOTE:
If the details don't add to the story, leave them out. Every word choice you make in your story should be intentional and focus the reader on what you want. Don't waste their focus on trivial details.
Regardless of whether you're writing about a famous place that millions have seen in pictures or experienced in person, your character's perceptions of that world are what matters in your story. You're not writing about any living room, small town, or large city; you are writing about a specific living room, small town, or large city and why those Settings matter to your character.
Pull the reader into your story by allowing them to experience the Setting on a deeper level. This can be the difference between standing on a beach facing the Pacific Ocean, feeling the sand beneath your bare toes, inhaling the scent of tangy salt spray, and hearing the roar and slam of the waves against the shore versus looking at a postcard.
Learning to write Active Setting is as easy as knowing when and where you want to ramp up your Setting details and why.
I've had the privilege to work with thousands of writers in all genres over the years and to see them take the blah or non-existent Setting of their stories and make their passive Setting description work harder and do so much more than simply describe a place. That's my wish for every writer who takes the time to study Active Setting.
Throughout this book we'll be looking at how you can ramp up elements of your story by how you use or do not use your Setting. We'll start with an overview of why Setting matters to a story and see examples from published authors showing, in a variety of genres, how they maximized Setting in their novels. Always keep in mind that Setting is more than describing a place.
NOTE:
Active Setting means using your Setting details to work harder and smarter.
First, you should focus on what seems like a basic assumption.
Your reader has never been in your worldâwherever your world is.
It doesn't matter if it's New York City and most of your readers live in Manhattan; your reader has never been in
your
world. The Setting and world you'll paint on the page are more than a travelogue or a list of street names.
Not everything that a character sees, smells, tastes, or touches needs to end up in your final manuscript, but it's a place to start. For example, a point of view (POV) character (the person whose thoughts, emotions, background, and worldview through which the reader experiences the story) who is miserable in a school environment will not see or notice the same items as a POV character who finds school a sanctuary and the center of her world.
As the author, you need to focus the reader on what's key about your POV character's world Setting and then bring that information to life through word choices, details, and how you thread those details together.
NOTE:
The details you choose to share must matter. (Yes, I'm hammering home this point.)
Your reader should not be focused on something that is not pertinent to your story. Why? You're wasting an opportunity to make your Setting show more than a place or an item simply because you as the author find it interesting. Make the Setting reveal more than that. Too much narrative, which is what Setting is in large chunks, slows your pacing.
You are not just working with objects in spaceâyou're creating a world. When you make characters interact with the space they're in, you can make those few words become more than just descriptors. Doing so turns these words into ways the reader can grasp the world as the character experiences it.
POOR EXAMPLE:
Sue walked into her mother's living room, past the couch and the coffee table, to sit down in a chair.
What is the above sentence showing you? Revealing to you? Letting you experience? Not much, it's simply moving a character through space.
REWRITTEN EXAMPLE:
Sue walked into the gilt-and-silk living room of her mother's home, gagging on the clash of floral odors: lilac potpourri, jasmine candles, lavender sachets. Did her mom even smell the cloying thickness anymore? Did she ever try to glance beyond the draped and beribboned window coverings that kept the room in perpetual dusk? Or was she using the white-on-white colors and velvet textures to hide from the real world? With a sigh, Sue sank into a designer chair and hoped she could crawl out of it sooner rather than later.
OR:
REWRITTEN EXAMPLE:
Sue walked into the heart of her childhood home, remembering playing cowboys and Indians behind the worn tweed couch, building tents by draping sheets over the nicked coffee table, hiding behind the cotton drapes that were now replaced by newer blinds. Her grandmother used to shudder when she deigned to visit the house, but Sue's mom didn't care. Now she'd no longer be knitting in her easy chair or patting the sagging couch for a tell-me-all-about-it session.
See? The painted details allow you to experience a lot more than simply seeing a room. That's the power of Active Setting.
Let's look at another example: Four brief sentences that quickly pull the reader into a bar scene, only this bar is in an urban fantasy novel and the bar is populated with vampires. But the author, Marjorie M. Liu, wants to make it clear that the world between humans and preternaturals is not clearly delineated. This bar could be any bar, anywhere, and the reader should be aware of that fact. Examine specifically how the details, especially the sensory details, make this Setting, and thus the scene, come alive.
⦠and stepped sideways to the battered bar, its surface scarred and mauled by years of hard elbows and broken glass. Ashtrays overflowed. Bottles clustered. Everything, sticky with fingerprints: even the air, marked, cut with smoke and sweat.
âMarjorie M. Liu,
The Iron Hunt
Now let's pull apart all the sensory details and see why they ramp up what many writers would have ignored.
⦠and stepped sideways to the battered bar, [
This is a visual that's very specific and tells the reader where the character is, but the author doesn't stop here.
] its surface scarred and mauled [
Powerful action verbs.
] by years of hard elbows and broken glass. [
Here she brings home the pointâ
battered bar
is the initial image. Then the reader is focused on its surface,
scarred and mauled
. Finally the reason the bar got to this pointâvia
hard elbows and broken glass
. The author layers the details to bring home her point.
] Ashtrays overflowed. [
Visual and smell detail.
] Bottles clustered. [
The author didn't stop with a row of bottles, but the action verb gives an image of bottles clustered together as if for mutual support.
] Everything, sticky with fingerprints: [
Tactile detail.
] even the air, marked, cut with smoke and sweat. [
And more smells.
]
In just a few sentences the reader is with the POV character, standing in this bar, experiencing, smelling, hearing, and feeling that situation.
So how do you initially show the Setting in the scene? One thing to remember is that the reader does need a quick "anchoring," probably in the first few paragraphs of a new scene or new chapter, or a change in location. Where are we? What time of day is it? Is it quiet or noisy? What is the quality of light?
NOTE:
The use of light can show time change. Instead of telling the reader it's twenty minutes later, show them by the cast of late-afternoon shadows, the glare of the sun directly overhead, the quieting of the birds as dusk falls.
The reader will be mentally asking these questions, and the longer you keep the information from them, the less they will focus on what you want them to focus on. The reader will become more removed from the story and the characters, and instead be trying to figure out the where, when, who, or why.
Once you've established or anchored the reader into the
where
of your story, using a strong Setting description, you do not need to continue to embellish and rehash a Setting. Let the characters interact with the Setting, move through it, pick things up and brush past them, once the reader knows the character is in a place already described.
Whenever there's a Setting introduction that's different for the POV character, or for the reader, you should use a few words of description to orient or anchor the reader into the new environment. For example, it's human nature to notice what's changedâyou might not notice an object on your mantel every day, but you do notice when it's missing. If an object, like a beloved photograph, was foreshadowed earlier in the story, you can now show that it's missing, which allows the reader to mentally see the rest of the room that you've already established and know where the POV character is. We're in that character's skin, seeing what was once there and now is not. So instead of starting this scene with the character re-entering the living room, you show the reader that the first thing the character notices when she enters the living room is the gap on the mantel: The space where her mother's photo was.
Bam!
We're in that living room without spending a lot of time redescribing what the reader has already been shown.
Look at how Laura Anne Gilman orients the reader as to where the character is physically in space and gives a hint of the protagonist's backstory, characterization of two different characters, and a hint of potential conflict between characters through her description of a room. All in only one paragraph!
The only way to describe J's place was “warm.” Rosewood furniture against cream-colored walls, and touches of dark blue and flannel gray everywhere, broken by the occasional bit of foam green from his Chinese pottery collection. You'd have thought I'd have grown up to be Uber Society Girl, not pixie-Goth, in these surroundings. Even my bedroomânow turned back into its original use as a libraryâhad the same feel of calm wealth to it, no matter how many pop-culture posters I put up or how dark I painted the walls.
âLaura Anne Gilman,
Hard Magic
Now let's dissect that paragraph to see the power of the individual parts.
The only way to describe J's place was “warm.” [
Subjective emotion from the POV character that gives a hint of her relationship with the home's owner. Plus we are able to get a quick sense of the feel of a place; we know when we've been in a warm or cool room even if we don't have too many details yet.
] Rosewood furniture against cream-colored walls, and touches of dark blue and flannel gray everywhere, [
Notice the pieces of furniture are not described because it's not important to know there's a couch or two chairs in the room. It's more important to get a sense of the owner of the room by his choice of subtle and understated colors and the woodârosewood is a world away from oak or distressed pine. We're getting a glimpse into the world of the secondary character here.
] broken by the occasional bit of foam green from his Chinese pottery collection. [
Here, because collecting Chinese pottery is not the same as collecting baseball cards or stamps, the reader has another image of the wealth and refinement of the home's owner.
] You'd have thought I'd have grown up to be Uber Society Girl, not pixie-Goth, in these surroundings. [
Now the reader is focused on the differences between the POV character's sense of self and the home's owner by use of contrast. This is (or was) her home, yet it's clear she does not see herself as belonging.
] Even my bedroomânow turned back into its original use as a libraryâhad the same feel of calm wealth to it, no matter how many pop-culture posters I put up or how dark I painted the walls. [
This hints at conflict and foreshadowing.
]
Through her specific word choices and the objects she's chosen to comment on, Gilman has deepened her world building between these two characters in the series. We are now seeing where the POV character came from and where her mentor still lives through the use of Setting description. The author's word choices, pointing out the contrast between
calm wealth
,
pop-culture posters
, and dark-painted walls, reveals to the reader the POV sense of not belonging in the world in which she was raised, which is a key theme in this story.
Let's look at another example approaching Setting from a rough draft version to the final version.