A Writer's Guide to Active Setting (28 page)

The above is a lighter approach to showing the character via the Setting and would be appropriate to an amateur sleuth mystery, a chick-lit romance, or a lighter YA or Middle Grade novel. Now let's see what it would look like if you wanted to make the Setting act in opposition to the character in a stronger way for a darker mystery, suspense, or thriller story, while keeping the focus on the action.

Setting in an action sequence means never slowing the forward momentum to focus the reader on a hunk of narrative description that does not matter to the story. Narrative Setting description, by itself, only works on one level: to show your reader a room, street, etc. Active Setting means the reader never feels the story has stopped or slowed—she experiences the Setting of the story because that's what the POV characters do.

To play with this assignment, you'll need to get deep into your POV character's skin. Ready?

Look at a passage or setting description in your manuscript that might need a little more help to keep the reader feeling that the character is active, as opposed to stopping for sentences of description. If you find a larger chunk of Setting description, try the following: Take a chunk of setting description and have the character interact with the place or space. Let them move through it, touch an item as they pass it, and notice some detail, but only if it reveals something about them or the story.

If you need some Setting description in a passage, try weaving in a sentence or two (maximum), not back-to-back, but interwoven into what you currently have on the page.

If you don't have anything in a WIP, consider using this passage as a writing prompt:

See how you can play with these words—or your own—to put your character into the setting so the reader experiences the place and its relationship to what your character is attempting to do.

Here are some ideas to help you get started:

• Show a thief casing out the Setting.
  
• Show a tired mother with two small children being shown this location as a possible rental.
  
• Show a returning war vet with a physical disability returning to his pre-deployment pad.
  
• Or try all three interactions with this Setting to see how you can make the Setting reveal more.
  

• Great Setting involves so much more than description.
  
• A paragraph or more of Setting description inevitably slows pacing. Use it intentionally.
  
• Study the genre you want to write in to understand the genre and subgenre expectations.
  
• Weave Setting through action in your story so that the reader can see and experience along with the POV character.
  
• Make sure what you show of Setting matters to the overall story.
  

When we talk about using Setting as a character in the story, we mean that these stories must happen in this particular Setting—for example, Manderley in Daphne du Maurier's novel
Rebecca
, or Jack London's
Call of the Wild
. It could also mean that the Setting becomes as familiar to the readers as the characters, if that Setting is used in a series.

Some authors use Setting as an active character in their story as opposed to a simple backdrop. Think Tony Hillerman and the Southwest, Dennis Lehane and Boston, Charlaine Harris's
True Blood
series set in the backwoods of Louisiana, Jim Butcher's
Dresden Files
in Chicago, Dana Stabenow's Kate Shugak series in southeast Alaska, and Tess Gerritson's
Rizzoli & Isles
series set in Boston. With each of these authors you can no more remove the Setting from the story than remove the protagonist. Take out either and the story flatlines and falls apart.

In other series, where the Setting is not its own character, the protagonist can move about the country or the world, depending on story needs.

When Setting acts as a character in a story, you can't easily remove the stories from that place without destroying key elements of the story.

Usually in these types of stories, the reader is clued into this symbiotic relationship by having Setting introduced before the protagonists or secondary characters, or at the same time as the protagonist and in some detail so the reader is clear that the Setting matters.

The pacing is slowed early in the story in order to make it clear to the reader that the place matters—the author anchors the reader to the tone and theme of the story by going into depth when describing place.

In these stories, be aware the reader will accept slower pacing in exchange for in-depth place analysis, but only for so long. One or two long paragraphs at most, as the story opens, and then something had better happen.

Let's see how T. Jefferson Parker uses his first-hand knowledge and familiarity with the nuances of his Southern California Setting as an integral part of his novels:

Parker uses his home turf of Southern California, specifically Orange County, as the setting for most of his stories. He draws the reader deep into the place because his characters are embedded where they live. In the example, the reader is flat-out told that this story could only happen in this Setting, and why this Setting is rich with conflict and a cast of characters who have undergone a lot of change in a short period of history. Knowing this, you expect different classes of people to rub shoulders and see sparks fly. It's implied that, while many of the people in this Setting are good, not all are, and that is the kernel of conflict. This is not a perfect place: It's rife with displacement and differing expectations, and Parker mines these differences to create taut, suspenseful novels.

Except for his Merci Rayburn series, Parker usually writes stand-alone novels with common threads of theme and place. He references why he uses Southern California for his Settings in the Frequently Asked Questions section on his website:

The next example comes from a stand-alone romance novel. In this story the Setting acts as a metaphor for a woman seeking answers about her childhood and a dramatic event that occurred then. There have always been unanswered questions for her, but now, while healing from a recent accident and trying to decide what to do next in her life, the protagonist and POV character returns to the small town in New Mexico where secrets about her past are buried.

The character is a photojournalist, so she sees the world as if through a viewfinder. In this scene she comes across the community church, which embodies so much of the history of the town. The author doesn't settle for the traditional descriptive words used to describe the unique southwest adobe building style, where the walls of the oldest buildings show the shaping by the builder's hands, and the arc of the overhead sky shows a clear and vivid blue on sunny days because of the state's altitude.

Look at the care and intentional Setting descriptions the author uses to paint a clear and specific image of this old church—
peachy flesh, plastic blue sky, curved bones
. The first sentences are all about what the POV character sees and how she sees it. The last three sentences contrast what has been shown with the intrusion of the modern world—bus motor running, narrow street, milling tourists. It's the sublime and the mundane smacking up against one another, all shown in one key paragraph.

Pat Conroy is an author who—while he too writes stand-alone novels—tends to use similar locations in his different work. His Southern locations are as fully fleshed and important as any of his key characters. Conroy uses the cadence of Southern thought, speech, sense of history, and regional uniqueness not as a backdrop to his stories, but as a breeding ground for flawed characters, character expectations, conflict, and events. Conroy's same stories, if set in the Southwest or the Heartland, would not fly, because those areas have a different sense of self.

Conroy tries to impart to the reader that what is unfurling in his stories is, in large part, based on the people who grew up in this specific Setting—and how they respond to their world. He isn't aiming for a generic description of a location. He wants the reader to experience, right from the beginning, the mind-set and cadence of this unique Southern city. Let's see how he does this.

Unlike the earlier Parker example in Southern California, where the characters and actions of the story evolve from the Setting, Conroy uses a slightly different approach. He uses the history of specific Southern Settings embedded into the characters themselves to create the story. Right from the beginning, it's clear the POV character knows and loves Charleston deeply. The city is as much a character in his story as the people who fill its pages. Words are lavished on the Setting itself throughout the pages to enhance that characterization.

Let's assume Conroy had to layer his writing step-by-step:

As an opening, this raises no story questions, reveals little about the place and how the protagonist feels about it, or why the story must happen in this Setting. The reader does not feel that being born and raised in this Setting creates a very specific character, or that that character's choices, decisions, and actions will be a direct result of being a native-born son.

The richness of language, the deep layering of emotion the character feels about his hometown, and the symbiotic relationship between place and person are still absent. We have a start, but still a rough one. Look back at exactly how Conroy uses Setting in this opening.

And here's another mystery author, whose series Setting is Chicago. But a Setting in Chicago can change from book to book, as the series reader is reminded that this city is the sum of its parts. All the different areas of Chicago must be experienced—not simply the Miracle Mile of downtown Chicago—to really understand the city. In this next passage, the protagonist visits the headquarters of a huge, family-owned conglomerate that started as one store. She is seeking funding for the basketball team of an inner-city school on the South Side of Chicago—not far from where the multibillionaire created his first store.