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by Gloria Kempton (mobi)

  going to have to understand if they're going to navigate it and get where they want to go in the story.

  Kahlan stared into the fire. "The boundaries are part of the underworld: the dominion of the dead. They were conjured into our world by magic, to separate the three lands. They are like a curtain drawn across our world. A rift in the world of the living."

  "You mean that going into the boundary is, what, like falling through a crack into another world? Into the underworld?"

  She shook her head. "No. Our world is still here. The underworld is there in the same place at the same time. It is about a two-day walk across the land where the boundary, the underworld, lies. But while you are walking the land where the boundary is, you are also walking through the underworld. It is a wasteland. Any life that touches the underworld, or is touched by it, is touching death. That is why no one can cross the boundary. If you enter it, you enter the land of the dead. No one can return from the dead."

  "Then how did you?"

  She swallowed as she watched the fire. "With magic. The boundary was brought here with magic, so the wizards reasoned they could get me safely through with the aid and protection of magic. It was frightfully difficult for them to cast the spells. They were dealing in things they didn't fully understand, dangerous things, and they weren't the ones who conjured the boundary into this world, so they weren't sure it would work. None of us knew what to expect." Her voice was weak, distant. "Even though I came through, I fear I will never be able to entirely leave it."

  Using words like the underworld, death, curtain, rift, wasteland, magic, spells, and dangerous, the author brings this setting to life even though we're not quite there. We anticipate getting there because now we know it's an exciting place fraught with all kinds of scary things.

  The use of dialogue to convey setting is effective here because we trust Kahlan. She speaks with authority and confidence and we know that she knows what she's talking about. We believe her. We're actually in Richard's point of view in this scene, and one reason we believe her is because Richard believes her, and he's a trustworthy character.

  Once again, when using dialogue to describe, you have to know your characters so you know what kinds of details they would mention in their description of a place. As you can see, Kahlan is the kind of character who

  goes psychologically deeper when describing place than many characters would. She doesn't just describe the physical appearance of the boundary or the underworld. She goes into the wizards casting spells and what it all means, which is much more interesting than just physical details.

  stay in voice

  Sometimes I see fiction manuscripts from my students who use dialogue to describe setting and the characters begin to sound like those time-share salespeople: "And over here in this corner we have a gas fireplace with a marble hearth and mantle and strobe lights on the ceiling above." What you want to remember when using dialogue to describe setting is to stay in your character's voice. If you have a character in your novel who's into hip-hop, then, "Hey, man, it's yo mama's blue rag on the floor there," and well, you know what I mean. Joyce Carol Oates handles this pretty well in her novel Middle Age. Roger and his fifteen-year-old daughter, Robin, are in the car together discussing a dead uncle. While the setting they're discussing doesn't play a huge part in the story, it's important for the characterization of Uncle Adam.

  She said hesitantly, "Mom was telling me, she'd heard from some friends there, Mr. Berendt had—some things?—people were surprised to find?—in his house?" "What things?" "Oh, I don't know." "What kind of things?"

  "It's just gossip, you know Mom. She'll say anything people tell her." "Honey, what kind of things? I'm Adam's estate executor, and I know." "Mom was saying she'd heard Mr. Berendt had, like, lots of money hidden away? In boxes? Like, buried in the cellar of his house? Millions of dollars?" Robin was watching him closely. Seeing his grimace, she said, "I never believe it, why'd Uncle Adam hide money like that, if he had it? If, like, anybody had it? You'd put it in a bank, right? I told Mom that. She's so credulous."

  They discuss the ridiculousness of this idea for a moment, and then Robin continues:

  "I was in Uncle Adam's cellar, a few times. When we were there visiting. I must've been, like, ten. A long time ago." "Were you?"

  "The cellar was old. It was sort of creepy. Uncle Adam said maybe there'd been dead people buried there, a really long time ago? Like, if they'd been murdered in the tavern, that the house used to be, they were buried in the cellar. Was that so?"

  Oates uses the setting details to show the eccentricity of Robin's Uncle Adam. We learn that he may have hid money in the old house and told his niece stories about possible dead people buried in the cellar. Robin talks about her uncle and his creepy house and cellar. But note how she phrases so many of her remarks as questions. This is how she talks throughout the story and how so many teens typically speak, raising their voices at the end of their sentences in a question.

  When your character is describing place, be sure to remember who's talking and stay in voice.

  different stories, different settings

  There are all kinds of stories, settings, and characters, and when certain characters in certain kinds of stories talk about certain settings, they mention certain things that other characters in other kinds of stories would never think of mentioning. The following are three very different characters from three very different kinds of novels speaking about three very different kinds of settings.

  In this first excerpt from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Mr. Dursley, Harry's uncle, is listening to the news. This is how the local newscaster and weatherman describe one aspect of the story's setting on this particular day in Britain:

  When Dudley had been put to bed, he went into the living room in time to catch the last report on the evening news:

  "And finally, bird-watchers everywhere have reported that the nation's owls have been behaving very unusually today. Although owls normally hunt at night and are hardly ever seen in daylight, there have been hundreds of sightings of these birds flying in every direction since sunrise. Experts are unable to explain why the owls have suddenly changed their sleeping patterns."

  The newscaster passes to the weatherman and the dialogue continues:

  "Well, Ted," said the weatherman. "I don't know about that, but it's not only

  the owls that have been acting oddly today. Viewers as far apart as Kent, Yorkshire, and Dundee have been phoning in to tell me that instead of the rain I promised yesterday, they've had a downpour of shooting stars!"

  Owls and shooting stars mark Harry Potter's arrival at the Dursley's. And J.K. Rowling came up with a rather creative way to describe the setting in this fantasy novel, through the evening news.

  The next excerpt is taken from The Lords of Discipline, a mainstream novel by Pat Conroy. The protagonist, Will, is telling Abigail, an old friend, how he feels about the Corps, which is the story's primary setting, comparing it to how she feels about her roses.

  "I used to think that the Corps represented sameness. We all dress the same, we look the same, we live by the same rules, everything. But each one of us is different. When I walk into this garden each rose looks about the same to me, and you go to a parade at the Institute and all two thousand cadets look exactly the same to you. But if you look at them carefully, Abigail, the same thing happens to those cadets as to your roses. Each one is different, with his own surprises, his own miracles."

  Keep in mind that this is a mainstream novel so the dialogue, the description, and even the action should make some kind of universal statement to the reader that connects ultimately to the story's theme. Will is describing the setting as he speaks, but he's doing it in such a way as to also make a statement about what he believes to be true about human beings. As you can see, the voice is very different than the newscaster's in the Harry Potter novel.

  Finally, the following is an excerpt from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whist
le Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg. This is a literary novel, and in this scene Evelyn Couch and elderly Mrs. Threadgoode are sitting in the visitor's lounge at Rose Terrace where Mrs. Threadgoode, now that she has an ear she can bend, is going on and on and on about her life. Understandably, her voice is very different from the newscaster's in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Will's in The Lords of Discipline.

  "The railroad tracks ran right across the backyard, and on summer nights that yard would be just full of lightning bugs and the smell of honeysuckle that grew wild, right alongside the tracks. Poppa had the back planted with fig trees and apple trees, and he had built Momma the most beautiful white lattice grape arbor that was full of wisteria vines...and little pink sweetheart roses grew all over the back of the house. Oh, I wish you could have seen it."

  Since most of the story is a flashback, this is a creative way to introduce the setting to us before we even get there ourselves. We begin to get a feel for the town of Whistle Stop through the aged voice of one of its most prominent citizens.

  weaving narrative setting into dialogue

  In an earlier chapter, we discussed how to weave narrative into dialogue. Now we're going to discuss how to specifically weave narrative setting into dialogue. If done right, we can keep unfolding the setting throughout the scene as it moves. This is how it should be done—otherwise, the action and dialogue will begin to feel like it's taking place in a vacuum. We want our scenes to be visual. We don't want to create a bunch of talking heads; the reader needs to be able to picture our characters somewhere.

  Weaving also gets us away from the tendency to create info dumps, those large paragraphs full of background, characterization, and setting details that are boring to write—we know they don't feel quite right—and worse yet, boring to read. So as much as you can, try to throw setting details into the actual dialogue as the scene moves forward.

  The following example from Lorna Landvik's novel Your Oasis on Flame Lake will give you a small example of how this is done.

  Darcy was boogying around to "Love the One You're With," playing air guitar like the maestro she is, and I was laughing, trying to screw a fixture into its socket, when Sergio blasted through the door like a gas explosion.

  "It looks fantastic," he said, twirling around like the little plastic ballerina inside a jewelry box I once bought Lin. Even if I hadn't been high up on the ladder, I wouldn't have been able to watch him — he just made me too damn dizzy.

  "Wow," said Franny, who had followed Sergio in. She plopped down on the couch and hugged a pillow to her chest. "It looks just like a nightclub."

  Darcy's air guitar vanished and she flung herself on the couch next to Franny.

  Obviously, the words in italic are the lines I want you to pay special attention to. This isn't heavy on setting, and you could do a lot more if you had to. For example, if you wanted to show that the characters were affluent, instead of just screwing a fixture into a socket, the viewpoint character

  could be changing the lightbulb in a crystal candelabra. You could describe the couch as a mammoth black leather sofa with a mink afghan hung over the back. You could go the other way and describe a 25-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling and a ratty red futon with an old blanket that smelled like a dog bunched up in one corner. How you use a dialogue scene to describe the setting always depends on what you're trying to get across about the characters or the story.

  integrating your setting

  The most effective way to integrate setting into a story is to use all three of the fiction elements at your disposal: dialogue, action, and narrative. This causes setting to simply form a background for the story. It's always there, almost like another character. It takes a gifted writer to be able to pull this off and make it feel natural.

  Katherine Dunn is such a writer. In her shocking novel Geek Love (and I do mean shocking—and it takes a lot to shock me), Dunn is able to pull off just about everything in one scene. This is a story about a family of carnies. The main characters are the parents and their five children: Arturo, better known as Aqua Boy because he has flippers for arms and legs; Electra/Iphigenia, Siamese twins joined at the hips; Olympia, the hunchbacked protagonist; and Fortunato, who can move objects around rooms. Lil Binewski, the mother, ingested drugs—insecticides, arsenic, radioiso-topes, anything to make her babies more "special"—so she and her husband could make a living with them in the carnival, which was their home. In this scene, the father is telling his children the by now very familiar story about how he came by the idea of creating the Binewski freak show using his own children as the stars of the show. The story is told in Olympia's first-person voice.

  "It was in Oregon, up in Portland, which they call the Rose City, though I never got in gear to do anything about it until a year or so later when we were stuck in Fort Lauderdale."

  He had been restless one day, troubled by business boondoggles. He drove up into a park on a hillside and got out for a walk. "You could see for miles from up there. And there was a big rose garden with arbors and trellises and fountains. The paths were brick and wound in and out." He sat on a step leading from one terrace to another and stared listlessly at the experimental

  roses. "It was a test garden, and the colors were, designed. Striped and layered. One color inside the petal and another color outside."

  .The roses started him thinking, how the oddity of them was beautiful and how that oddity was contrived to give them value. "It just struck me—clear and complete all at once—no long figuring about it." He realized that children could be designed. "And I thought to myself, now that would be a rose garden worthy of a man's interest!"

  We children would smile and hug him and he would grin around at us and send the twins for a pot of cocoa from the drink wagon and me for a bag of popcorn because the red-haired girls would just throw it out when they finished closing the concession anyway. And we would all be cozy in the warm booth of the van, eating popcorn and drinking cocoa and feeling like Papa's roses.

  I love the way the author moves between dialogue, narrative, and action as well as between the past and the present to give a sense of the story's setting, while at the same time turning the key to unlock the door to the story's theme. Brilliant. If you can ever pull this off, you, too, will fall into the category of brilliant.

  In the Fundamentals of Nonfiction workshop I teach for Writer's Online Workshops, there's a line about settings I particularly like to use: Description in action beats static description. I would say the same is true of dialogue. Description in dialogue beats static description. Don't ever use narrative to describe your setting when you can have a viewpoint character interacting with the setting in a lively discussion with another character. That's really the whole point of this chapter.

  You've learned how to move the story forward through dialogue, how to weave dialogue, narrative, and action, how to use dialogue as a characterization device, and in this chapter, how to use dialogue to reveal your story's setting. In the next chapter, we're going to discuss how dialogue can help with the pacing of a scene or story. You can use it to speed things up or pull back to slow things down. Read on to discover how you can get better control of your stories.

  Know your characters. Jerry is a computer geek who is accompanying his wife to her company picnic at a large park near a reservoir. She works for the Sanitation Department.

  Establishing setting. Write a two-page scene of dialogue between two characters in one of the following settings or a modified version. Focus on integrating setting details into the scene from beginning to end. And remember, the details can come through the character's observations of the setting, through dialogue, or through action.

  • a rock concert

  • an AA meeting

  • a corporate office

  • a shopping mall

  Write a two-page dialogue scene that focuses on setting. What would Jerry notice about the setting and what would he say out loud?

  • the inside of a car

&n
bsp; Too much too soon. Your characters are entering a winter wonderland. It's their first date and they've decided to leave the city behind and drive up to the slopes for the day to go skiing. One of the characters is from California and has only seen snow once before, as a small child. Describe the setting from her point of view as she describes it to her male partner in the car. The goal is not to info dump but to let it gradually emerge—not too much too soon.

  It's all in the details. In the heart of downtown Seattle, we have a place called Pike's Place Market. It's an outside array of food booths and shops full of tables of homemade clothing, jewelry, leather goods, and anything else you could think of. In one area, the vendors throw fish back and forth to entertain the customers. You can buy any kind of fish imaginable here. It's a place full of life and energy, a sensory heaven. Create a one- or two-page scene of dialogue between two characters who are visiting from out of town. Use all five senses in your descriptive dialogue of this setting.

  Dialogue description. A character, Janie, is taking her blind friend, Darcy, to Las Vegas for the first time. Janie lives in a small town in Iowa where she's a teacher's assistant for a second grade class. She's only been to Vegas once before. Using Janie's third-person voice, write a one-page scene of dialogue for Janie as she describes the sights and sounds of the city. Use as many descriptive, active, and specific verbs and nouns as you can.

  Stay in voice. Write a one-page scene of dialogue describing a Harley-Davidson convention from any or all of the following characters:

  • a Buddhist monk • a small child • a political candidate

  • a Ninja motorcycle enthusiast • a mental hospital escapee

  Different stories, different settings. If you haven't already, identify the kind of story you're writing—genre, mainstream, or literary—and write a one-page scene that shows your character in dialogue with another character, describing the setting and staying with the voice of the kind of story you're writing. If you're not currently writing a story, choose a type of story and create a protagonist for that story who is talking to another character about the setting. Or choose one of the following: