2. Your college library. If you can gain access to a college library, further resources are available to you. More specialized histories of towns, religious groups, etc., may be found here. Don't overlook master's degree theses and doctoral dissertations in such areas as history, sociology, economics and social work.
3. Your state or area historical society. Although these specialize in your own area, you may be surprised to learn what resources are available through interlibrary loan, on microfilm or microfiche, or on computer disk. Genealogical collections often reside in state libraries of this type, too, and could include basic genealogical references for other areas of the country. Such materials may provide valuable insights into long-standing attitudes and values of a region.
4. Government documents. The United States has studied and analyzed virtually every aspect of life in this country, from agricultural history and practices to sexual behavior and consumer spending. Most cities of moderate size or larger have a telephone number listed for assistance to citizens. You can order documents this way, or procure a guide to many documents available by mail order from Washington.
5. Your local bookstore. Most will have a variety of magazines. There probably will also be a "travel" section, and browsing here may uncover a specific guidebook or history you will find relevant. Be sure to consult the bibliographies in the back of such books for leads to other source publications on the subject.
6. Correspondence. Even small towns these days have Chambers of Commerce and/or tourist bureaus. Don't hesitate to write for historical or cultural information. These offices exist to answer such queries, and some material you may receive free of charge. States have tourist bureaus, too, and industrial development offices designed to provide demographic, attitudinal and all sorts of other information for potential tourists, PR firms or businesses considering relocation. This material may answer many questions for you.
7. Computer sources. If you have a CD-ROM drive, you may already have a source of historical information on compact disk. Whole encylopedias are available, and many regional histories. There are several fine commercial products for sale on floppy disks, including some which show historic trends, industrial production, religious groupings, financial standings, and many other aspects of an area's attitudinal life. To find out where to obtain any of these materials for your computer, browse through any of the top monthly computer magazines for a wealth of ads for them.
8. Interviews. Don't forget to ask about them among your friends and associates. You may often find that a friend has a
friend who was raised in the area you're interested in. If you get lucky this way, by all means seek out an interview. People usually love to talk about places in their past, and you will get not only information but a real insight into the attitudes of the person you are interviewing; such attitudes may be typical of the region.
USING THE INFORMATION
Having consulted some or all of these possible sources, you'll be ready to take the same steps another writer would take after visiting an area to study its history and attitudes. Essentially, you will ask yourself:
• What in the history of this place is uniquely formative of prevailing attitudes and feelings?
• What are these prevailing attitudes and feelings?
• How can I present the characteristic area attitudes and their background cause in my story?
• What part does this aspect of setting play in the working out of my story?
If you have done your homework and then honestly decide that there's nothing especially significant in the historical background or regional attitudes of the people as far as your particular story is concerned, well and good. Your effort still will not have been wasted because you can proceed confidently, knowing you aren't likely to make any factual errors such as having a Dallas cabdriver view the world the way one in New York might, or having upstanding citizens openly frequent a roadside bar in a small town in the heart of Southern Baptist country. And more likely you won't just prevent such obvious setting errors. You will also get a keener feel for your entire story world because you will know where the story people have come from — what makes them and their peers "tick."
That's why history and attitude are such an important part of your story setting. Getting them right will not only prevent
mistakes damaging to credibility, it will also help you better plan the events likely to motivate your characters . . . stir them up . . . make them feel passion. Your story will be made more believable at the same time it is drawing additional feeling and even fervor from the historical background and prevailing sentiments of the place.
As an exercise, pause here and consider—on paper—your own area, the place where you live now. Briefly write down what you believe the general feeling of the place is in terms of how people feel about themselves, their setting and their lives, and what they believe in and care about. Then try to find and write down some of the historical background for the area that tended to make people the way they are. Can you identify the attitudes? Can you define any of them as special to your area? Can you find the historical or perhaps sociological reason for them?
Such practice on an area that you know well should help you prepare for checking out an area that's relatively unfamiliar to you.
If you haven't done so earlier, this would be a fine time to consult Appendices 1 and 2. These go into further detail and other aspects of researching a setting and may provide you with additional ideas for investigation of how a place was, and how the past influences the present.
CHAPTER 14
SETTING AND STYLE
Athoroughly detailed study of writing techniques in presentation of story setting is well beyond the scope of this book. But questions often asked —and errors frequently seen in student manuscripts —suggest that a few observations and bits of advice would not be out of order.
Your style as a fiction writer may have already developed over time, or may just be in the process of developing. In either case, it is likely that you will write best if you force yourself never to try to be "fancy" or "inspiring" or anything of that kind in developing your writing style. The best style usually is no visible style at all —prose that is crisp, clean, clear and transparent: a pane of glass through which your reader experiences the story directly, without ever being aware of the words. Far too much "stylish" writing is really affected writing, and while there may be a few readers out there who would appreciate such stuff, the fact is that your story has been lost the first moment a reader starts noticing your style rather than following the story's events.
The bottom line: In handling setting, as in all other parts of your fiction writing, strive for directness and simplicity. Such writing is the most graceful and effective of all.
SOME TRUTHS
It is also a fact that handling setting often involves description of some kind, and it is in description that writers most often fall
prey to the temptation to write "pretty" or "poetic" passages. Therefore, it's vital in talking about setting to begin any discussion of verbal technique with truths which have been stated before, and will always be true:
• Write simply and directly, and don't get fancy.
• Never use a big word when a small one will do.
• Write short sentences. Write short paragraphs.
• Never strain for an effect, and never try to be poetic.
• Remember that clarity is your bedrock stylistic goal.
These rules might all be summarized briefly: When in doubt, take it out. If you are not absolutely certain that a turn of phrase is accomplishing the desired effect—and the story can go on without it—then don't put the phrasing in at all, or if it's in your draft, delete it on rewrite. Few things will disgust a busy editor — or more quickly brand you an amateur —than overwriting.
You know what that is: a seemingly endless round-and-round the verbal rosebush, trying to pile more and more adjectives on something in the setting so it will be "cl
earer." Or tacking a batch of weak adverbs onto a verb that was wobbly to begin with, in an attempt to make the verb more forceful.
Here is an example:
A warmly cheerful and welcoming fire was burning brightly inside the large, dark, sinister cavern, while slow-moving shadows could be discerned on the high, pale walls of rock.
What's wrong with this? Just about everything! Consider: The writer wants to show the setting in a vivid way, but the approach is all wrong. Instead of seeking out strong basic words, the writer stuck on all sorts of qualifying adjectives and adverbs ("warmly cheerful," "welcoming," "large, dark, sinister," etc.) instead of trying to be simple and direct. You may come up with a better rewrite, but here is one possibility:
A campfire blazed inside the great cave. Shadows danced on the high rock walls.
You may quarrel with use of the verb "blazed," and wish to substitute something like "burned brightly." You may argue, too, that "great cave" is not sufficiently evocative. Is "danced" a cliche? Perhaps you can come up with better wording.
Regardless of such quibbles, I think you will agree that the second effort is improved by slashing some of the weak adjectives and adverbs and attempting to find stronger nouns and verbs that don't require such crutches. A good, specific noun will seldom need many adjectives to modify it. A strong action verb will seldom require the help of an adverb. Therefore, it's obvious that you can, as one editor advised me, "look for adjectives and adverbs, and kill them!" or you can possibly avoid the temptation to use them in the first place by seeking out strong specific nouns and strong action verbs.
A further observation about these examples may be in order. You may have noticed that in the original a fire "was burning," while in the suggested revision a "fire blazed." If we had chosen to substitute "burned" for "blazed," the basic meaning would have been the same, but for better style: Always use the simple past tense if you can in describing things. Thus you will not write, "Rain was falling . . . ," but instead will teach yourself to write, "Rain fell. ..." You will not write, "Evening was near-ing. . .," but instead, "Evening neared...." (or perhaps better: "Darkness neared," darkness being more specific than evening).
Also, avoid the passive voice. You will not say things like, "The night was made worse when the rain began . . . ," but instead will say something closer to "The night worsened when the rain began." The use of compound verb forms and weak passives in description is often tempting, but almost always bad. Compound verb forms are not the most direct way to get the job done, and passives are weak; description always walks on the dangerous edge of being too slow and dramatically weak anyway, so don't make the risk greater than it already is.
When this was first pointed out to me years ago, I protested (briefly) that it's not quite the same thing to say "a fire burned" and "a fire was burning." Being a refugee from an English department, I argued that "fire burned" implied that the fire had burned in the past and was now over, while "fire was burning" connoted that it was still burning in the story present. "Pick nits all you want," my writing coach replied. "Try it my way and you'll never go back." He was right. Once I habitually used the simple past tense, all my descriptions of setting seemed magically more vibrant.
Look for weak verb forms, pallid nouns, crutch adjectives and limping adverbs in your own copy. If you find them, fix them!
THE PURPLE PATCH
Another aspect of straightforward descriptive writing style is the ability to avoid poetic flights of fancy and unnecessary big words. You have perhaps encountered such a flight in someone else's copy — surely not your own! — and know why composition teachers call such an effusion a "purple patch."
Here's an example of a purple patch:
Rising, chanting, ever-changing, in a never-ending cacophony of ululation, the zephyr-breath of the mighty planet's ceaseless, restless celestial motion, driven alike by the massive depth of ocean and rising of a miniscule breeze from the golden, petal-like wings of a gossamer butterfly, pressed insistent lips against the diaphanous opacity of the chill pane.
Wow. Gorgeous, huh? —until you stop and figure out what the writer was trying to say, which was: Cold wind blew against the frosty window.
It's been said before, but the point is worth making again. Such outrages against writing style most often occur when the writer has "stopped to describe." Therefore, one good way to avoid the temptation to write purple patches is to seldom stop your storytelling to describe. If you are intent on keeping your setting descriptions brief and maintaining focus on the characters and the plot inside the setting, then few chances to write a purple patch will arise.
Instead of burying yourself, your story and your reader under a trash-pile of verbiage, look for the feel of a place or time, and then seek out concrete details to evoke that feeling. As mentioned in chapter eleven and elsewhere, the feeling might be one of joyfulness or isolation or loneliness. Identify it, then ask yourself what specific concrete details will evoke the feeling in as few words as possible. You can count on your reader to fill in the details if you give him precisely the right clues on which to build.
That's why, for example, I risked using the word "blazed" in an example earlier in this chapter, and why I contented myself with calling the site a "great cave." I am not sure precisely what the word "blazed" will conjure in the reader's mind, but I feel sure it will have something to do with bright, leaping flames, great heat and vigor. Exactly what picture "blazed" will give the reader beyond that, I don't know. But I don't care; his own imagining will be better for him than any further avalanche of details I might try to foist upon him. Similarly, I count on "great cave" evoking in his mind his own mind-picture of the feeling of greatness and cave-ness. Will it be Carlsbad, or an earthen hole he played in as a child? I don't care; I would rather he work from my feeling-evoking words, and draw his own feeling-packed mind-picture, than try to study through some laborious description of mine.
Readers love to draw setting pictures in their own imagination. They will, provided you give them the right feel for the place, and the few precise words designed to evoke that feeling.
How do you find those few precise words? You do so by seeking out specific, concrete details in the setting which will produce the desired evocation. As an example, suppose you first laboriously wrote something unacceptable like the following:
It was a cold and bitter night. Phillip felt chilled, and when the sleet began, he felt colder. Dark clouds rolled in. The mercury fell. Icy wind began to blow. Walking home alone, Phillip was buffeted by the wind.
This is not too bad. Short words, short sentences, little strained "poetry." But it lacks feeling-focus. What are we trying to evoke here? Cold? Wind? Loneliness? Darkness? A short segment like this can't evoke everything at once, and maybe the story situation dictates brevity, as it often does.
But perhaps we can improve things. Let's decide that what we want to evoke in the reader concerning this bit of setting is a feeling of chill and loneliness. Having decided this, we can have a stab at revision something like this:
Alone, Phillip trudged home. Violent wind battered him, driving pinprick sleet into his face.
Possibly this brief segment will get the job done for us. Suppose, on the other hand, we wish to use the same general setting details to evoke a different mood in the reader, one of longing for home. In such a case we might produce a segment like this:
Hurrying against the strong wind, Phillip squinted through the darkness for the first sight of his cabin window. It would be good to get home to the warmth of his stove and the stout protection of the cabin's log walls.
In both of the above examples, notice that indentification of desired feeling provides the framework inside which a brief and focused description can be written.
ADDING CONTRAST
Another helpful gambit you can use in seeking brevity and evocative accuracy is the use of contrast. On its simplest level, what we are talking about here is how a dark cloud will look darker against an other
wise bright sky, or how much more dreary an old building will look if you stand it beside a fine, fresh new one for the sake of the contrast. It always helps the vividness and evocativeness of your writing if you can pinpoint a sharp contrast: barren black tree branches seen against a snow-colored wintry sky, for example, or a scream piercing the total silence of a summer afternoon in the country, or the glitter of diamonds on a black velvet cloth.
The trick here is to identify the object you wish to emphasize, figure out what specific sensuous characteristic of that object should be stressed, and then find the right object to stand it beside, or background to display it against, for the maximum contrast.
In sight contrasts, look for dark against light, smooth against rough, color against pallor, smallness against vastness, or brightness against dullness. In sound contrasts, look for loudness against silence, pleasing sound against discordance, harshness against smoothness. Ask yourself: "What specific aspect of the setting do I want to make vivid?" Then: "What can I place beside it to make it stand out even more?"
Suppose you want to show how loudly that truck is idling at the corner traffic light? First make sure no other cars are on the street when you show it, and make the scene a lazy afternoon or evening, very, very quiet otherwise. Then the truck's idling will be not only loud, but deafening. Or perhaps you would like to emphasize how small a house is, and how isolated; take it out of that tight little woods and stand it alone on a vast and windy hilltop, surrounded by a thousand acres of empty prairie. (Does this mean, incidentally, that you will sometimes tinker with minor aspects of your setting simply to make things more vivid? Of course.)
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