Rewrite:
* The towering live oak dwarfed the one story shack built against its trunk.
[The change here gives the reader a clearer idea of the type of tree and its size.]
* The leaning cypress tree once must have stood seventy feet tall or more, but now looked like a crooked-back elder at half that height. [The change here gives a specific tree type plus a hint of the tone or feel of the passage.]
* The broad-leafed magnolia once was my height, but now arched taller than my five-foot-seven stretch. [The change here added a specific tree plus shows the POV character and a hint of his or her back story.]
Ignoring Setting details or using vague, non-specific details as a default mode of writing leaves your reader at a distance from your story and that’s what we’re looking at with learning to write Active Setting. But always consider the intention behind why you’re showing Setting at all.
Here’s an example of Setting that does not need too many details or words because the Setting is not being used to show information about the POV character or to orient/anchor the reader into a change in the story’s location. The Setting is used to show the reader only one thing:
“Woods surrounded the clearing in which Merlotte’s stood, and the edges of the parking lot were mostly gravel. Sam kept it well lit, and the surrealistic glare of the high parking lot lights made everything look strange.”
–Dead Until Dark – Charlaine Harris
In the above example the author wanted to keep the reader focused on the feel, the emotion of the Setting, and nothing more. Look what would have happened if Harris had chosen to overwrite this Setting.
“Piney woods with a few wild magnolia trees surrounded the ninety foot by ninety foot clearing in which Merlotte’s stood, and the edges of the square parking lot were mostly gravel of the light grey variety, clashing with the red of the Georgia soil. Sam kept the lot well lit with at least six vapor-arc lights high overhead and a spotlight near the front door of the bar. The surrealistic glare of the high parking lot lights made everything look elongated and warped, like looking into one of those mirrors at carnivals.”
See? All this detail shifts the focus away from the mood of the Setting and can slow the story pacing.
Note: Be aware of the intention of using Setting details. If the reader needs to know the type of tree, then show it. But if they don’t need that information, if it doesn’t add in some way to your story, then leave it out.
PART 3: Start creating your own library of books where the author creates the world of the story in enough detail that you as a reader feel you are on scene. Notice particularly how these authors use Setting to show characterization and sensory detail. Look at where and how much Setting detail is used.
Note: We’re always aiming for that balance in your story between no Setting or very little, and too much or unnecessary Setting.
RECAP
* A POV character that feels comfortable or at home in his or her environment will not see or notice the same details as a character who feels threatened or uncomfortable in that same environment.
* If your POV character is arriving in a place that hasn’t been described in depth earlier in your story, the reader will be more open to slowing your story pacing in order to orient or anchor the reader as to where the character is, but only if the Setting matters in some way in your story.
* The more narrative in your story, the slower your pacing, so thread your Setting details in judiciously and intentionally. If the piano in the corner of a room is meant to show the reader the environment of a character then add the piano. But if a couch and tables are described because they happen to be in a living room, and serve no other function, then refrain from allocating words to their description.
* Be specific in your details versus vague. A Ming vase shows more than a pretty vase.
Part 2
USING SUBJECTIVE SETTING DETAIL TO REVEAL CHARACTER
One of the ways that Setting can work harder in your stories is by using it to reveal something about the character viewing the Setting. Instead of stopping story flow to tell the reader Joe is a former Special Forces operative or that Fran loves children, you show this as you filter what they see through their experiences, personalities, backgrounds.
Here’s a generic Setting example:
The street was a block long with three-story buildings on either side. Most of them brick. One was built out of concrete. All had steps leading down to the sidewalk. Five trees had been planted along the outer curb and several cars were parked along the street.
Pretty bland and non-descript. The reader sees buildings, but not much else. But look what happens when we take our Joe and Fran from above and revisit this Setting:
Joe stood on the corner, with the widest viewpoint of the 400-meter long street running east to west. Buildings squatted, all of uniform height and width, three-stories on either side. Most of them brick, but one of Soviet-grey concrete. Hide sights for a sniper? Possibly, but nothing stood out. Several areas of vulnerability and strength — the largest areas of view, but no faces at the windows or along the rooftops. Good. Escape route would be dead ahead or behind, unless he could access the buildings and use the roof. No alleys to create choke points, garbage cans that could contain a bomb, or loose items, backpack, boxes that could hide an IED. The types and number of vehicles were what he expected on a quiet street, except for the big van that could be surveillance, especially with its out-of-state plates and dark tinted windows. The one with leaves from one of the scrawny trees fronting the sidewalk littered on its roof, which meant it’d been there for a while.
Do you get a clearer image of not only the street, but of Joe and his background? The reader experiences the street on a deeper level and is right there with Joe, seeing what he’s seeing, and learning a lot about him from how he views the Setting.
Let’s see how child-loving Fran might see the same street.
The street stretched a block long with the sounds of kids of all ages shouting and laughing, noise that zipped from the three-story buildings on either side. Most of the apartments were brick — the old fashioned-kind of brick that screamed genteel families and industrious lives. One building stood out — being concrete, as if the people who lived there didn’t care so much about their surroundings. Steps led down from each home to the cracked sidewalk, filled with chalk drawings and hopscotch squares. Five boxwood trees marched along the outer curb, one with a droopy Happy Birthday balloon snagged in its branches. Several mini-vans and SUVs parked along the street, waiting for the next trip to school or soccer.
So what did you learn about Fran? About what matters in her life? What she wants more of in her world just based on how she subjectively focused on this city block?
Note: How the Setting is revealed says a lot about the character.
Joe can’t get away from threat assessment whereas Fran is focused on the happy families she sees living there, or the possibilities of happy families. The writer needs to be aware that the relationship between the POV character and the Setting is what allows the reader to see/experience the story on a deeper level.
It’s important to remember that place can and should be filtered through a specific character’s emotions, impressions, viewpoint, and focus — this is how it reveals character and why it is that what one character sees in a Setting can be more important than the Setting itself. Ignoring the powerful use of characterization and Setting decreases the subtext of your story and also decreases the immediacy a character feels in your story world. If your POV character simply walks through a Setting with nothing revealed except that the character is now at a store, on a street, returning home, you are showing your readers that this Setting doesn’t matter that much to the story. So if it does matter, show it!
Note: Don’t use Setting simply as window dressing.
RIGHT INFORMATION/ RIGHT SIGNALS
Don’t confuse the reader. They are going to come into your Setting with very little context
, so they'll be trying to visualize the who as well as the where and when of the location and how it feeds into your story. So you might go back and edit to make sure you're:
* Sharing the right information and sending the right signals for that character. Fran would not think of offensive and defensive positions and Joe would not notice chalk drawings unless they constituted a threat.
* Filtering the Setting through one character’s experience, emotions and mindset at a time.
* Not stopping the story flow to show place, or details of a place, unless that place reveals something that’s important to know about the characters.
Note: Adding Setting description is not necessarily an intrusion on the page, but can be an extension of the character’s communication. Important to realize if your first drafts are heavy on showing characters via their dialogue or movement.
REVEALING CHARACTER THROUGH SETTING
Here’s the beginning of a Setting passage from a Nancy Pickard mystery. This novel is part of a series, so the author chooses to reveal character via Setting rather than simply repeat what readers of the series may have already learned. You discover so much about this couple by what the POV character sees just by looking around her own living room.
Our furniture didn’t match, at least not in theory, but it fit together perfectly in practice. We’d used my favorite clear, bright colors — yellows, oranges, reds — and mixed them with his favorite deep brown wood tones, so the house had an autumnal atmosphere all year long, kind of crisp and cheerful and cozy all at once. There were always books and magazines littering the rooms like scattered leaves, and often a week’s worth of newspapers trailing from the kitchen to our bedroom upstairs and the bathrooms down to the living room and finally into recycling. And books, so many books it looked as if a convention of librarians had dropped by with armloads and joyously tossed it all up in the air and dumped everything, leaving us to sort through the detritus on our deliciously erratic quest for wisdom.
–Confession – Nancy Pickard
The passage continues on, but serves so well revealing who these characters are. It gives the reader a broader understanding of who they are, as a couple, and individually by what they surround themselves with — these two are comfortable with themselves, casual and intelligent.
What if Pickard chose to tell, not show? What if she wrote:
Our home reflects the fact we are intelligent people comfortable with our lives and who we are.
Since this novel is part of a series, as the stories move forward Pickard does not necessarily need to describe this room in this much detail because the readers of the series will remember this room. In another book the author could choose to highlight a different room in the house — the kitchen, bedroom, or even the garage — so new readers to the series, as well as the series readers, can experience this home on a deeper level, see these characters by their environment and feel a part of the world of the story.
I’m not saying that in every story you want this much Setting description for every character, or that you have to reveal character every time, but I do want you to think in terms of how would this one specific POV character relate to this Setting versus a different character? It’s a great place to open up opportunities to reveal your character to the reader in different ways.
Let’s examine another example of characterization being shown through Setting.
“Out of the way, please. Sheriff investigator. Come on now. Out.”
Merci Rayburn ducked under the ribbon and continued down the walk. Her heart was beating fast and her senses were jacked up high, registering all at once the cars hissing along Coast Highway to her left, waves breaking on the other side of the building, the citizens murmuring behind her, the moon hanging low over the eastern hills, the smell of ocean and exhaust, the night air cool against her cheeks, the walkway slats bending under her duty boots. She figured a place like this, ocean front in San Clemente, would run you two grand a month and you still got termites in your walkway and spider webs high in the porch corners.
–Red Light – T. Jefferson Parker
This one paragraph description opening the story shows a lot about the character through how she looks at the Setting. The reader is not introduced to the crime scene as a laundry list of narrative description — building, location, time of day. No, the author threads all of this information throughout the character’s description of the Setting in such a subtle way that the reader is pulled deeper into the story and the skin of the POV character while actively moving the story forward.
We learn that Merci can multi-task and take in many different details at once, a good characteristic for an investigator to have, and something the author can use to slip in other important details later in the story without the reader feeling its strange for Merci to notice. The paragraph also lets us know that Merci covers her uncomfortable emotions with snarky thoughts — a place like this, ocean front in San Clemente, would run you two grand a month and you still got termites in your walkway and spider webs high in the porch corners. Later, if Merci does this again, the reader can assume she’s uncomfortable in some way.
In the next example, the author uses Setting description to show the POV character’s thought process and where he’s coming from as well as filtering in insights about a secondary character. The POV character, Joe Pike, has been assigned to protect the life of a spoiled rich girl. Two attempts have already been made on her life, the latest one while she’s been in Pike’s custody, so he’s now taking charge of where he’s stashing her and they are moving to a new location [remember when you shift your characters you shift your readers and they need to become anchored in place all over again]. Look at what Joe Pike reveals about himself, and about his impressions of the girl, in this one paragraph of Setting.
The girl was moody getting out of the car, making a sour face to let him know she hated the shabby house and sun-scorched street smelling of chili and epazote. To him, this anonymous house would serve. He searched the surrounding houses for threats as he waited for her, clearing the area the way another man might clear his throat. He felt obvious wearing the long-sleeved shirt. The Los Angeles sun was too hot for the sleeves, but he had little choice. He moved carefully to hide what was under the shirt.
She said, “People who live in houses like this have deformed children. I can’t stay here.”
–The Watchman – Robert Crais
We not only get a sense of Joe Pike looking for threats and assessing safety issues, he’s here not because the neighborhood is safe, but because he can keep her safe here. The house is anonymous. He doesn’t think about the people in the houses or the paint job or anything but security. This also shows a lot about the intrinsic differences between him and the girl he’s guarding by her response to the Setting and what he’s seeing of her response. A lot going on in one paragraph and it never stops the forward momentum of the story.
Let’s look at another example, this time from an author I always study for her ability to make every word do double duty. In this description we’re about a third of the way into the story and the POV character is looking for a tenuous lead on her missing ex-sister-in-law. See if you can tell about what the POV character thinks about her ex-sister-in-law by what she observes of the surroundings and interior of the woman’s cabin.
But first let’s look as if the author was writing from First Draft to Finished Version.
Note: Since I am using a published author’s work, I’m imagining a rough first draft. No telling how the author wrote initially or how many drafts the author used to get to the final product. What I want you to look at are the possibilities you can apply to your own work if you’re currently lacking in Setting detail and ways to add Characterization via that detail.
[First Draft] I drove my vehicle into the hills to my sister-in-law’s house.
Bland. No sense of location. All the writer did was get the character from Point A to Point B.
[Second Draft] I drove my rig into
the hills above Santa Barbara and when I arrived at my sister-in-law’s place, I stopped and checked it out.
A little better. Now the reader knows where the POV character is, but we’re not experiencing any of what that character is experiencing or the interaction she’s having with what she’s seeing.
[Final Version]
The sun was flaring red in the west when I drove my white Explorer up a gully toward Tabitha’s house, past sandstone boulders and gray-green brush. The air smelled thick with mustard and eucalyptus. The view of the city, two thousand feet below, was spectacular. Santa Barbara lay like a velvet sash between the mountains and the Pacific, smooth and glimmering.
The house itself looked neglected. Faded gray paint curled from the wood siding, and weeds spread across the lawn, humped and matted, like an overgrown beard. When no one answered my knock, I looked in the front window. The living room held some thriftshop chairs and a work table covered with pens, pencils, and drawings. In the dingy kitchen, shopping bags bulged with cans of creamed corn and SPAM. Was that what she cooked for Brian? No wonder he had requested sea duty.
Writing Active Setting Book 1: Characterization and Sensory Detail Page 3