writing the heart of your story (19 page)

With many of my novels I pondered long and hard as to where I should set the story. Oftentimes I knew I needed a city backdrop, but which city? With
Intended for Harm
, my modern-day Bible rendition of Jacob and Joseph, I waffled back and forth between Los Angeles and San Francisco—two cities I was very familiar with. But I decided to go with LA because I’d grown up there and felt I could capture the era of 1971 to present day the best by drawing from my own experiences and memories. But I could have set that novel in any city. Yet, once I made that choice, I knew I would have to make that setting live inside my characters as they lived there in my story.

You may choose a familiar place in which to set your novel, and we’ve all heard the line about how we should only write about what we know (which I don’t agree with—we should only write what we’ve researched well). But when we write about a place we know, we can save ourselves a lot of work researching, and we can often bring believability to that place because of our experience there. What I’d like you to think about, though, as you dive deep into setting, is how certain places make you feel and why. We link setting to events in our lives, and those events contain an emotional content.

Use Your Setting to Highlight Theme and Character

When choosing settings for your scenes, you want to think about the kinds of places that will allow the emotions, needs, dreams, and fears of your characters to come out. Certain places will trigger these things to come to the surface and will stir memories. Your character has a past, and even if she never visits any of the places in her past in your novel, other places can draw out feelings and memories. This happens to us all the time.

Of course, if you are putting your characters in places they’ve been before, or the same town they’ve been living in their whole life, those memories and feelings are closer to the surface. The point is, you want to use your setting to help bring out your themes, drive your plot, and reveal character. You don’t have to do this, but by ignoring setting you are missing out on a great tool in your writer’s toolbox that you can use in a powerful way.

Earlier I had you think about the places in your past that evoked special memories or feelings. There will be moments in your novel when you want your character to realize something, learn something, change in some way, be affected profoundly. You can call setting into play in these instances. You want the protagonist’s relationship to her world to grab you. And you can bring her world alive with rich detail by showing her world through her eyes and the effect that world has on her.

Ask Your Character

Here are some questions you can ask regarding the setting your character finds herself in, whether it’s the overall setting of the novel or a particular place in a particular scene you want to write:

* What might be special about this place that a person passing through might not notice?

* How does she feel when she is there?

* What memory or emotion does the place evoke in her and why? Can you come up with something that happened there that ties in with the wound from her past? To a hope or dream she may have had but lost somewhere along the way?

* How does she look at not just the place but the kind of life she has there (professional, family, community)?

* What is her one special secret place she likes to go to and what does she do there?

* What is the one place she avoids and would never go to?

* What can she notice while she is there that no one else notices?

* What special thing can you have happen in this special place that reveals something secret about her? About her dreams? About her fears?

* What one memory can you come up with that is triggered by her being in this place?

* What was her happiest moment in this place? Her saddest?

* If she has come back after a period of time, how has this place changed for her, and how does that change make her feel? Happy, sad, nostalgic, fearful?

* What conflicting feelings does she have about being there?

Setting That Triggers Memories

One novel that comes to my mind in posing these questions is Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams. This book is all about a character who is dealing with setting. Her protagonist has returned to the town she grew up in after many years. Throughout the novel as she deals with her senile father, the neighbors she thought she knew, and her memories that come back to haunt her, we watch how this place and her past assault and change her radically. It’s a book all about how setting can trigger change and awareness. How it can make us step back and assess our present lives in the light of our past.

So, as you think about setting for your novel overall and for individual scenes, think about the themes you are bringing out. Think about not just the plot points the setting can help reveal but also the deep character traits that can be triggered by locale and environment. We like to stroll down memory lane—both figuratively and literally. Sometimes we do it out of a masochistic desire to feel hurt or pain, or to wallow in painful memories. Other times it’s out of nostalgia, to try to capture a feeling we somehow lost along the way. These are things your characters can do too. They are human things we humans do.

So when you get ready to write a scene, don’t just plop your character in the closest coffee shop down the street. First think about what you need to reveal in the scene. Then think of the best place to put your character so that this moment in the scene will be enhanced or triggered by the setting. Let her look at something she’s seen before but in a different way. Then watch what happens.

Seeing the World through Your Character’s Eyes

One of the essential things you need to do in your first scene particularly is ground your protagonist in her setting. Just writing that made me blow out a breath. Why? Because I edit and critique many manuscripts that contain really dull narrative about the setting. Most common is the scene that goes underway for a paragraph or two and then suddenly inserts an author interruption in which I read a number of paragraphs (or pages) telling all kinds of details about the scenery, locale, and the world the protagonist is in. The problem is this information is all detached from the POV character.  The world must always be seen through your character’s eyes, not be described to the reader by the author in an info dump.

Show Her World

At some point you made a decision to set your story in a particular locale and time period. And in choosing your first scene you thought of a specific place, time of year, time of day (or at least you should have). I read one best-selling novel (which was near the top of my “worst books” list) that didn’t even tell the reader what part of the US the story was set in until somewhere around page 150, and it only said “the South.” There was no sense of place, and certainly not in the protagonist’s POV.

Maybe your plot is highly dependent upon your locale, as many novels are. The setting is often like a character, evoking the South, for example (Gone with the Wind or The Secret Life of Bees) or a particular country or a type of natural environment like the wilderness or the Arctic Circle. But whether or not the actual location is intrinsically tied in with your plot, you want the setting to be experienced and expressed by your character—not by you, the author. Remember—playgoers don’t come to the show to hear the playwright; they want to watch the play. And so it is with a novel.

What Makes Setting Special for Your Character?

That’s the question you should be asking—not just for your first scene but in all your scenes. As you think about beginning your novel and putting your character somewhere in some time, stop and think about how she feels about being there. Once you can tap into how she interacts with the place in which she lives, works, and grows, you’re halfway there. You want to show the scenery not just through her eyes but with an emotional response. Once you do that, your setting will become alive and vibrant.

I mentioned earlier a book that I think is one of the most powerful books in terms of evoking setting: Pat Conroy’s
The Prince of Tides
. The book oozes with setting, and it’s so intertwined with his characters that you feel you are there, sensing what they sense and experiencing the locale in a truly deep and personal way. Conroy doesn’t accomplish this by writing pages of description.

Sure, there’s a lot of description of Colleton, SC. How is it I remember the name of that place after having read that book two decades ago? Because he made me feel as if I’d lived there. And his narrative writing is evocative and beautiful (which is important too). But his descriptions work because they are so enmeshed with his protagonist, Tom Wingo, that you can feel it. The best way to avoid a big information dump every time you introduce a new place is to feel, see, hear, smell, and emotionalize the setting in your character’s POV.

Think about
. . . places you’ve lived. Try to lock on to a few memories of very specific spots, like a park or school playground, that is linked to a powerful memory. Maybe it’s a very ordinary place that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else but it holds a special meaning for you. Think of a place where you felt hurt, where something happened that upset you, where an embarrassing or hurtful incident occurred. Close your eyes and see what you notice about the details about that place.

If you have a scene to write, ask the questions above and try to pick a setting that will be perfect for what your scene needs to accomplish. If you are in the rewrite stage and you have a flat or boring scene set in a boring place, think of a new setting in which to unfold this scene, and pick something that will trigger a feeling or memory in your character that will help advance the plot or reveal something significant about your character.

Chapter 27: Space and Time

“Clocks slay time . . . time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”

~William Faulkner

Sol Stein, the famous editor, author, and writing instructor, has a very short chapter in his classic book Stein on Writing that he calls “Creating the Envelope.” As I looked through my numerous books on writing craft, I drifted toward his book (which happens a lot), and was reminded again of the best advice to give writers regarding setting details. I discussed in the last chapter of exploring your character’s feelings and responses to setting, to make setting personal and dynamic in your novel, as well as to give it heart. There’s nothing more boring in a novel than a paragraph of dry narrative to describe each new place your character finds himself in (well, it’s up there with trite dialog). But in this chapter I want to talk about boiling down the essence of a locale or setting in a scene, and Stein’s “envelope” really is the best way to do it.

Here’s what he says: “Writing fiction is a delicate balance. On the one hand, so much inexperienced writing suffers from generalities. The writer is urged to be specific, particular, concrete at the same time. When the inexperienced writer gives the reader detail on character, clothing, settings, and actions, he tends to give us a surfeit, robbing the reader of one of the great pleasures of reading: exercising the imagination. My advice on achieving a balance is to . . . err on the side of too little rather than too much. For the reader’s imagination, less is more.”

Less Really Is More

I’ve often said this very phrase to my editing clients, and I really believe it’s true—not just in description but in about every aspect and element in a novel. Less spoken, more implied. Less shown, more left up to the imagination. Go ahead and freewrite a page or two about a new setting your character has entered. Maybe she’s just stepped out of an airport terminal in a foreign country. Play with her immediate reactions, the smells and sounds that trigger memories and make impressions. Describe everything and everyone she sees until you have the whole picture before you.