Why care about a story’s setting?


March 2, 2020  •  No Comments

Why care about a story’s setting?

A lot of people think of setting description as the specific surroundings where the action occurs. “There was a red camel in the corner.” “The curtains were blue lace with tiny hearts woven into the fabric.”

This is true. Most of us learn to write this stuff when we’re in grade school. We learn to use our specific and colorful words and our imaginations and once we’ve mastered that, every writing book ever tells us these passages of prose are wrong and bad. This is also true.

Setting is way more than a blob of description.

It’s also the “big picture” where the story was set:  the Wild West, the Weird West, Las Vegas in the 1930s, the Antebellum South. With that comes history, culture, and the way that society works. This is why, in my opinion, some theatre directors take a huge risk when they move Shakespeare or other stories from one time period to another. If a story is integrated into its setting, it relies on the dynamics of that world. It needs the power structure, the cultural norms, and the societal context of that world to inform it.

One reason West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet) worked as a story was because Arthur Laurents transplanted a story about an Italian gang culture in the renaissance (seriously, what were the big families in the Quattrocento but gangs?) to a modern American gang culture. There are enough common elements in terms of social mores, power structure, and all the things that make action and consequence function that the rewritten story still makes sense.  In this way, it’s the setting and all that goes with it that provides an important mechanism for story tension.

Think on a small, specific level (the curtains) and a global one (the Renaissance)

Setting can indicate past, present, or future on both a literal level (story time line) and an emotional one. The book Snow Falling on Cedars (David Guterson) very successfully uses contrasting settings to keep the past and present storylines separate and he makes the tension dance between them.  It’s a courtroom drama about the fallout from a Japanese-American internment camp. The way he uses setting to convey mood is brilliant.

Setting is the difference between a script and a movie. It’s all the information—the colour, the history, and the context—that exists around your dialogue and your plot. It’s your costume and stage sets. It often overlaps with character and motivation. It reveals theme, point of view, culture, power dynamics, and emotion.

Setting grounds the story in a time and place and can convey mind set, culture, mood, and personality. Whether your protagonist hangs out in a historic English pub or a moonshine still in the Kentucky woods says a lot about him. For this reason it can be used for situational irony. Most common are fish out of water stories like the shows Hart of Dixie or Northern Exposure. It is a useful shorthand for establishing character.

Setting is context. Consider that readers may not understand the setting of your story, even if they know the city.  Think of the difference between The Gangs of New York and Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  With a global market for readers, you especially have to explain it to them because other people from other backgrounds or cultures may have no understanding of your story world, even if it is set in modern times.

 

 

Creating Unforgettable Characters


September 30, 2019  •  No Comments

A good book is filled with people we feel we’ve met. We imagine meeting them on the street, or that their name might show up in our inbox.  They exist both inside the book and in an extended version of our own reality because they’ve become part of our consciousness. They think, talk, and act in unique ways that aren’t exactly predictable, but they are knowable.

As a reader, we know these unforgettable characters when we meet them. As a writer, it’s not always that simple.

How Do We Create a Character?

There are plenty of books on the topic and they’re all probably right for some author somewhere. Psychological profiling, archetypes, questionnaires—whatever it takes to get the job started is fine if it works. In truth, I don’t use any of the above until much later in the characterization process. My cast tends to walk into my head and start telling me a story. This is simply my flavor of madness.

Once the story is populated, the real work begins. A hero is fine—a hero who is a puzzle to be solved is so much more enticing. Put another way, the worst-written characters are the ones who fulfill all our expectations. The best ones take us by surprise.

Character is conflict

What makes Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde interesting? Spike and Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Mr. Darcy? Ebenezer Scrooge? They fulfill obvious expectations, but deeper down, they have impulses that are the precise opposite of what they seem. Mr. Darcy appears cold and proud, but he’s really loving and thoughtful. Scrooge is a horrible miser, but he has the capacity for generosity. And our darling vampires are nothing if not contrary.

Putting characters into conflict with each other is necessary to build a plot. Putting them in conflict with themselves makes them infinitely more interesting. Those mentioned above are memorable enough they almost exist outside the stories that spawned them. We may or may not remember the specifics of Jekyll and Hyde, but Stevenson’s character has become an icon for a double life.

Let’s build on this idea some more:

One arc or two or three?

How-to books mumble on about how a story needs a plot with rising action, a climax, and conclusion. Essentially, this is like the clothes hanger for the story—we need a plot structure to provide shape so the book is not one big stream-of-consciousness word barf. There are also character arcs, in which a protagonist grows through internal struggle. If your characters don’t cross the finish line with more self-awareness then when they started, we wonder why we spent 300 pages cheering them on. That’s why authors use both an external and internal story arc to accommodate a character’s conflict with the world plus their conflict with themselves.

Let’s use The Lord of the Rings as an example:

  1. There is a plot arc, which is the external conflict of a story—the rock ’em, sock ’em action component. The hobbits & friends need to chuck the One Ring into Mount Doom. It’s a physical journey with sword fights, drinking, and talking trees.
  2. Then there’s the internal character arc (arc, not orc) which is Frodo’s private war with the ring and his role in the quest. Is he worthy? Can he resist the pull of the dark side? We know he’s brave and true, but the struggle is real. He can’t resist the darkness altogether and Sam has his hands full keeping Frodo together through that long, long trek through the wasteland.
  3. In some cases—and they tend to be truly excellent pieces of writing—there is a second, or thematic character arc that intersects the other two.

The Third Arc

I’ll keep using Frodo as an example. What Tolkien does is interesting. Yes, there’s a good versus evil fight for Frodo’s soul, but the conflict has another significant aspect. Throughout the trilogy, there’s a theme around the survival of community. The elves are dwindling. Mines are abandoned. The industrial revolution rampages through the Shire. Even the Fellowship gets sundered early on. Community and cohesion are difficult to maintain in a fading world.

Frodo—the bookish heir of a rebel uncle—becomes the poster child for this thread. He’s an orphan among a people defined by its blood ties. He’s got friends, but generally speaking he’s outside the norm because of his association with Bilbo, a respected figure but a definite misfit. From there, Frodo becomes increasingly separated from the herd. He loses Bilbo to Rivendell, has to leave his home, and is eventually singled out because of the ring. There is no question he loves the Shire and all it represents, but his ties to it gradually fall away until he leaves Middle Earth altogether.

While this progression of isolation overlaps Frodo’s battle with the ring’s power (good versus evil), it’s also a microcosm of the land’s changing nature and forms a secondary dynamic arc (community versus abandonment/withdrawal). This secondary arc adds a melancholy depth to Frodo’s story. Imagine the change of tone if Frodo went home at the end, had a pack of kids, and drank beer with Sam for the next forty years.

Adding a third arc—one intimately tied to the overarching theme of a story—supercharges the character by creating a resonance that extends beyond their individual circumstances. They become larger than life because they mirror the bigger landscape. The trick is to manage this secondary arc with a light hand—too much and it becomes a ponderous sledgehammer.

To summarize, there is no right or wrong method of writing characters, but inner conflict—especially with contrary impulses—will make your protagonist interesting. Adding multiple arcs to the character will further boost their complexity. After all, real people have many issues in their lives. It stands to reason a realistic character will, too.

 

Addictive world-building


February 7, 2019  •  No Comments

I was thinking about what I wanted most in a story. Some like spooky chills, others the heartache of a great romance. For me, it’s the OMG wonder of discovering an amazing world. Prydain. Middle Earth. Westeros. I love a fully-formed fantasy realm I can walk into and find friends waiting for me. I don’t take to most I find—I’m picky and take a while to settle in—but I’m loyal once it’s won me over.

I think part of the problem with finding a truly satisfying realm is that they’re hard to build. It goes far beyond naming kingdoms and drawing maps. There is a terroir that infuses everything so that the reader instinctively knows the smell and texture of each item in the place. Great authors can spin that out of the aether, making it distinct and complex and madly simple all at once. The characters grow from it (or vice versa) so that even the agents of change are the natural extension of the realm’s internal conflicts. It’s all terribly logical and consistent, as if the reader is encountering a history rather than a piece of fiction.

I read these things and think: I wish I’d written that. And somehow, weirdly, feel as if I have because the author has made it so incredibly real it’s become part of me just by looking at the page.

Is that writing or summoning a world?

Newsletter contest


February 13, 2017  •  63 Comments

This contest ran in my latest newsletter, but it’s open to anyone who finds this. There’s something mysterious in this lovely treasure chest – Jewelry? Gift card? A tiny hellhound of your very own?

You could win whatever is hiding inside this box PLUS a signed backlist title of your choice! International entries welcome.

Leave a comment on this blog post and tell me what you think might be inside the box! I’ll pick a winner on February 19, 2017.

(Treasure chest not included. I had to battle multiple fairies to get this one.)