When a Place Becomes a Character

 The places where stories happen matter, and not just because a story has to occur in something other than the ether - unless you are writing that kind of steampunk/Victorian thing. Setting becomes a character when it evokes a feeling in the reader. It becomes an active character when the setting foreshadows or foretells events. Setting can mirror events - the photo to the right is Pike Place Market - a setting I used in Bound by Ink. It's a cramped, claustrophobic place to meet a serial killer, don't you think? It was a great mirror for the tension in the scene - and that the ramp slops down, possibly into hell, foreshadows a few things that crop up later in that story.
 

The other option is to have the setting contrast the story action and/or the protagonist's mood. Looking at this photo of one of the lovingly restored Victorian homes in Port Townsend, WA, you can see either a beautiful old home, or a frightening, likely haunted, old mausoleum. It entirely depends on your protagonist's frame of mind - which is another great point. Setting is brilliant not just because you get to flex your descriptive muscle in the prose, but because it is a glimpse into the depths of your characters' states of mind. The protagonist and the antagonist aren't likely to see this pretty blue sky and roofline the same way if the house is the antagonist's mad scientist lair. All the sharp wrought iron will look menacing to whoever is being dragged into the  house while bound in chains. The person doing the dragging may be whistling a cheery tune because he adores how well constructed this old house is - no one can hear his victims scream! It's charming!

When you visit a place, any place, and you have an emotional response - good or bad - take a picture. Always take a picture. Even if you take terrible photos - you're storing up not just setting options - you're storing up those emotions. Your aim is to look at something like this rock formation in Ohio and recall what you felt while you were there. If you can do that, chances are you can capture that feeling on the page for your characters when you need it. (In my case, it was 'OMG, I'm looking at the passage of x number of years per layer of rock and that is the coolest thing EVER.' Yes. I'm a dork.)

This photo at left is an old gun battery emplacement in Port Townsend, WA. Fort Warden State Park. Can you not see the zombies shambling up that dirt and grass track toward you? Fine, sunny day. Warm concrete. The undead approach and you go cold. Maybe that's the other reason to take photos of places that evoke a powerful response in you - they suggest their own stories. And when that happens, it's a really good indication that the setting in question IS alive and stepping forward to help drive a character and a story.


Setting matters, but only so much as it evokes emotion, drives characters, and/or moves the plot in some fashion. The fastest and easiest way to get those things is to use a setting that already moves you. Unless you write scifi. Then please. No attempting to breathe vacuum.

More than a Setting

Before I get to the weekly topic, I have some very exciting news! I've posted the first chapter of the as-yet-untitled book seven in the Persephone Alcmedi series over at my personal blog. Last Wednesday I posted the prologue HERE and we peeked in on the Vampire Excelsior's plans. This week...it's Johnny.

http://wolfsbaneandabsinthe.blogspot.com/2013/11/persephone-alcmedi-book-7-chapter-one.html

We've been talking this week about how much is too much when it comes to settings. The other posts have all had some great pointers/info to share. Jeffe says you can "establish" a scene with "a few key hints" and the notion that "anything that isn't directly relevant to the story is too much." Not bad advice. Our special guest poster Lucy Snyder, says the setting "must above all else serve the story" and that "boring is too much."

I'm writing this on Monday so all I've see of the other Word-Whore's contributions this week are Jeffe's and Lucy's installments. (I know KAK will have more sound advice to add on Tuesday. She's pretty savvy, yanno.) I agree with both of the previous posts. Instead of reiterating the same ideas, I'm going to add a bit about how to find those "few key hints" that "above all else serve the story" amid the myriad of possibilities you created in your world building.

My agent, Donald Maass, says in his book Writing the Breakout Novel:

The great novelists of the past and the breakout novelists of today employ many approaches to setting, but all have one element in common: detail. A setting cannot live unless it is observed in its pieces and particulars. A place is the sum of its parts. The emotions that it evokes are most effective when they are specific, better still, when they are unique.

"A place is the sum of its parts." Sure, you could give every last little detail from each blade of grass to each stone in the road to the shape of every cloud visible in the sky but that is not what he means. Obviously, those details would not all be relevant to the story and they would not all be necessary to evoke that special sense of time and place that grounds a character in the story. Unless you are one of those rare writers with a gift for writing prose that reads with all the dreamy lilts of listening to someone like Sean Connery or Patrick Stewart talk, then the superfluous details become the tedium that will bore readers to sleep.

As the author, you can envision so much in this setting--in this world--it can be overwhelming! (It's Tuesday now and I'm editing. See KAK's post...specifically her comments on street construction, decline of water purification station, treasury fluctuations, crop rotations....) So how do you sift through all that possible info to find those special features that bring the most to the scene?

From the book, The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman

Most settings are brought to life by the tiniest details: a stain on the carpet, a cobweb in the corner, a broken window pane. Use these types of details--often flaws or irregularities--to help make settings memorable.

It seems that in following Lukeman's suggestion, you are looking for the 'more bang for your buck' description. That little something that stands out, that seems odd or out of place, and which sticks with the reader because that detail evokes a reaction, perhaps a dread, a worry, or best of all, a question in the reader's mind. How did that window get broken? Why is it yet unfixed? 

Again to quote my agent's book:

The breakout novelist does not merely set a scene; she unveils a unique place, one resonant with a sense of time, woven through with social threads and full of destinies the universe has in store for us all. She does not merely describe a setting, she builds a world. She then sets her characters free in that world to experience all it has to offer.

As the author you must take a good look around the setting, see it in your mind's eye, and ask yourself:

What will my character notice here and how will she react/respond to it?

What unique things will catch the eye of your character? What impact does it have on her? Is there something you thought she might overlook? Something she may react to more strongly than you expected? There can be all kinds of nouns here...items, people, pets, even smells... that are present--or evidence of them while the items, people, pets, smells are absent--and these pieces of the setting help not only evoke the mood of the setting, but enable the author to show us facets of the character. Add it all up to get the sum of its parts and you'll find it's much more than a setting.

World-Building: Spice, Carrot, or Meat?

Setting. World-Building. Whatever you call it, is it a spice in your word stew or is it the carrots?

If it's the meat, we'll be asleep by page five.

Jeffe, ever the champion of "keep it moving" as demonstrated in the many novellas to her name, reminds us in her post that lush world-building is a luxury in which not every story should invest. If your setting is a common/recognizable environment, then a few sentences and you're done. Those sentences are dedicated more to establishing the atmosphere/mood than actual landscape.

However, as Lucy mentioned in her post yesterday, it is possible for setting be a character; especially in SF/F. As such, it merits turns through the footlights. Go ahead, paint the highlights and note the shadows. But don't spend too long on it or you'll distract the reader from the action going on in the spotlight.

What two cents do I have to add? Dear Readers, I still struggle with how and when to dole out the details of the foreign worlds so very vivid inside my head. I desperately want to share the mad genius in the construction of the streets, the decline of the water purification stations, the fluctuations of the treasury, and the cycle of crop rotations...

Yeah, but...No.

I have to rein in my enthusiasm; otherwise, my word stew is really a turducken and a food coma is imminent.  I mean, I have to cut way, way back. I'm one of those authors who has to heed the "use less than 10% of what you want to tell them and parse it out slowly" advice.  My first drafts are inevitably too heavy on the details of the world. I edit my world-building by forcing myself to view everything through my protagonist's eyes and by answering the following questions:

Would she actually notice that? Why?

Non-natives to a land make note of the bigger picture in the beginning and pay attention to details when events force them to. Indigenous people notice change to their environment, and that change is a precursor to an event. It might seem a subtle difference between when/how details are revealed, but it's a difference that plays into the ever-important pacing of a scene and the story.

Dear Readers, do you have a method for policing your world-building? I'd love to learn how you balance your word stew!

Setting: How Much Is Too Much?

With our Monday Word-Whore gallivanting around England, we have a special guest for you today.

Lucy Snyder has writing chops that spans a broad spectrum of genre styles. She is the author of the urban fantasy Spellbent series including: Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, and Switchblade Goddess, as well as Orchid Carousals featuring characters from the Spellbent series. She won a Bram Stoker Award in 2010 for her poetry collection Chimeric Machines. Her Sparks and Shadows won the 2008 Editor's Choice Black Quill Award for Best Dark Genre Collection, and her humor collection  How to Install Linux on a Dead Badger was released in 2007.

Setting: How Much Is Too Much?
by Lucy A. Snyder

Hi everyone! I hope everybody had a fabulous Halloween last week!

Knowing that I think a whole lot about world building, James asked me to guest blog this week and talk a little bit about setting. More specifically, he asked me to talk about when a writer has focused too much on his or her setting.

There’s no cut-and-dried answer to the question of “How much setting is too much?” It depends on the type of story you’re telling. If you’re writing a lean, action-packed thriller set in the present day, all you need are a few vivid strokes and you’re off to the races:

The location was one of those sad old mansions in Bel Air. Ostentatious, but had seen better days. Money is so fickle here in L.A. and a big old house is like an aging mistress with a plastic surgery fetish. It’s more economical to just buy a cheap, flashy new one than keep on renovating the old one. Otherwise, you wind up renting the place out for porn shoots just to break even on the roofing bills.

There was a pair of twisted pomegranate trees guarding the open gate and the ground beneath them was gory with broken crimson fruit that crunched and splattered under the wheels of my little black Mini. Pulling into the wide circular driveway, I kept expecting to spot Norma Desmond burying her pet chimpanzee in the overgrown rose garden. I felt better once I saw Sam’s red ‘84 Corvette with its vanity plates that read HAMRXXX. It was parked near a massive wooden door that looked like it ought to open into a medieval Spanish dungeon. 

– from Money Shot by Christa Faust

Faust’s descriptions are vivid and as compact as the narrator’s Mini. She doesn’t spend time describing the shingles, or the windowpanes; she lets the reader fill in the rest because she knows most all of us have seen plenty of Hollywood mansions in movies or on TV. Instead, she focuses on the pomegranates, and in doing so creates great gruesomely foreboding imagery. Even better, she continues to build the narrator’s character as she describes the seedy world she works in.

But in some stories and novels, the setting is so crucial that it functionally serves as another character in the narrative. It could be a fantasy wonderland, an ancient house full of secrets, an astonishing spaceship, or a grim alien dystopia. In these cases, the reader will want to see the setting unfold before them and spend more time in compelling descriptions of structures and landscapes.

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an, idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple of large gantry cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.
Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.
             – from The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin spends more words describing a wall than Faust spends describing an entire mansion. But she’s not merely describing the wall, is she? She’s using it to convey the isolated culture the characters live in.

Your setting must above all else serve your story. And if you look at the two examples above, you soon realize that good descriptions of setting keep the story flowing. You don’t just drop everything for the sake of pages of static description; adept writers maintain narrative momentum whether the setting is briefly described or lovingly detailed.

So, what’s too much? Boring is too much. Keep it interesting, and keep it moving.

       For more on Lucy see her website: http://www.sff.net/people/lucy-snyder/

Setting and World-Building - Keep It Concise!

On my way home through LAX last week, I passed this little scene. That airport is terrific for having these charging/work desk laptop stations. Both mom and daughter were equally absorbed in what they were doing. (The daughter's device is also plugged in.) Some might complain that they should be talking to each other, but I love that they shared this - such a companionable moment.

You can draw a lot from the setting. If I hadn't told you, you might not have guessed it was an airport. But the woman's carry-on bag suggests travel. The tile floor looks like a public space and the big pillar tells you it's a large one. The tropical plants hint at a warm weather location. You might be able to figure out that the bench to the left is a shoeshine stand - also indicative of an airport, bus or train station - and the keen-eyed might catch that the slice of lighted sign to the right is a concourse map. Perhaps there are other clues you picked up - if so, share!

In this way, we talk about a picture being worth a thousand words. (Although the above was only 180.) I've never particularly liked that adage. (It turns out to have kind of a weird provenance. And if you go to that link, consider donating the $3 to wikipedia's fundraiser - they're a non-profit and deserve at least that much.) Also, this bit is really amusing:

Another ad by Barnard appears in the March 10, 1927 issue with the phrase "One Picture Worth Ten Thousand Words," where it is labeled a Chinese proverb. The Home Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Familiar Phrases quotes Barnard as saying he called it "a Chinese proverb, so that people would take it seriously." Soon after, the proverb would become popularly attributed to Confucius.

The reason I don't like it - and ironic to me that it's originally attributed to a newspaper editor - is that it implies that words fail where a picture succeeds. The adage also suggests that many, many words are needed to convey a story.

I don't believe this.

Now, I'm a concise writer. Always have been, really. My Master's Thesis was the shortest in the department - and not because the project wasn't complex. It was a honed-down PhD project. My developmental edits are unfailingly to add text - I'm *never* asked to trim words. And I know this leaves some readers behind. At the same time, I have trouble reading authors who feel to me like they retread the same concepts/problems/angst endlessly.

Just last week, I got involved in a Twitter convo where someone said something along the lines of "in a 100K book, you can't have good world-building and [X]." I don't really remember what [X] was - it might have been a good romantic arc. But we were discussing the balance of romance, action and world-building in a story and which preponderance made it fantasy vs. romance. At any rate, I said that I thought an author can do excellent world-building in 100K, regardless of the rest of the story.

Key to Jargon for non-industry types:
100K -> 100,000 word novel. The typical novel ranges from 80K to 120K
World-building -> creating a world different from our reality, particularly relevant in fantasy where the world is *entirely* different from ours, e.g., also knows as setting

 It doesn't take a lot to establish the setting. Just as in the picture above, a few key hints tell you everything you need to know. I think this is important. Some authors get heavy into world-building, wanting to tell you all about it - from the ecosystem to the various races all the way up to the thousand-year history. You'll note that all of that stuff is BACKGROUND. As in, the stage setting. It's not the actual story. Yes, the author absolutely needs to know those things, but - and this is a big BUT - she doesn't need to tell the reader all of it.

So, in answer to the Bordello's Topic of the Week (see how I made you read all the way through to find out? I would say clever me, but I didn't do it on purpose), Setting: How Much is Too Much?, I'd say anything that isn't directly relevant to the story is too much. Sure, that internecine war over corn crops is a great bit, but it's not relevant until the corn shortage impacts the main characters.

Notice that I specify main characters there - no secondary spin-offs away from the primary action. I know this isn't the Fantasy Way, but it's the Jeffe Way, for better or worse. This way I have plenty of words left over for important stuff.

Like sex scenes. :D