Setting (10 page)

Suppose again that your setting is the mountain town described above, with only its friendlier aspects identified. Suppose that Ted, your viewpoint character, learns something previously unknown about the setting, as in the following example:

"I love the mountain behind the town," Ted told Maxwell. "It gives a feeling of solidity —strength. You just know this town is as solid as that granite."

Maxwell's face twisted with pain. "Solid as that granite, eh? That's all
you
know, my friend."

"What do you mean?" Ted shot back.

Maxwell squinted upward at the rock face overhanging the buildings, and pointed. "You've seen those deep fissures, the shadowy cracks in the face?"

"Of course. What. . ."

"Those cracks go deep, Ted. It isn't generally known, but the entire face of that mountain is crumbling. That granite is rotten. Give us the slightest earth tremor, or even a heavy and prolonged rainstorm, and the face of that seemingly solid mountain could fall right onto this town — wipe it out in an instant."

This new aspect of the setting changes everything. It has to jolt your character into a reassessment of everything, and possibly change the course of the story from that moment forward.

Often most dramatic of all is the basic, abrupt change in the setting itself. Such a change upsets all expectations and must result in new plot developments.

When I mention change in the setting, I am not talking about actually moving the locale of the story, although you might elect to do that sometimes, too. Here I refer to having something change drastically in the essential makeup of the existing story backdrop. For example, rather than having Jennifer move from Peoria to San Francisco, we would stay in Peoria, but have three closely timed murders create an atmosphere of terror and suspicion inside the same general physical environment. Or, rather than leaving our car race at the Indianapolis 500 and changing the setting to Dayton, Ohio, we would stay at Indianapolis but show the sky clouding over, threatening a dangerous downpour on the track.

Or perhaps the setting could change in a way similar to the following example:

The Sparger family had been near the heart of power in Middletown for more than fifty years. Ted's father and his father before him had been leaders of the local Democratic Party's machinery, and had always had a voice in political decisions. It was this political power that had made Jim so confident he could get the block of Main Street re-zoned to allow him to tear down the old bank building and sell the property for a new apartment complex.

By midnight, however, as the election returns kept coming in, he saw that everything in this comfortable world of his had suddenly changed.

"We've lost," the Democratic chairman told him bitterly around
1 a.m
. "This is no longer our town. We have no control now. Nothing is ever going to be the same again."

Thus the physical setting is the same, but the cultural-political setting has become vastly different, and for people like Jim it is really no longer the same setting at all.

Changes inside the setting are almost always threatening to story characters in some way, and because they are threatened, those characters do something about it. And when characters do something about it, your plot is jostled off dead center.

A change in the setting can also be used much more dramatically, of course, to make the plot action change as well, and instantly. If your quiet suburban hospital suddenly catches fire, this change in the setting has instantaneous results in the plot

as people run for safety and/or try to put the fire out.

What's the moral here? Simply this: Any time you feel a need to move your plot along, look at the possibility of introducing a real or just perceived change in the setting you've been using, or changing the way you've been describing the setting. A dark cloud scuds across the sun, plunging the street into darkness; a character learns that someone died in this rented house last year; suddenly the town no longer feels friendly; a rock tumbles and a landslide begins to gain momentum. In each case a different reader perception of the setting has started us toward movement in the plot.

ENHANCEMENT OF TENSION

In virtually all such situations the change does more than motivate characters to do something, thus advancing the plot; it also increases dramatic tension in both the characters and your reader. You can capitalize on this fact by consciously tailoring your setting change to increase tension in any of the following ways (or with a combination of them):

1. by darkening the mood of the story

2. by introducing new threatening element(s)

3. by creating mystery

4. by overturning previous character expectations

5. by demanding immediate action.

In an earlier chapter, a suspense novel by John Miles,
The Night Hunters,
was mentioned in an illustration. The same novel might be used as a source of illustrations of all the points just listed.

Two paragraphs in chapter two of the novel begin to darken the mood as follows:

She wished . . . that she hadn't found that Bartelson had died by his own hand. There was something still depressing about the picture that the scant facts portrayed: a man coming west, as they said, to make good, and doing

all the "right" things —serving in the army, opening his own business, serving the community. But for Bartelson it had all gone sour. Ruth tried to imagine how it must have been, staking one's life in this remote place, walking every day under these brooding old trees, feeling the heat of late summer suck the energy out of every pore, watching the forces that no one could understand take everything that had been worked for, saved, built against the future.

She shivered again, for no reason, and hugged her arms about herself. . . .

The first paragraph breaks almost perfectly in half, first recapping new and worrisome information just learned about the setting; then, with the "Ruth tried to imagine" sentence, moving into the viewpoint character's feelings and using emotionally charged words like "remote" and "brooding" to darken the mood.

Such work on the mood of the setting is especially important in a novel such as
The Night Hunters,
set in a small southeastern Oklahoma town which ordinarily would not be thought of as threatening. Many short passages clearly designed to darken the mood are found throughout the novel.

The book is, however, not merely a mood piece but a suspense novel. Only a few pages after the segment quoted above, another character close to Ruth is seen driving home late at night. Here there is another touch of the darkness of the first paragraph, and then the introduction of a new threatening element:

Preoccupied with her and his own feelings, Doug drove the few blocks to the little house he had rented. He did not think deeply into the questions she had raised about the missing records or seeming lies, because he well enough understood the clannish, suspicious nature of the people of Noble. It was simply one more manifestation of their kind of hate, he told himself. It meant nothing more. . . .

Because of his preoccupation, Doug Bennett did not see the black Ford cruise quietly down the street moments after he had gone inside. The car was parked and the engine shut off. The lone occupant remained behind the wheel, watching. Long after the lights had gone out in Doug's house, the shadowy figure remained in the car, watching, moving now and then as a pint bottle was raised, sipped from and put back on the seat.

Such a passage, of course, creates mystery, too.

Setting or a change in setting can also be used, as previously stated, to
overturn character expectations.
Later in the same novel, the character Ruth Baxter expected to leave the town of Noble on a short trip. But her plan was thwarted just at the end of a previous chapter. Now, having been out of her viewpoint and setting for about a dozen pages, the reader is returned to her at the start of chapter nine like this:

The impulse was to scream —to scream and keep on screaming, to let the fear burst out. Ruth fought it and held it back by the tiniest margin of control.

The tunnel was less than ten feet in diameter. The only illumination was an urnlike, battery-operated fishing lantern on the loose gravel-and-earth floor. Its yellowish light shone against chalky stone walls, seeping water here and there, braced in X patterns with heavy, rough-cut timbers gone black from age and rot. . . .

Ruth, her hands tied in front of her, was made prisoner to one of the huge support beams by another length of rope looped through her arms and tied to the beam. . . .

Here the transition is eased for the reader exclusively through identification of a carry-over emotion from when Ruth was last seen. But the setting is new and totally unfamiliar, a tactical fiction situation we earlier warned against because it creates confusion. But here the gambit is acceptable and even desirable because clearly one of the author's goals is to make the reader experience just a little of the fright and disorientation that Ruth herself is feeling. In effect, the near-vertigo experienced by the reader in being plunged headlong into a new and alien setting works here, because confusion is exactly a part of the effect being sought. In such a drastic change, the character Ruth obviously is not—and will never be —the same; all her expectations and assumptions have been altered forever by finding herself suddenly in this new setting.

Finally, and perhaps the easiest method of all to understand, you can increase story tension with a change in your setting that
demands immediate action.
Such action-demanding setting changes are often dynamic and highly dramatic, like the following:

• Setting: a quiet town. But then the dam breaks above it.

• Setting: a small hospital. But then a deadly epidemic breaks out.

• Setting: a peaceful street. But then gunshots are heard.

• Setting: a nice old house. But then the eviction notice is served.

I leave it to you to conjure up any number of other static settings in which a change dramatically increases tension.

THE POWER OF REPETITION

Although the emphasis in this chapter has been primarily on dynamic setting —setting in change or with changing perception — it is also possible to increase story tension simply by drumming away at a static setting that is threatening or scary to begin with, such as in the novels of Stephen King. Often there is no really new development in the setting at the times when the story intensifies. What we get instead is further moody description of the same setting, which has a cumulative emotional effect. To reduce the process to absurdity: One cobweb across the face means nothing, but a dozen may mean a haunted house; one momentarily glimpsed light in the old mansion may be a trick of moonlight, but several such sightings almost surely mean something dire is afoot.

By all means, then, you should realize that handling of setting can be an invaluable tool for you in increasing plot tension and making things happen. It's axiomatic in fiction that characters make things happen in the plot. But it's equally true that setting can motivate characters. So you needn't always look inside your character's mind for motive; sometimes it might be simpler to examine your story environment, and do something with it that
forces
mood to darken, action to take place, or character to get moving.

All of which brings us to a closer look at the way setting forms and motivates character. That's the business of chapter eight.

CHAPTER 8

HOW SETTING AFFECTS CHARACTER

It may seem a bit strange
to you that a separate chapter should be devoted to setting and its impact on character when it's been clear from the outset of this book that setting obviously has such impact. We have already seen how setting affects story characters in a variety of ways, potentially playing a part in their background, expectations, beliefs, hopes, ideals, problems and goals. Here, however, we want to take a deeper and more precise look at setting's impact on your story people and to point out how you should work to make setting and character harmonious.

The use of certain settings often tends to foreordain certain kinds of characters. This is because of reader expectations of the type discussed back in chapter five.

While there are exceptions to every rule, one of the most obvious examples of setting predicting a certain kind of character is the traditional western. Today you may find more short, scruffy and even "antiheroic" male leads in the traditional western setting, but the vast majority of male leads in the latest western novels are still close to the stereotype introduced all the way back in Owen Wister's
The Virginian,
the man who told someone to "smile when you say that." This character, predicted by the setting, is close to Gary Cooper in
High Noon,
or Alan Ladd in
Shane.
He is a loner, brave, soft-spoken, slow to anger, self-reliant and incredibly competent in outdoor skills and gunmanship; he is Anglo-Saxon, tall, blond or sandy-haired more often than not, vaguely in his 30s, with a background that has alienated and slightly embittered him, and possibly put him on the wrong