Setting (11 page)

side of an unjust legal system. Usually he has no permanent home, and owns little more than his horse and what he can pack into his saddlebags, if that much. He is a fundmamentally decent man who respects women and the underdog. He seldom seeks a fight but backs down for no man.

This prototype of the western hero does not endure simply because it seems to work in terms of reader expectation. It also works because such a character is completely in harmony with the traditional western setting; the mythic "Old West" is the kind of setting that would produce such a man, and such a man is the kind who would best survive in the Old West environment. His ideals —individualism, truthfulness, self-reliance — are the values that fueled the American psyche during the country's great expansion into its western frontier. In short, the traditional western hero is true to his setting.

Thus the setting can be a predictor of character. Publishers of romance fiction, for example, see this clearly. Some romance editors issue detailed "tip sheets" which define not only the kind of setting they want for their stories, but details about desired lead characters. Setting and character have been carefully outlined to "fit" one another.

One such publishing house recently said it wanted its stories to feature an urban or suburban woman, single, age twenty-eight or so, with a dismaying and unhappy love affair or marriage in her background; she is allowed a lively sexual appetite, but shouldn't act upon it except with the man she learns to love in the course of the story. Another publishing house said it wants younger women in college or blue-collar work situations, and expects such heroines to have more vivid sexual exploits. Still another line features older women in highly professional occupational settings, and for such characters problems in their professional lives must somehow dovetail with romantic entanglements—which, given their experiences, they should approach more cautiously than their younger sisters in the genre. And so it goes. The existence of such tip sheets proving that editors realize the intimate relationship between setting and character.

SETTING PREDESTINES CHARACTER

The impact of setting on character goes well beyond tip sheets and genre expectations, however, and you as a writer of fiction should remember that. Setting—in real life as well as in fiction — tends to form character in ways you can analyze and use in your work.

This was brought home to me most forcefully a number of years ago when, as a journalist, I was given the assignment of doing a twenty-county tour of Oklahoma to ask questions of the person on the street for a series of newspaper stories on "the mood of the state."

This was no small task, and I approached it with some trepidation. The reason was not simply the size of the task, but the fact that Oklahoma is a border state, quite different in its farm belt north and tourist campground south, its wooded hill country in the east and dusty open plains in the west. I sensed —but did not fully appreciate at first—the fact that a state with such drastic differences in topography, incomes and occupations might offer a bewildering variety of outlooks and opinions.

I set out to the western sections first, driving across vast, dusty, open prairie where you can see another car on the road five miles ahead, and a distant farm silo may be the only relief from a barren horizon. On my first day I visited three small rural towns, parking near the drugstore or courthouse and buttonholing passersby, ready with my notebook and list of questions.

To my surprise and delight, almost every one of these "plains people" responded with a cautious but open attitude; they were almost uniformly friendly and willing to help by expressing opinions. They seemed generally to trust me at once, and take me at face value.

This assignment was not going to be as hard as I had feared, I thought as I worked through other parts of the prairie country.

About three days later, I worked through the southern part of the state, visiting tourist campgrounds, fishing cabins, and little towns catering to sportsmen and sightseers. Again I found that the people were friendly. But then I drove farther east into the hill country.

I love the hills and mountains, and I grieve to report it, but the deeper I moved into tightly hill-bound terrain, visiting small hamlets dense with trees flourishing in the dark shade of overhanging cliffs and bluffs, the more chilly my reception became. Gone was the open, trusting attitude of the plains, and instead I met narrowed eyes of suspicion, sharply hostile counterques-tions, and a growing number of outright refusals to so much as "talk about talking." There were open, friendly people, to be sure, but suddenly they were in a distinct minority. There were times when I felt like I had been plunged into a scene from the movie
Deliverance.

Later I moved out of the hill country and into the northern farm belt, where attitudes toward a stranger like me seemed halfway between those I had met earlier. Only then did something begin to dawn on me with greater impact than ever before. Roughly, the realization (and I hesitate to admit I had been so dumb as not to have known it long before) went like this: "Hill people and plains people are
different."

Why? Psychologists and social historians probably have a much better answer than I do. Surely it can't be as simple as the fact that life on the plains is marked by open horizons, vast winds, and a sky that comes down to eye level, while life in the hills is closed-in, almost hermetic at times, more isolated from the broad view.

Whatever. The basic fact is what's useful to us as writers, and that is simple enough:
Define the kind of setting a character is to be found in, and by so doing you go far toward defining the kind of character it must be.

It may be such an obvious fact that we sometimes forget it. In more than two decades of teaching fiction, I shudder to think of the number of times I have encountered story characters like the backwoods girl who had never been out of her valley, but spoke in a brisk, "Britishy" accent; or the college-president character who dressed and acted like a gross and illiterate idiot, or the working cowboy set in an eastern courtroom and brilliantly defending a suspect in a complex lawsuit. We forget the strong link between setting and character formation only at grave peril; readers usually are quick to balk at believing story people who appear completely out of tune with their setting.

Does this mean that you should attempt to delineate characters who are perfectly typical of their story setting? By no means. If you try to do so, you risk creating stereotypes rather than vital story people, creating only dull and predictable characters. What you must aim for is the credible, not the stereotypical.

PROTOTYPES AND STEREOTYPES

Ordinarily this means that you should be aware of reader expectations in the traditional genres, and also the kind of people most typical of various real settings. It will help you in making characters and settings harmonious if you do some real-life observing and then draw up a "setting list" for your desired character.

Suppose, for example, you wish to create a character who is a famed brain surgeon. You might immediately draw a character who is a tall, middle-aged man, with gray hair, a distinguished manner, a big country home, and a workplace environment in a huge city hospital. This is all believable enough. It might work. But it is also predictable —and a bit dull.

So let's suppose for a moment that you haven't been paying attention to this chapter, and try to create a more memorable character-and-setting combination without real-world study or the knowledge that character and setting must in some way fit one another. Your new character, in such circumstances, might turn out to be a short, fat, unkempt teenager with a bad case of the shakes who spends most of his time in the pool hall, lives under a railroad bridge, and practices medicine in a clinic serving a rural community of 300 souls.

Of course I grossly exaggerate for the sake of illustration. But stranger setting-character combinations have been known in student manuscripts.

How would you avoid both the character who is credible but dully predictable and the character who is unbelievable both in terms of his fit to the environment and the credibility of his story setting?

First you would make real-life observations. I suspect you would find things like the following about famed brain surgeons:

• They tend to be mature men.
But there are women in the field.

• They almost always work in major hospitals in very large urban centers.
But some work in large clinics that happen to be located in smaller communities.

• They work killingly long hours.

• They are extremely well paid — most are wealthy.

• They tend to live in large suburban homes.
But some live on ranches and some in inner-city apartments.

• They deal daily with life-and-death situations.

• Most are in private, individual practice.
But some are members of medical firms or clinic teams.

• Most are dedicated, and love —and live —their work.
But a few are at the burnout stage, longing to escape the pressurized life.

• They come from well-educated family backgrounds.
But a few represent the first person from their family ever to go beyond high school.

• They drive Mercedes and Lincoln cars.
But some drive pickup trucks, and some don't own a car at all.

Having begun to create such a "prototype list" from actual observation, rather than from what you think you already know, you would have the stuff to begin drawing a character in a credible but not stereotypical environment. You might be able to begin creating a character who is a woman, five feet tall, the first of her family ever to attain a college education, who drives her Ford Bronco to the big clinic on the edge of a small rural community every morning. She might live on a ranch, and she might be suffering from premature professional burnout after several years of working seventeen-hour days in the operating room.

Now, having done this, I would suggest that you take further steps. You should make personal contact with a brain sur

geon —or some other surgeon with a highly specialized craft— and try to spend some time with him (or her) in order to see and better understand his typical setting. Ideally you would see his home, meet his family if any, ride to work with him one day, ask questions about his background and beliefs, and even seek permission to stand beside the scrub nurse in the surgical arena and witness the environment in which he works. (I did this — with great hesitancy —for a medical novel once, and it was not as scary as I had imagined it would be; I didn't even faint.)

With all this research behind you, I suspect you would create a brain surgeon character who was not only more vivid than you might otherwise have been able to make her, but you would also have a story setting rich in the kind of detail that convinces the reader and enhances the character.

Even if you are not quite willing to go this far in making sure the wedding of setting and character is a good one, go as far as you can! Don't let laziness or shyness hold you back. In the extreme, remember that the New York City corporate executive is
ipso facto
not the same as the college English teacher at a rural Kansas junior college; and remember further that ordinarily you couldn't just switch the two characters, moving the executive to Kansas and the teacher to New York. Look long and hard at your setting, and grow characters out of it. Or look long and hard at your character and provide him with a setting that fits. Just don't ignore their relationship; to do so is to risk having unbelievable characters in a good setting, or good characters in an unbelievable setting.

CASTING AGAINST SETTING

"But" —you may be protesting—"what about that western character I just read about who was a little weasel from Chicago? Or that brain surgeon —for the luvva Mike!—whose story setting was a ranch in Arizona? Or how, Bickham, do you explain the success of the character Dr. Joel Fleischman in the popular TV show
Northern Exposure,
a young Jewish doctor in the godforsa-

ken setting of Cicely, Alaska? Where is the harmony of setting and character in any of these examples?"

Such notable exceptions don't change the rule. They only prove that no rule is absolute, and that sometimes, with good reason, a writer can take a big risk. Such examples as cited above illustrate the process of
casting against setting
for the sake of surprise and contrast. The technique has notable triumphs, and you may wish to try it. You should be warned, however, that you walk the precipice of incredibility every time you do, and there are many failed experiments of this type for every one that works.

Parenthetically, I don't know about the weasel western character or the brain surgeon on a ranch. But Dr. Joel, in
Northern Exposure,
gets his humor and sympathy not just from being out of harmony with outback Alaska, but because he is so perfectly a product of his fictional New York City background setting. To put this another way, Joel doesn't fit his present setting, but that's a large part of the point—his continuing plot problem. On the other side of the same dramatic card, his character would not work in this predicament if he did not act
exactly
as his stated background setting ("I'm a New York City Jewish boy.") suggests. Joel fits his background, the setting from which he has been transplanted, very well indeed, and that's why he is effective as a character out of his element.