Setting (20 page)

A campfire blazed inside the great cave. Shadows danced on the high rock walls.

You may quarrel with use of the verb "blazed," and wish to substitute something like "burned brightly." You may argue, too, that "great cave" is not sufficiently evocative. Is "danced" a cliche? Perhaps you can come up with better wording.

Regardless of such quibbles, I think you will agree that the second effort is improved by slashing some of the weak adjectives and adverbs and attempting to find stronger nouns and verbs that don't require such crutches. A good, specific noun will seldom need many adjectives to modify it. A strong action verb will seldom require the help of an adverb. Therefore, it's obvious that you can, as one editor advised me, "look for adjectives and adverbs, and kill them!" or you can possibly avoid the temptation to use them in the first place by seeking out strong specific nouns and strong action verbs.

A further observation about these examples may be in order. You may have noticed that in the original a fire "was burning," while in the suggested revision a "fire blazed." If we had chosen to substitute "burned" for "blazed," the basic meaning would have been the same, but for better style: Always use the simple past tense if you can in describing things. Thus you will not write, "Rain was falling . . . ," but instead will teach yourself to write, "Rain fell. ..." You will not write, "Evening was near-ing. . .," but instead, "Evening neared...." (or perhaps better: "Darkness neared," darkness being more specific than evening).

Also, avoid the passive voice. You will
not
say things like, "The night was made worse when the rain began . . . ," but instead will say something closer to "The night worsened when the rain began." The use of compound verb forms and weak passives in description is often tempting, but almost always bad. Compound verb forms are not the most direct way to get the job done, and passives are weak; description always walks on the dangerous edge of being too slow and dramatically weak anyway, so don't make the risk greater than it already is.

When this was first pointed out to me years ago, I protested (briefly) that it's not quite the same thing to say "a fire burned" and "a fire was burning." Being a refugee from an English department, I argued that "fire burned" implied that the fire had burned in the past and was now over, while "fire was burning" connoted that it was still burning in the story present. "Pick nits all you want," my writing coach replied. "Try it my way and you'll never go back." He was right. Once I habitually used the simple past tense, all my descriptions of setting seemed magically more vibrant.

Look for weak verb forms, pallid nouns, crutch adjectives and limping adverbs in your own copy. If you find them, fix them!

THE PURPLE PATCH

Another aspect of straightforward descriptive writing style is the ability to avoid poetic flights of fancy and unnecessary big words. You have perhaps encountered such a flight in someone else's copy — surely not your own! — and know why composition teachers call such an effusion a "purple patch."

Here's an example of a purple patch:

Rising, chanting, ever-changing, in a never-ending cacophony of ululation, the zephyr-breath of the mighty planet's ceaseless, restless celestial motion, driven alike by the massive depth of ocean and rising of a miniscule breeze from the golden, petal-like wings of a gossamer butterfly, pressed insistent lips against the diaphanous opacity of the chill pane.

Wow. Gorgeous, huh? —until you stop and figure out what the writer was trying to say, which was: Cold wind blew against the frosty window.

It's been said before, but the point is worth making again. Such outrages against writing style most often occur when the writer has "stopped to describe." Therefore, one good way to avoid the temptation to write purple patches is to seldom stop your storytelling to describe. If you are intent on keeping your setting descriptions brief and maintaining focus on the characters and the plot inside the setting, then few chances to write a purple patch will arise.

Instead of burying yourself, your story and your reader under a trash-pile of verbiage, look for the
feel
of a place or time, and then seek out concrete details to evoke that feeling. As mentioned in chapter eleven and elsewhere, the feeling might be one of joyfulness or isolation or loneliness. Identify it, then ask yourself what specific concrete details will evoke the feeling in as few words as possible. You can count on your reader to fill in the details if you give him precisely the right clues on which to build.

That's why, for example, I risked using the word "blazed" in an example earlier in this chapter, and why I contented myself with calling the site a "great cave." I am not sure precisely what the word "blazed" will conjure in the reader's mind, but I feel sure it will have something to do with bright, leaping flames, great heat and vigor. Exactly what picture "blazed" will give the reader beyond that, I don't know. But I don't care; his own imagining will be better for him than any further avalanche of details I might try to foist upon him. Similarly, I count on "great cave" evoking in his mind his own mind-picture of the feeling of greatness and cave-ness. Will it be Carlsbad, or an earthen hole he played in as a child? I don't care; I would rather he work from my feeling-evoking words, and draw his own feeling-packed mind-picture, than try to study through some laborious description of mine.

Readers love to draw setting pictures in their own imagination. They will, provided you give them the right feel for the place, and the few precise words designed to evoke that feeling.

How do you find those few precise words? You do so by seeking out specific, concrete details in the setting which will produce the desired evocation. As an example, suppose you first laboriously wrote
something
unacceptable like the following:

It was a cold and bitter night. Phillip felt chilled, and when the sleet began, he felt colder. Dark clouds rolled in. The mercury fell. Icy wind began to blow. Walking home alone, Phillip was buffeted by the wind.

This is not too bad. Short words, short sentences, little strained "poetry." But it lacks feeling-focus. What are we trying to evoke here? Cold? Wind? Loneliness? Darkness? A short segment like this can't evoke everything at once, and maybe the story situation dictates brevity, as it often does.

But perhaps we can improve things. Let's decide that what we want to evoke in the reader concerning this bit of setting is a feeling of
chill and loneliness.
Having decided this, we can have a stab at revision something like this:

Alone, Phillip trudged home. Violent wind battered him, driving pinprick sleet into his face.

Possibly this brief segment will get the job done for us. Suppose, on the other hand, we wish to use the same general setting details to evoke a different mood in the reader, one of
longing for home.
In such a case we might produce a segment like this:

Hurrying against the strong wind, Phillip squinted through the darkness for the first sight of his cabin window. It would be good to get home to the warmth of his stove and the stout protection of the cabin's log walls.

In both of the above examples, notice that indentification of desired feeling provides the framework inside which a brief and focused description can be written.

ADDING CONTRAST

Another helpful gambit you can use in seeking brevity and evocative accuracy is the use of contrast. On its simplest level, what we are talking about here is how a dark cloud will look darker against an otherwise bright sky, or how much more dreary an old building will look if you stand it beside a fine, fresh new one for the sake of the contrast. It always helps the vividness and evocativeness of your writing if you can pinpoint a sharp contrast: barren black tree branches seen against a snow-colored wintry sky, for example, or a scream piercing the total silence of a summer afternoon in the country, or the glitter of diamonds on a black velvet cloth.

The trick here is to identify the object you wish to emphasize, figure out what specific sensuous characteristic of that object should be stressed, and then find the right object to stand it beside, or background to display it against, for the maximum contrast.

In sight contrasts, look for dark against light, smooth against rough, color against pallor, smallness against vastness, or brightness against dullness. In sound contrasts, look for loudness against silence, pleasing sound against discordance, harshness against smoothness. Ask yourself: "What specific aspect of the setting do I want to make vivid?" Then: "What can I place beside it to make it stand out even more?"

Suppose you want to show how loudly that truck is idling at the corner traffic light? First make sure no other cars are on the street when you show it, and make the scene a lazy afternoon or evening, very, very quiet otherwise. Then the truck's idling will be not only loud, but deafening. Or perhaps you would like to emphasize how small a house is, and how isolated; take it out of that tight little woods and stand it alone on a vast and windy hilltop, surrounded by a thousand acres of empty prairie. (Does this mean, incidentally, that you will sometimes tinker with minor aspects of your setting simply to make things more vivid? Of course.)

LEARNING TO OBSERVE

First-hand observation will help you clarify some of these stylistic techniques for yourself once you are aware of them. I encourage you to look at parts of the real setting-world around you, and think about how you would portray them. Look at the tree in your yard or nearby park—
really
look at it, for a change. How could you place that in your story setting and make it real and vibrant for your reader? Really look at that city bus as it approaches your stop. How could you put that bus into your story and make it practically leap off the page for your reader, so that it becomes a tremendously vital and real part of the setting?

Make notes as you hone your observation-description skills, write practice paragraphs. Make sure they're not long, static paragraphs, but brief, evocative ones, centered on a mood. If you don't like a description you've produced, go back and rewrite it using stronger verbs and more specific nouns, or using a different feeling as the focus point, or putting something different into the setting for useful contrast.

Such accurate observation, creative thought and careful verbal revision will soon result in surer and more skillful use of all the other techniques we have covered in this book. In handling setting, the use of precise language is mandatory, because your words are the conveyance of everything you know and your reader needs to know. Nothing else will work unless your verbal arsenal is on target.

So important is verbal technique in setting, as a matter of fact, that we cannot leave the subject with the discussion given in this chapter. In chapter fifteen we will pursue the subject a bit more, with a number of highly specific exercises and work suggestions.

CHAPTER 15

EXERCISES TO SHARPEN YOUR SETTINGS

Be warned in advance
: This chapter is designed to make you practice some of the things you've learned in earlier chapters. None of it will be especially difficult for you now, but doing the suggested exercises correctly will require some investment of time as well as effort—and there's even a requirement for that aspect of fiction-writing which all amateurs dread and all selling professionals do: rewriting.

FACTUAL DATA IN A SETTING

Let's suppose you have the following information in your notebook after visiting a small town and making observations and then doing other factual research at the library.

The name of the town is Elk City, and it's in the western part of Montana. In a valley in the Sapphire Mountains. Population is 3,000. County Seat of Morgan County. Courthouse on town square downtown, old brick building, two stories, with a dome. City hall, a small stucco structure, is nearby on Main Street. The town is quiet, but sometimes trucks going by on the nearby highway make a big racket. A bell in the tower at the First Presbyterian Church tolls the hour. Elk City has a city manager and city commission, five commissioners elected at large. Small police department and fire department, antiquated equipment. Sheriff's

department in the basement of the courthouse is old and grungy. Sheriff has four deputies. It's cold in Elk City in the winters, cool in the summers. The surrounding mountains are tall, jagged and beautiful. No other town of any size nearby —people drive ninety miles to Missoula for major shopping expeditions. It's an easygoing place with a population on the elderly side, and hunters and fishermen visit a lot. Nothing much ever seems to happen. Some of the side streets are dirt only, and in the summers they're dusty. An old, open-pit copper quarry nearby, now abandoned, has water in it which sometimes smells bad on the hottest summer days. During the long, snowy winters, of course, this is no problem. It was a pleasant summer day, seventy degrees, when you visited last July 7 and 8.

Elk City was founded by a man named John Jergens in the 1880s. He found a small vein of silver nearby, and for a few years the town boomed with silver mining. When the silver played out in the 1890s, copper was discovered and the big quarry, now an abandoned pit, provided steady work and income for about a hundred families. As copper production decreased, the town declined steadily, and by the 1920s it was about the size it is today. Old-timers still yearn for the good old days. Every year they have a Frontier Days celebration on September 1. Parade, community picnic, band performance in old Jergens City Park. People are proud of sticking it out in Elk City, and think one day the town will come back. They've been saying that for more than fifty years now.