Setting (8 page)

Consider, for example, Cussler's breakthrough novel,
Raise The Titanic,
in which the long-sunken wrecked ship is constantly at the center of discussions, maneuvers, plans and counterattacks. If the Titanic were not at the heart of the setting as both focus and target of everyone's quest, the dozens of viewpoint changes would be hopelessly confusing.

Or consider
Hotel,
in which the very purpose of the novel is to place a wildly mixed batch of characters and plot problems within a single setting and show how the problems all work out within that unifying setting.

In the case of Whitney, try to imagine how a novel such as
The Trembling Hills
could work at all if the setting were not San Francisco at the time of the great earthquake there. Without the unification of constant references to that colorful historic setting, the multiple story lines would seem to "fly all to pieces" in apparent lack of relevance to one another.

Let me encourage you to study a number of recent novels of your own selection; look at the setting and examine the different viewpoints and plot lines. Ask yourself how many of the varying elements tie directly to one another in ways other than through reference to the setting. I think you will be surprised to see how often divergent aspects of plot and character would not be seen as related at all if they did not play against identical setting backdrops.

Further, you might want to consider how the
tone, mood
and
atmosphere
of setting will unify a story. From Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King, horror writers have known this to be so. The consistent emphasis on darkness, dankness, isolation, eccentricity and occult intervention gives King's novels, for example, a unifyingly frightening feel that no single plot element or character can provide. To put this another way, in the novels of King and other horror writers, sometimes the consistent feeling of dread and fright comes not so much from what happens as it does from where it happens, and how that place feels.

Thus you can not only make your story more believable and convincing through sound use of setting, you can also unify it both in terms of making disparate plots and characters seem related and in terms of building up a story atmosphere which will cloak all characters and events within a single feeling matrix.

This is another reason why setting is so important, you see. You get not only obvious credibility advantages from proper handling of setting, but also unification of other story elements.

UNIFYING TECHNIQUES

A variety of techniques are available that will help you use your setting as a unifying "binder." We will look at six of these techniques, those used most often by writers to create a strong sense of cohesion in their stories. Study each technique, and use them to unify your own stories.

Consistent and repeated reference to a single aspect
of your setting will keep that aspect uppermost in your reader's mind. Then, as you show different characters noticing this single aspect, or as you play out different scenes near it, or include a reference to it, you consistently remind the reader that, "Hey, we're in the same place, see? The same story, see?"

One example might be use of a clock tower on the main street of your story's small town. To transform the clock and its tower into a potential unifying device, you would first give it some considerable notice and description, perhaps something like this:

Middletown's Main Street was dominated by the First National Bank's old brick clock tower, built in 1889 and a landmark to the present day. No other structure on the street stood more than two stories tall, but the clock tower extended a full three stories taller. Its dark red bricks were stained by generations of soot and rain, its conical copper roof was green from decades of corrosion. It had a clock face on all four of its sides, each face almost six feet in diameter, with ornate Roman numerals and hands festooned with spidery black curlicues. It struck every fifteen minutes and tolled out each hour, its vast and metallic voice an echo from times gone by. At night, four small spotlights shone on it, illuminating it like the rampart of a mighty old castle. Whenever anyone looked for a symbol of Middletown, they almost always came back to the clock tower, for it dominated the town; it always had, and it always would. Some said it
was
Middletown.

Such a lengthy description, as useful as it might be in building up story mood, could hardly be allowed, even in a novel, unless the tower was also being set up as a constant unifying aspect of the setting. You can be sure that the reader would "latch onto" such an elaborate description, and remember it. (Remember that lengthy descriptions ordinarily are to be avoided. When you insert one such as this for a very special reason, the reader notices immediately.)

Having thus gotten the reader's attention, you could use the clock tower again and again as a unifying reminder:

• Characters could agree to "meet under the old clock."

• Someone could hear the old clock striking the hour.

• The author could comment that the tower looked especially dark today against the rainy sky.

• Traffic might be described at some point as being backed up from First Street all the way down to the clock tower corner.

• An elderly character might comment that he feels "as old as that clock downtown on the bank corner."

I leave it to you to imagine many other ways the clock and its tower could be mentioned repeatedly in a story as a unifying factor.

Repeated reference to certain aspects
of the setting by one or more characters is closely related to the technique just discussed, but a bit different. In this case, the author does not focus on a single item in the story environment such as the clock tower, but on some angle about the setting which is dominant. This might be how isolated a setting is, for example, or how grungy, or how it might be sandwiched in between a steep hillside and a fast-moving river. In such a situation, the author (through her direct description) and the characters (through taking notice in viewpoint, or in making dialogue comments) repeatedly refer to the general angle that is set up early in the story as particularly noteworthy.

Here's an example of how a general setting angle might be set up at the outset (here focusing on a town's isolation):

Middletown stood on the prairie halfway between Junction City to the north and Emersonville to the south, eighty miles to Junction City, ninety to Emersonville. To the east and west, the next hint of "civilization" was much farther away. On a clear summer day, someone once said, you could look in any direction, for as long as you could bear it, and never see anything at all but sagebrush, rolling sand dunes, and an occasional dust devil.

Having once set up this aspect of the setting in the reader's consciousness, the author might salt into the story dozens of references like the following:

• The brilliant sunlight made her shrink from the vast distances.

• "You can't get anywhere from here in less than two hours," he said.

• She drove to the edge of town and looked out toward — nothing.

• Sleep would not come. She felt like she had been dropped into the middle of the Sahara desert. . . .

• An old pickup truck, coated with the red dust of a million desolate miles, rolled in from the empty prairie to the north.

• The town felt like a place on a distant planet, so isolated was it.

Again, you may come up with small references that would do a better job than any of these in referring back to isolation as a general, unifying aspect of the setting.

Continual, subtle expansion
on a detail or aspect of the setting will also serve to keep it in focus as a unifying element. How would such a process work? Rather than beginning with a large description, as in the case of the clock tower mentioned above, you would start small, and build. As the story went along, the element of the setting chosen for such treatment would grow larger and larger in the reader's awareness.

As an example, in one of my earlier novels titled
Katie, Kelly and Heck,
I had five distinct plot lines and some dozen viewpoints working from quite early in the book. Although all the events took place in the same small town —one unifying factor —I worried that something further was needed to assure an additional sense of unity. The setting device I discovered, and built more importantly as the story progressed, was a back-alley whisky still which no single character considered centrally important.

I first showed the still, freshly loaded and beginning to cook a new batch of sour-mash whisky. It was simply mentioned as being located in the alley.

A chapter later, I showed a secondary character examining the still in more detail. This time I revealed the ownership of the apparatus and its importance to him. Two more sentences of description were added to what had been provided in the earlier segment, this time telling the capacity of the still, its temperature, and its internal pressure. I also described a pressure gauge on the equipment.

Fifteen pages later, I showed the still being sabotaged — the pressure valves being closed, the heat starting to increase, and the aforementioned pressure gauge beginning to rise.

From that point, with metronomic regularity, I returned in brief segments to the still, unattended in the alley; each time, a bit more description was added, and each time it was noted that the temperature was still higher, the internal pressure continuing to rise toward the red line on the gauge. While all the characters in the story went about their own business, and the physical setting changed from place to place around the town, the repeating, expanding progress reports on the still, described objectively from a viewpoint "on high," maintained a central setting detail focus point for the book until very late in the story when —you guessed it—the still exploded, bringing everyone's attention back to it.

In your story the central aspect of setting might be a house, a room in that house, a street, a gathering storm. Whatever it might be, if you first merely mention it but then continually return to it with greater and greater attention to descriptive detail, you may be sure your reader will focus on it and cling to it as a unifying factor in your yarn.

Ongoing references to different aspects
of the setting which have something in common is slightly different again. Here, rather than seeking different ways to refer to generally the same phenomenon, as in our examples above about isolation, you provide the reader with different looks at various parts of the setting, building a complete and detailed picture, finally, by a process of accretion.

For example, you might show a factory worker in a small town paying his home rent to an office operated by the same company that pays his wages. A bit later, you might show the same worker shopping and getting additional credit at the company store. Still later, you might have him taking his sick child to the clinic (the only one in town) operated by the company. And later yet you might describe how the local newspaper is run by an editor who happens to be the brother-in-law of the owner of the local company. As you added references to other aspects of the setting, a composite picture would emerge which would give the reader a convincing picture of a "company town" where anyone trying to be independent would face grave odds indeed.

Such a technique is very convincing to readers, incidentally, because it allows them to experience and draw conclusions about a story setting in the same way they operate with real-world environments: by collecting small bits of data and finally drawing conclusions from them. In addition, of course, the quiet drumbeat-like presentation of different aspects, all pointing to the same generality about the setting, give the story a wonderful cohesiveness.

Careful comparison-reference
back to what the setting was before it changed can allow setting to remain a unifying factor even when the actual setting changes. Suppose, for example, a basis of your plot lies partly in the stress caused to the characters because they are forced to move from the city to an unfamiliar rural area (change in setting causing the plot). In such a circumstance, you would be required to describe the city setting in order later to show how different it is from the new rural one. All well and good, but the sudden change from urban to rural in the middle of the story might create a sharp feeling of discontinuity—loss of unity —for your reader.

In such a situation, the unity of the plot problem would be emphasized by your references to the conflicted feelings in the characters as caused by the move; by comparing new setting versus the old in an author-objective passage or two; by having characters talk about the new setting and how it differs from the previous one; or by having characters homesick for the old setting, talking about how good it was, how unfamiliar they are with the new. In this way, the change in setting would itself become a constant setting reference point!

In my novel
Katie, Kelly and Heck,
mentioned earlier, Katie Blanscombe is dislocated from Cleveland, Ohio, to a sorry, isolated little outpost in Arizona, where she gets into all kinds of trouble because she simply does not understand the new territory. In the course of the novel, I found it useful to have Katie fall prey to homesickness again and again, and to criticize her new hometown as being barbaric when compared with Cleveland. Thus, even as Katie moved from a boardinghouse to a hotel, and from poverty to ownership of a restaurant, and from nervous self-restraint to a scene in which she danced and kicked up her heels on a cafe stage, her basic personality was kept unified and consistent —and her essential personal problem kept in focus—by the fact that she kept being homesick and kept moaning about "this dreadful little town," comparing the setting to the one she had left in Cleveland.