Writing Active Setting Book 1: Characterization and Sensory Detail (4 page)

PACING AND SETTING

If
t
he character is returning to a place that
hasn’t
been described in depth earlier in the story, the reader will not be as open to
the
pacing
slowing
on the revisit so you as author can describe place. The reader has most likely already created their own visuals because
as readers
we need to see t
he characters in some context.
This is a small, but very important point and an error I see many newer writers make.

*
Waiting until too late to describe and orient the reader as to place.

*
Or forgetting totally that the reader has no idea where the character is in the story because they’ve moved from a known location to a new, unknown location.

If I write “Joe left his home and went to the city,” the setting is so vague as to leave you clueless and frustrated. But if I write “Joe left his beach-side cottage and drove into
Lake Forest
City
, a northern suburb of
Seattle
,” the addition of a few specifics gives the reader enough to inhabit the character’s world while keeping the
main
focus on what’s happening in the story.

Note
: Without clues the reader will default to what they already know and can get a totally erroneous Setting image.

The following is an example of orienting the reader via
Setting
when
moving
a POV character from one location to another
.
A
dd more than a hint of Setting
only when that new location has an impact on the story.

The POV character i
s showing up
to an
interview for a job she didn’t apply for, but needs
. Look closely at what the author focuses the reader on in describing this area of
New York City
.

The office
—
or whatever it was
—
didn’t exactly inspire confidence. The address was a mostly kept-up building off
Amsterdam Avenue
, seven stories high and nine windows across. Brick and gray stone: that looked like the norm in this neighborhood. We weren’t running with a high-income crowd, here. Still, I had seen and smelled worse, and the neighborhood looked pretty friendly
—
lots of bodegas and coffee shops, and the kids hanging around looked as if they’d stopped there to hang on the way home from school, not been there all day waiting for their parole officer to roll by.

–
Hard Magic – Laura Anne Gilman

Now let’s look closer:

The office
—
or whateve
r it was
—
didn’t exactly inspire
confidence
.

[E
motion=wariness. The reader gets an emotional feel for the area via the POV character’s impressions.]

The address was a mostly kept-up building off
Amsterdam Avenue
.
[Fo
r those who know NYC this small specific street name can say a lot
,
b
ut
those who don’t will skim over the spec
ific name as having no context or assume the POV character is seeing an economic state of this particular area of town.
]

…
seven stories high and nine windows across.
[
N
ow the reader has a
distinct
visual and physical image
.
]

Brick and gray stone: that looked like the norm in this neighborhood
.
[
T
he reader is beginning to be reassured, subtly, that the POV character can enter this building. This space is the norm
means
it doesn’t stand out as better or worse
, and the POV character would not be stupid to enter
.
]
We weren’t running with a high-income crowd, here.
Still, I had seen and smelled worse,
[
S
ensory detail
(covered in more depth later in this book)
—
the reader doesn’t get a specific smell
,
but is subtly reminded th
at most of us are very aware that
the smell of a building or neighborhood
can also tell us what kind of world the character has entered
.
]

…
and the neighborhood looked pretty friendly
—
lots of bodegas and coffee shops, and the kids hanging around looked as if they’d stopped there to hang on the way home from school, not been there all day waiting for their parole officer to roll by.
[H
ere the reader has been refocused from the
wariness at the
beginning of the paragraph to comfort
—
the building
s
ha
ve
not changed
,
but what the POV character focuses the reader on
—
kids hanging out after school
—
creates a different emotion and feel for the building
s and
makes it understandable why the character now enters the building and doesn’t run away screaming
.
]

And here’s a final example where the author chose
simply
to describe and not add much more. Why? Because the reader needed a sense of place in order to explain the events that happened in the story
,
but not more.
Sometimes the author doesn’t want the focus shifted into too much detail about the Setting, and that’s fine.

You’ll find this technique
used
more often in mysteries, suspense
,
and thrillers where the author wants enough detail to anchor the reader
,
but not enough to stop the fast-paced forward momentum or the tension being created. Other genre stories can afford more Setting details
—
historical and literary stories for example
—
because the pacing of these genres can be slower. But even in these stories, too much Setting description that adds little to the story can leave
readers
dead in the water.

In the following example a young woman has gone missing after having car trouble near a well-known cemetery.

Erin
knew the road: a narrow strip of pavement that ran a few blocks alongside the sprawling cemetery’s high chain-link fence. There was a park on the other side of the road
—
with a smaller, unfenced, old cemetery for Veterans of Foreign Wars. Only a block away, quaint, charming houses bordered the park, but there was something remote and slightly foreboding about that little back road
—
especially at night. Surrounded by so many graves, it was an awfully scary spot to have car problems.

–
Final Breath
–
Kevin O’Brien

The last
sentence is the reason for the Setting
description. I
f
O’Brien had
chosen to simply write:

Surrounded by so many graves, it was an awfully scary spot to have car problems
and skimped on Setting and word choices that created an emotional feel for where the incident happened, the tension and conflict in the story would have been lessened because y
ou as the reader would have been told
the Setting was scary
, but not shown
that it was scary. T
he story question raised
—
what happened to the missing girl
—
would not be as strong. But O’Brien did not need to go into other details about this cemetery
—
about the fact it’s the largest in Seattle, or is the final resting place for Bruce Lee and his son Brandon, or is one of the oldest cemeteries in the community. So a brief
three-
sentence description, followed by that key summation line, did its job
to show you where the incident happened and why it was plausible that this girl disappeared in this location
.

ASSIGNMENT
:

P
ART
1
:
Describe a tree, a house
,
and a car
from your own POV
. No right or wrong here, as we’re trying to establish
your
basel
ine way to use description and
Setting
.
Do this part of the assignment before you look at Part 2. If it helps, think in terms of your story and
as you
describe a tree, a house
,
and a car.

P
ART
2
:
Notice
your default way of describing elements of a
Setting
.
Look to see if you write with too much information, not enough, with vague word choices. To help you
,
I’ve included some example
s
of these issues.

Intention:
This is to determine how you most naturally write
Setting
elements. It’s hard to change what we don’t understand.

Some
writers
will
write really long descriptions s
uch as this
tree description
:

A
Utah
pine
, I suppose. I know it wasn't an alligator. Remembering, I'd say the trunk was about a foot through, but the reason for the tree's importance was a lightning strike that burnt out the core. So the tree was alive on the outside and dead in the middle. The lowest limbs got thick as trunks and the branches went out and up. The shape was perfect for a tree house. After the dead middle trunk was cut off level with the live limbs that is. Scrounged pieces of 2x4 and small offcuts of plywood formed the tree
house, which we lined with gunny sacking to make it feel like a real house. Slept in that tree more than once. Now a road goes over where the tree was. I reckon it provided winter fuel for someone's fireplace. The old jailhouse, though, still stands not a hundred yards away.

L
ots of det
ails in this description,
too many as you the reader can get easily shifted from focusing on a specific tree to a lot of other issues, a character’s back story, how the character feels ab
out the absence of the tree, a secondary building that’s now on the site
. This example lets this writer know that he might need to pull in and focus the read
er more on the tree description.

Over-describing can cause you story issues that will impact your pacing and frustrate your reader. The most important world-building aspect in the above example is the description of the tree as alive on the outside
,
but dead on the inside. This gives enormous insight to the POV character
’s world and his relationship to
it
—
we assume the character, too, is alive on the outside
,
but dead on the inside.

Another common
Setting
detail speed bump:

Example
: a blue trac
t
home.

Here we have too little detail. The author assumes the reader knows what is meant by a trac
t
home, but since trac
t
housing has been around since the 17
th
century there can be a huge difference between coal
-
miner homes in an 18
th
century Cornish town and wooden detached homes created in an American suburb shortly after World War
II
. Adding a few more specific words will pull your reader deeper into your
specific story
Setting
.