Writing Active Setting Book 1: Characterization and Sensory Detail (7 page)

One last point to notice is that Gardiner doesn’t stop the story to give a description
;
she filters in sensory details, movement
—
driving, looking
—
in with internalization
(her internal thought process)
. This is a powerful use of description that places the reader in the
Setting
and
gives insights into the
POV
character
and the ex-sister-in-law
.

Note
: Notice the specific word choice of velvet — a tactile, luxurious, even glamorous fabric used to contrast with the rough and decidedly unglamorous house. A clever use of the sense of touch for something we wouldn’t ordinarily think of touching (the ocean, the city, the lawn, the house siding).

The next
is a fascinating example
—
a little long though, which impacts the pacing of the story
,
but reveals so much
about the protagonist Salander
. In the first section the author
shows
almost a full page
of Salander’s decision-
making process
as she contrasts her current apartment with where she might like to live
.
Notice what th
is
decisio
n-making process reveals about her
character.

She had never thought about an alternative to the 500 square foot in Lundagatan, where she had spent her childhood. Through her trustee at the time, the lawyer Holger Palmgren, she had been granted permission of the apartment when she turned eighteen. She plopped down on the lumpy sofa in her combination office/living room and began to think.

The apartment on Lundagatan looked into a courtyard. It was cramped and not the least bit comfortable. The view from her bedroom was a firewall on a gable façade. The view from the kitchen was of the back of the building facing the street and the entrance to the basement storage area. She could see a streetlight from her living room, and a few branches of a birch tree.

The first requirement of her new home was that it should have some sort of view
.

She did not have a balcony, and had always envied well-to-do neighbors higher up in the building who spent warm days with a cold beer under an awning on theirs. The second requirement was that her new home would have a balcony.

What should the apartment look like? She thought about Blomkvist’s apartment—700 square feet in one open space in a converted loft on Bellmansgatan with views of City Hall and the locks at Slussen. She liked it there. She wanted to have a pleasant, sparsely furnished apartment that was easy to take care of. That was third point on her list of requirements.

For years she had lived in cramped spaces. Her kitchen was a mere 100 square feet, with room for only a tiny table and two chairs. Her living room was 200 square feet. The bedroom was 120. Her fourth requirement was that the new apartment should have plenty of space and closets. She wanted to have a proper office and a big bedroom where she could spread herself out.

Her bathroom was a windowless cubbyhole with square cement slabs on the floor, an awkward half bath, and plastic wallpaper that never got really clean no matter how hard she scrubbed it. She wanted a washing machine in the apartment and not down in some basement. She wanted to have tiles and a big bath. She wanted the bathroom to smell fresh, and she wanted to be able to open a window
.

—
The Girl Who Played With Fire
—
Stieg Larsson

As I indicated this was a long passage, but the author consciously slowed the reading experience so that the reader could see how this young woman was metamorphosing
. He
show
ed where Salander
was coming from to
highlight where she was going
. The above passage was on page 86-87.
Salander
e
ncountered
obstacles
while
finding a new place
,
b
ut she persevered
—
which showed more characterization
—
and manage
d
to acquire a new apartment.
Later the author spends several more pages showing
Salander
making
quite
an
extensive trip through IKEA to purchase new furniture
to replace the
marginal left overs. But the reader sees very little of the new apartment except that it
does
have a view and she bought furniture for a spare bedroom.
We’re shown only what matters to Salander
—
that her apartment is large enough to have a spare room, all the furniture is new
,
and that’s about it.

Later, on page 623 in the same story
,
another character
, Blomvist,
is asked to describe the protagonist’s sofa as a means of verifying that he really did know her because the protagonist has a well-earned reputation of guarding her privacy, which includes her home space to an extreme degree.

“On the occasions I visited her she had a worn-out, extremely ugly piece of furniture with a certain curiosity value. I would guess it’s from the early fifties. It has two shapeless cushions covered in brown cloth with a yellow pattern of sorts on it. The cloth is torn in several places and the stuffing was coming out when I saw it last.”

– The Girl Who Played With Fire – Stieg Larsson

Doesn’t this description of one piece of furniture give you a unique perspective on who
Salander
is?
The use of s
pecific Setting details over the course of a book is used to symbolize chang
e
—
t
he change in who Salander is from an earlier book and the start of the current story, what she values
—
or not
—
and reveals in small stages the growth of this charac
ter from totally isolated from
others to one willing to live in a different way.

Later
—
on page 664
—
Blomkvist
has finally found
Salander’s
current apartment and here’s his description of where
she
lives
:

Blomkv
i
st was standing at that moment by a window looking out at a magnificent view that stretched far from Gamla Stan towards Saltsjon. He felt numb. There was a kitchen off the hall to the right of the front door. Then there was a living room, an office, a bedroom, and even a guest room that seemed not to have been used. The mattress was still in its plastic wrapper and there were no sheets. All the furniture was brand-new, straight from IKEA.

What floored Blomkv
ist was that Salander had bought the pied-a-terre that had belonged to Percy Barnevik, a captain of industry. The apartment was about 3,800 square feet and worth twenty-five million kroner.

Blomkvist wandered through deserted, almost eerily empty corridors and rooms with patterned parquet floors of different kinds of woods, and Tricia Guild wallpaper of the type that Berger had once coveted. At the center of the apartment was a wonderfully bright living room with an open fireplace, but Salander seemed never to have had a fire. There was an enormous balcony with a fantastic view. There was a laundry room, a sauna, a gym, storage rooms and a bathroom with a king-size bath. There was even a wine cellar, which was empty except for an unopened bottle of Quinta do Noval port –
Nacional
!
from 1976. Blomkv
ist struggled to imagine Salander with a glass of port in her hand. An elegant card indicated that it had been a moving-in present from the estate agent.

The kitchen contained all manner of equipment, with a shiny French gourmet stove with
a gas oven as the focus. Blomkv
ist had never before set eyes on a Cornue Chateau 120. Salander probably used it for boiling tea.

[
The
description goes on for another page until the author wraps up with
the following
paragraph.]

The arrangement was all out of proportion. Salander had stolen several billion kroner and bought herself an apartment with space for an entire court. But she only needed the three rooms she had furnished. The other eighteen rooms were empty.

Blomkvist ended his tour in her office. There were no flowers anywhere. There were no paintings or even posters on the wall. There were no rugs or wall hangings. He could not see a single decorative bowl, candlestick, or even a knick-knack that had been saved for sentimental reasons.

Blomkvist felt as if someone were squeezing his heart. He felt that he had to find Salander and hold her close.

She would probably bite him if he tried
.

–The Girl Who Played With Fire – Stieg Larsson

I’
m not advocating using so much word space to des
cribe the living space of every
character, or even
using such long descriptions of Setting
in every
kind of story, but in this 724-page story
the author chose to show much of
Salander
’s personality via her personal space.

The reader
saw
only three rooms
, and only the furnishings of those rooms because that’s what mattered to Salander.
These rooms made her appear as if her life was full and positively changing.
But because we were able to get a different perspective on Salander’s private space, from
another character, Blomkvist, it allowed
the reader to see
Salander
in a very different light and to feel, much like Blomkvist felt, that this young woman was very isolated and alone.
By allocating enough words in his descriptions, he brought home the shock of the contra
s
t of those descriptions.

Here’s another example from mystery author Walter Mosley. The POV character, Easy Rawlins, has tracked down a lead on a missing person
he
is seeking.
Instead of describing
his impressions of the missing person
directly,
Mosley
reveals the character through what he sees of the man’s home environment.

It was a studio apartment. A Murphy bed had been pulled down from the wall. It was unmade and jumbled with dirty clothes and dishes. A black-and-white portable TV with bent-up rabbit-ear antennas sat on a maple chair at the foot of the bed. There was no sofa, but three big chairs, upholstered with green carpeting, were set in a circle facing each other at the center of the room.

The room smelled strongly of perfumes and body odors. This scent of sex and sensuality was off-putting on a Saturday afternoon.

–Cinnamon Kiss – Walter Mosle
y

What if Mosley had decided to short change the reader here and go for a more ab
breviated room description:

It was a messy studi
o apartment. The man must have been a low-life loser to
live in such a place.

Sometimes that’s all a reader needs, but
that is telling, not showing.
W
ith a few
more lines, the author brought the reader deeper into the missing man’s character
by showing
who he was
via
Setting
.

Note:
The important element to remember is that
place can and should be filtered through a specific character’s emotions, impressions, viewpoint, and focus. How one character sees a Setting can be more important than the Setting
itself.

Ignoring the powerful use of characterization and
Setting
decreases the subtext of your story and also decreases the immediacy a character feels in your story world.

ASSIGNMENT

Using
Setting
to reveal character
:

If you are not currently working on a manuscript or feel more comfortable work
ing on a generic situation try Part 1 of this assignment. If
y
ou have a WIP
[Work In Progress]
feel free to try P
art 2.
Do w
hichever part works for you to understand the power of
Setting
to show characterization.