Writing Active Setting Book 1: Characterization and Sensory Detail (8 page)

PART 1:

Choose a room in your home. Look for a more private or personal room
—
a bedroom, writing area, kitchen, etc
.
—
vs
. a
public space
—
living room, bathroom, anywhere you’d feel comfortable having strangers come in and walk through. Now describe this room in 2
-
4 sentences max
imum
from the following POVs:

1)
Yours
.

2)
An acquaintance or relative you think may disappr
ove of you or your life choices
.

3)
Your POV
[1
st
or 3
rd
person] while giving an impression of
you to
the reader
.

Again only 2
–
4 sentences max. What do you focus on? What do they focus on? What word
s do you
choose
to describe your space? What are their word choices
that show you are in a different POV
?
What do your word choices reveal about the character viewing the room and the character that lives in the room?

PART 2
– YOUR WIP:

Choose a
Setting
description
of less than a paragraph from
your story. In
a maximum of
2
–
4 sentences,
show this
Setting
through the following POVs
,
even
if you do not u
se all three in your manuscript:

1)
The protagonist’s POV
.

2)
A secondary character
’s
POV
, especiall
y one who is very different from
the protagonist.

3)
Your protagonist
’s
POV
again, but this time
giving an impression of another character
through describing that character’s relationship with the Setting
.

Again
,
only 2
–
4 sentences max
imum
. What does the protagonist focus on? What does the secondary character [antagonist or villain] focus on? What are
his or her
word choices to describe the
Setting
? How do these word choices
change the feel of the
Setting
and what the reader sees
?

Intention:
The
pur
pose
of this exercise is to start to show yo
u the power of POV
as it related
to
Setting
. Change the POV
,
and though the
Setting
might remain the same
,
the impressio
ns the reader receives of that
Setting
can vary wildly
.
If
those impressions don’t
change you probably are showing the
Setting
through
your
POV as opposed to your characters.

RECAP

*
R
emember
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.

*
D
o not stop or slow your story flow to show a Setting or details of a Setting unless that Setting reveals something important about the story or characters.

*
Consider showing the same setting through two different characters to reveal information about the POV character or information about another character that they may not know about themselves.
For example i
f
a young woman thinks of herself as independent and self-contained and the reader is shown from her personal space how she has saved mementos of her childhood or of the people who have cared for her in the past, you are showing the reader something about her the character
that she
herself does not realize.

USING SETTING DETAIL TO ENHANCE SETTING

Sensory detail is one of the most underrated tools in a writer’s toolbox and can make a world of difference in creating novels that stand out in a reader’s mind. Not every
Setting
needs all five senses described in de
tail
—
t
hat approach is overkill and can have a ma
jor impact on your story pacing. B
ut when introducing the reader to a character, or changing the location of the story, or focusing a reader in on a place that’s going to play a larger role in the story, then by all means dig deeper to create a strong
Setting
image. And a key way to do this is via sensory details.

Use sensory details in your Setting when you first change a location or open a chapter or to indicate a shift in the emotional state of the POV character.
Think in terms of which sensory details a POV character would notice at that particular time.
Change the time and emotional state of the POV character and you should
notice a difference in which sensory details are being noticed.
An
example might be listening to specific music at the opening of the scene. What can be soft and relaxing at the beginning of the scene can be lonely and low-energy at the end of the scene. Have you ever entered a favorite store and found the music upbeat and fun only to discover that the person with you finds the same music annoying and dated? Each person’s description of the music would create a different feel for a reader about the store Setting.

Texture is so often overlooked in a story
,
but can act as a metaphor rich in symbolism for the POV character.
One character standing in a
n
Iowa
cornfield, feeling the wind and the sun enveloping them, feels nurtured and can taste the richness of the soil, the expanse of the Setting. Another character in the very same Setting can feel the dirt coating their tongue, the sun beating against them, drying their skin, sucking the very life out of them with its relentless sameness.

Think of the feel of different times of the day during different seasons.
I moved from a four-season climate to a two-season climate and am still waiting for certain sensory cues as to what season it is based on daily temperatures.

But think beyond simple hot, warm, cold. One character who is very athletic or runs on a warmer body core temperature [many men, especially young men, can fall into this category] may find an environment just to their liking whereas another character in the same environment is shivering. [I’m always that other character!]. Also think of other tactile experiences
—
what does wind feel like? Or fog? Or dry dust in the air vs. humidity?

Smell is a wealth of communication. Were you aware that after three months we retain only 30% of our visual memory
,
but even after a year we retain 100% of smell memory? Smell activates our primordial or the oldest part of our brains, so if you are missing scents on the page, you’re missing a very subtle but powerful element of sensory detail.

The following descriptions come from an interview with a Norwegian Scent Researcher. She is describing some of the locations she has visited to collect samples of scent.

Havana
. It smells sensual, of
Cuba
Libre [a rum, cola
,
and lime cocktail], coffee, dogs
,
and freshly washed laundry fluttering on endless balconies. The streets smell like they are crumbling, decaying, rotting. But unlike cities in the
United States
,
Havana
has been doing this for centuries. It rots in style. Berlin’s
Neukӧlln neighborhood is the closest you can get to Istanbul: sunflower oil, bread, dry cleaning, laundry detergent, tobacco, cheap aftershave, and kebabs. The outlying Colonia Hacienda de Echegaray district in Mexico City smells of fake leather boots, co
rn, dust, concrete, cocoa, burnt and moldy earth, plastic, sweat, chili peppers, and hot straw.

One or two sentences max and a reader is in
Cuba
,
Istanbul
,
or
Mexico City
.
When we smell fake leather boots, burnt or moldy earth, plastic, sweat, and hot straw, we add to those smells an image of run-down neighborhoods, stray dogs, a city that’s a working-man’s world, because we fill in the blanks based on what we smell.

Scents can evoke memories so strongly. I love the smell of lilies whereas my mother detests the same smell because they remind her of her mother’s funeral. Have you ever been overwhelmed in a new location because everything is new and different and the scents are what finally cause you to be overstimulated to the point you walk away with a pounding headache? Some scents mean pleasur
e
—
b
aking cookies, the smell of a new book, the warm scent of a
babies’
skin when you nuzzle their heads.
Others evoke just the opposite
respons
e
—
t
he musty smell of damp basements, strong perfume in a small elevator, moldy bread.

Don’t think that adding sensory detail means adding pages and pages of words and do remember to be specific. It smelled nice or of summer flowers doesn’t tell the reader much and the words are not working hard enough for your story.

Note
: Make sure that your sensory details are specific to the Setting of your story and filtered through a specific POV character’s awareness.

Watch how mystery writer Nancy Pickard quickly orients a reader as to Setting by focusing in mostly on sounds in this paragraph.

Students looked up at us curiously from inside their classrooms as we walked past. Teachers’ voices jarred the air, like different radio stations turned up too loud. Somewhere a couple of locker doors slammed shut, and everywhere there was that smell that only schools have and that echo
ey sound and that odd slanting
light in the halls
.

–Confession – Nancy Pickard

Did you find yourself thinking about your own school environment and being tugged into the place quickly by the sensory details?

This is the power of adding sensory details to Setting description.
R
eader
s
quickly find
themselves deeper into the Setting. They can feel themselves there on a three-dimensional level vs. simply a visual level. If Pickard had chosen to remain only on a visual level, see what she might have written.

Students looked up at us curiously from inside their classrooms as we walked past. There were lockers on both sides of the long hall and a scuffed linoleum floor. Overhead were fluorescent lights, most of them off in the middle of the day
,
but a few flickering.

Okay, but not great. We as readers are seeing what the POV character sees of the Setting
,
but we’re not
in
the Setting the way sensory details can pull us into the Setting.

Now let’s l
ook at how T. Jefferson Parker uses sensory details to describe the scene of a crime:

She noted that the table had been set for two. A pair of seductive high heels stood near the couch, facing her, like a ghost was standing in them, watching. The apartment was still, the slider closed against the cool December night. Good for scent. She closed her eyes. Salt air. Baked fowl. Coffee.
Goddam
ned
rubber gloves, of course. A whiff of gunpowder? Maybe a trace of perfume, or the flowers on the table
—
gardenia, rose, lavender? And of course, the obscenity of spilled blood
—
intimate, meaty, shameful.