From: Yours to Tell – Dialogues on the Art & Practice of Writing
“I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”
But if you are in Kansas, show us Kansas. Take us to Kansas, too.
STEVE: Setting, of course, refers to the time and place, the where and when of a narrative. It can be a powerful factor in persuading the reader to suspend disbelief (whatever the genre), establishing and deepening the created reality. It makes the world of the story more immediate—it puts you “there.” If readers are convinced of the authenticity of the setting (which happens only when you double-check every detail, even if you think you got it right the first time) they will tend to believe everything else you tell them. And if you make the setting fascinating enough, you increase the readers’ degree of engagement, which might keep them reading for more of that experience even if they’re less interested in other aspects of your story.
MELANIE: Is there always a presumed setting, even if it isn’t developed? Are there stories in which the setting is so incidental it doesn’t matter when and where we are? Does a minimalist setting suggest universality, disaffection, boundlessness?
STEVE: Certainly it’s possible to tell a story using little or no setting—it happens in theater all the time. More or less generic stage sets are rather common—a street corner, a table outside a café, a park bench, two people in chairs having a phone conversation, even a single character on a bare stage bathed in a spotlight. In such settings the words of the piece and—if there are two or more characters, their interaction—become the focus and carry all the weight. The advantage is that the minimal setting can be used to showcase brilliant dialogue and provide a detailed close-up on a relationship. The disadvantage is that you’ve just jettisoned a large portion of your writer’s tool set, making your task much more difficult.
As an aside, this illustrates the importance of correctly choosing the medium for the story you want to tell. If the visuals are most important, you may want to write it as a screenplay. If it’s the dialogue, you might choose to do a theatrical piece. If it’s more about larger philosophical and melodic issues than plot you might consider writing it as a poem. Intricate pacing and visual dynamics may suggest a graphic novel script to you. Or if it’s a combination of these elements, and you’re interested in engaging the reader’s imaginative participation, prose fiction may indeed be the way to go.
A minimalist setting can work well in the theater because it showcases the actor’s acting ability. That ability provides the coloration and context a more detailed setting would have normally supplied. Taking the actor away and telling the story in prose demands even more nuance from the writer’s dialoging skills.
As to whether minimal settings suggest universality or boundlessness, I think it depends on the story being told. But I would say as a general rule the best way to be universal is to be quite close, detailed, and specific.
I tend to think of setting as analogous to the sounding board in a musical instrument. It amplifies various aspects of the story and carries them to the audience. It’s the primary method for creating the tone and mood, and it supports and focuses our attention on the theme.
I’ve heard some writers minimize the importance of setting, complaining that it slows things down too much, that an exciting story doesn’t have a lot of time for scene setting so you need to establish setting with only a few broad strokes. I’ve heard statements like “Readers care about the story and not about where it’s set.”
MELANIE: So is there such a thing as too much setting?
STEVE: I think it’s possible to have too much of anything. One issue in regard to setting is that contemporary readers apparently tend to be less tolerant of long descriptive passages than readers of earlier eras were (although there are certainly exceptions, and I’m definitely one of them). So it’s probably good advice to break up those descriptive passages and spread them throughout the story. Of course, in terms of pacing, there may be times you want to deliberately slow down the narrative, and a longish passage of setting description is one of your options. But in that case you wouldn’t put it at the beginning of a chapter or book.
Occasionally I come across a longish setting description which takes me out of the narrative and upon closer examination discover that the author has stepped out of viewpoint in order to deliver that passage. For example, the book may be written in third person limited inside one of the character’s heads, but this descriptive lump is omniscient and obviously from the author’s viewpoint and not from the character’s. It’s another example of stepping outside of your narrator’s believable headspace.
A cure for that is to think solely in terms of what parts of the setting your viewpoint character is most likely to pay attention to. It’s in the nature of perception that although thirty people may live in the same city, they’re going to perceive the city in thirty different ways. What’s most important to your character? Maybe it’s the restaurants, or the bookstores, or the best streets, or the most beautiful places, or the places associated with some romantic or sentimental memory. Those are the things your characters are going to notice as they move through a setting—for them, it may be as if the other bits aren’t even there-they don’t even see them. Focusing on the pieces of the setting which actually tell the reader more about the character is a good way to move through a setting both efficiently and evocatively.
An exception to all this, of course, is the writer whose prose is so lovely readers don’t care that the story has ground to a halt as this long description of setting unfolds. But such writers are few and far between.
MELANIE: Setting can be anywhere on the continuum between broad/expansive and focused/narrow.
A family saga might cover multiple generations, as in Joyce Carol Oates’s Bellefleur or Isabelle Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Authors like Alastair Reynolds and Olaf Stapledon invite us to travel intergalactically. Leo Tolstoy, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, and Willa Cather take us across continents.
Or an entire novel might take place during the span of a single day, like Stephen King’s 11/23/63, or in a single town or house or room, like your chapbook novella Celestial Inventory.
STEVE: Celestial Inventory was originally designed as a technical exercise illustrating the philosophy that the way to the “universal” lies in being as specific as possible. I was inspired by Francis Ponge’s book The Voice of Things. Ponge, a French essayist and poet influenced by surrealism, developed his own form of prose-poetry in exhaustive pieces about ordinary objects such as oranges, potatoes, and cigarettes. The poetic paragraphs were meant to recreate the experience of everyday objects, in order to present original perceptions which avoided stereotypical thinking.
In Celestial Inventory I put my character into a small one room apartment and posit that he almost never leaves. He has his food and everything else delivered to him. I tell the story of his adult life up until the time of his death by means of an imaginative inventory of the objects in his room (including the walls, floor, and ceiling). The item descriptions are a mix of the objective, the fanciful, and the surreal.
I think this story, and its later follow-up The World Recalled, greatly improved my descriptive and observational skills.
MELANIE: In an earlier chapter we alluded to the way in which setting is sometimes referred to as “a character” because of its powerful presence. I wonder if this doesn’t obscure the function and nature of setting by comparing it to something else rather than exploring it in its own right.
Setting is setting, the where and when of a piece; it isn’t a character or a theme or part of a plot, though it certainly affects and commingles with all those components and more. I think it’s more useful to think about setting as itself, in its own terms rather than metaphorically as something else like character.
People often exclaim over how specific and full the eponymous setting is in your novel Deadfall Hotel. The hotel figures prominently in the story, of course. It’s a compelling setting, and we don’t need to call it a character to understand its importance. In fact, in my opinion, thinking of it that way undermines its power; we must experience the building directly as what it is, a building with a history and a physical structure, and not allow ourselves the refuge—one might even say the cheat—of calling it by another name.
STEVE: I suspect that’s just a further example of the way we tend to undervalue the significance of setting. So when a story seriously engages the setting we say “it’s like a character.”
But Deadfall Hotel did become a kind of technical repository for everything I’ve learned about setting over the years, in large part because it lived in my imagination for decades, and when I learned something new about setting—from reading about architecture, or landscape design, or “the psychology of the house” as Olivier Marc calls it—it just naturally became part of my process for delineating that hotel.
But you don’t have to research a large number of learned texts to understand setting—all of us are experts in it, we just aren’t often aware of it. We live in homes we’ve bought or rented, and we’ve worked in structures under other people’s control. We know the difference when we can decorate and redesign and otherwise make a place a home we’re comfortable in, as opposed to when someone else has made all those decisions beforehand. We recognize that some public buildings make us feel uncomfortable or oppressed, while others amaze and even engender certain spiritual feelings. We’re even aware of problematic spaces to a certain degree. Some of us ascribe those feelings to the existence of energetically “good” and “bad” locations on the planet, and some of us are a bit more analytical about it, especially if we’re addicted to one of those remodeling television shows. So we just need to recognize that the knowledge is there and then learn how to incorporate it into a story.
MELANIE: Choices about setting both inform and are informed by other components of the story—theme, plot, character, voice, point of view, language, structure.
The particular periods of American history chosen as settings by, for example, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, Harriet Beecher Stow, Margaret Mitchell meant that certain themes naturally presented themselves, the possible range of beginning-middle-end was clear, the characters spoke and behaved in certain ways and thought about some things and not others.
My story “Love as Something New,” one of the cycle of interlocking stories that make up the novel The Deceiver, takes place in America in the 60s. That setting choice determined what the characters would be thinking about (the Vietnam War, free love, pot and hallucinogens), what language would be used for their internal and external dialogue and for the larger narrative (particular slang, a certain in-your-face and self-conscious vulgarity), what themes could be plumbed (the “generation gap,” the pervasive sense that we could change the world). The decision about setting automatically gave me a structure within which to work and suggested strategies and details I hadn’t thought about when I started the piece.
STEVE: I think the key to good storytelling is recognizing that most story decisions are not made in advance, but evolve as you gradually create and research the story. A decision about setting changes your characters, and a decision about a character may alter the setting as well as everything else. Stories don’t come pre-built—they evolve one detail at a time. When you discover that the setting of your story includes a particular flower in a particular garden at a particular time of year, your whole story changes.
