Setting (or, "No Matter Where You Go, There You Are")

NOTES FOR A PRESENTATION AT THE GULF COAST WRITERS CONFERENCE

SETTING (or, “No Matter Where You Go, There You Are”)

Here we are.
This must be the place. What a set-up.

Is it time? This must be the moment.

What are we to make of the situation? This space/time continuum. This setting.

Setting is where time and space collide. Setting molds character, shapes themes, “sets” tones.

Think of settings from familiar fictions:
Stalag 17. Animal Farm. Cross Creek. 1984. Slaughterhouse 5.
The Legend of Hill House. Gotham City Middle Earth.
Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn’s mighty Mississippi Starship Enterprise.
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry Narnia.

(Discussion.)

Setting isn’t everything — but take the right eternal story and place it in a new setting and it takes on new life.

William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” becomes Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet.”
(Or “West Side Story” — or even the recent vampire vs. werewolf love story “Underworld.”)

Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” becomes John Sturges’ “The Magnificent Seven” which becomes “Battle Beyond the Stars.”

“The Taming of the Shrew” becomes “10 Things I Hate About You.”

(Discussion.)

What are we to make of this situation? How would you describe it? Give me one word.
Two. Three. Give me a sentence. What do we have now?
Are we getting a mood here? Can we glean a theme already from a simple description of a setting? A single sentence about a classroom. Do we have a bored student? A frightened one? Cynical? Hopeful?

My own: Bright and cold, white and clean, like a surgical theater, it smelled of alcohol, lemons, and death.

Contrast that with a description you might give of the classrooms in a Harry Potter novel, or Little House on the Prairie. Each of them are classrooms, but each in a different era, divergent realities, with vastly different moods evoked, and often through the descriptions of the settings.

The three rules of Real Estate: 1) Location, 2) Location, 3) Location.Curb appeal.
It’s the same idea as grabbing a reader with a lede. The first thing that a prospective homebuyer sees when they drive up could be what sells the home. Just the same, when you describe the place where you character will do whatever he does, you have the potential to set the tone, create the theme, foreshadow the end.

Here’s the tiny bit of description of a classroom at Century High School used in a chapter of my novel:
Scene III: The alchemist’s study.
Test tubes and equipment gleam in a workshop standing idle, awaiting students’ hands. The chalk board is covered in arcane runes. The equations always balance, not like the tales in the alchemist’s foresight, his waking visions, his stories. And not like life, though the equations aim to explain its basic properties and elements.

In short: There’s little to no description, but the theme is there, as is the foreshadowing. How much detail is necessary in describing a setting?

(Discussion.)

You need to get the details right, however. You don’t want to write about someone using a lead pencil in a classroom in the wrong century, or using a gas light when kerosene lamps were the rule.

J.R.R. Tolkein was building a world, and described it in rich detail in his Middle Earth stories. He would need to tell you what sort of wood the chairs of a little Hobbit classroom were made of, and how they were carved, and how high on the knee of a grown man they would rise. Another novelist might not feel the need to give such a detailed description of a schoolroom because simply saying his characters had gathered in a “college classroom” and knowing the setting was a modern city puts the reader close enough for government work. You’ll fill in the fluorescent lights and rows of chairs yourself.

But a detective novelist might need to place explicit details in the reader’s mind and describe a specific Bunsen burner giving off a brilliant green flame.

(NOTE: At about this point, Mr. Beard makes my next point for me, and I read his this:)

My rule of thumb is to tell what the reader needs to know to get a picture in his head of the place. Readers will provide the set dressing from their own experiences. We’ve all been in hospital rooms. You don’t have to describe all the equipment in detail, just mention that it’s there — unless the equipment is intrinsic to the story, in which case it is essential to be described before you suddenly bring it — as if out of nowhere — into the plot.

Nothing comes out of nowhere. Everything comes from somewhere — and that’s your setting.

Likewise, nobody comes from nowhere. The place you grew up, to a large extent, made you what you are. You need to keep that setting as well in mind when building characters. Who are they really? Where did they come from?


I’d like you to take a minute. Two minutes. Think about your home town. The main street in the heart of the town — it may not be downtown, but the place that was the heart and soul of town for you as a child. What about that landscape comes immediately to mind? Is it the architecture? A certain person always on the street? A store you frequented? Fire hydrants the boy scouts painted like revolutionary soldiers in 1975 — the year before the Bicentennial? An ice cream truck that came every Saturday? A tragic playground death?

(NOTE: I diverged from this quite a bit, as the discussion opened and closed throughout. I didn’t include much of the following segment. I think there’s a story there:)

Think about your school, your time there, a favorite teacher, a despised bully, a strange moment that never made sense to you then — I’m sure if you give it a moment, one will come to you. Put yourself in the little desk, with the fat crayons. What does it smell like there? When is break time? Who threw up chocolate milk on the bus? Which kid never had shoes or always had a runny nose? Is she the one who threw up on the bus? What does it feel like here? Is it hot? Why is there no air conditioning? How does the sweaty man who comes to fix the air conditioning know the little girl who has no shoes?

(NOTE: We closed with a moment of Zen, just like John Stewart:)

Our moment of Zen:

“I was reading the dictionary,
and I thought it was a poem about everything.”

— Stephen Wright
(standup philosopher)