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[ THE IMPORTANCE OF DESCRIPTION AND SETTING ] illustration

One of the first things I learned about the difference between good and bad writing is that good writing is not entirely dependent upon the setting. And bad writing sometimes is.

I was in a college class called The American Novel on the third or fourth floor of the English building, watching the branches of a huge oak tree sway gently outside the open windows in the lazy breeze of a spring afternoon. We were nearly halfway through that odd duck of a decade called the seventies, and the professor used the adjective transcendental, which was almost always, in those times, paired with the noun meditation.

“Good writing is transcendental,” the professor said. “It rises above time and place.”

That little pearl has stuck with me ever since. And being for a long time now in the business of writing — good rather than bad, I hope — and teaching it, I can attest that it is true. If it weren't, then only people who grew up in rural Alabama in the early years of the Great Depression would be able to make much of To Kill a Mockingbird. But the fact is that any thoughtful reader can make a great deal of it, because To Kill a Mockingbird is not about Alabama or the Great Depression. Writing that is only about a time is not literature, it is history. If it is only about a place, it is geography. Literature is about neither; it is about people and all of the wide range of joys and troubles that people tumble into.

Now, having said that, I'd better quickly say this: Even though good writing is not entirely dependent upon the setting, a writer of fiction would be paving the way to miserable failure if he did not first create, using every tool at his disposal, the most clearly depicted time and place he could come up with. Because a story will not get very far — more specifically, your reader will not go very far — without a setting that has been meticulously crafted.

Readers want to know a few things right up front, like what the weather is like and the lay of the land, the color of that lake, or the steep pitch of that steeple. Now whether or not these things have one iota to do with your story doesn't concern the reader. And it shouldn't; that's your business as the writer. That generic reader out there, who my students and I call the guy in Sheboygan, expects a few details from the start as part of his due for sitting down to spend any time with you at all.

The location and time frame of your story is more than just a stage for your characters to tromp around on. In some cases, the setting becomes a character itself. And all of the attendant details — societal conventions, seashores, mountains, regional dialects — determine the overall tone. In fact, if you do it right, setting and description become essential in your fiction. They become the foundation for the rest of your story to build on.

Very few existing novels or stories would work as well as they do, or work at all, in completely different times and places. It might be argued that To Kill a Mockingbird could be set in Nova Scotia in the 1980s, provided there was discrimination of some sort there, which there almost certainly was, discrimination being an abundant commodity in most times and places. In that venue, the story might possibly do the transcending my old professor spoke of. But, though it may survive such a transplant, it certainly wouldn't be the same book, or even — almost surely — a very good one. Harper Lee set her tale in the Deep South of the early 1930s, fertile ground for bigotry and family oddballs kept hidden away in crumbling old houses, a perfect bedrock for her unique novel.

Your fiction has to have a setting rich enough to match the story you intend to tell. It must be believable and sufficiently described to be as real for your readers as the rooms they are sitting in when reading it.

It's a tall order. But it's one that you'll have to fill before your writing can work on any level. This book will show you, through the use of explanations, examples, and practice drills, how you can go about establishing realistic, believable settings and providing engaging descriptions that will allow your readers to see, when they read your story, what you saw when you envisioned it.

CRAFT AND VOICE

Whenever I meet with a new class, the first thing I tell them is that creative writing consists of two things: craft and voice. I pilfer pretty liberally here from William Zinsser's On Writing Well, but he wouldn't mind; writers are usually gracious sharers and universally proficient pilferers. Then I tell the class that I might be somewhat helpful to them regarding craft, which includes the tricks of the trade and various clever manipulation tools, like rabbits out of hats.

But when it comes to voice, the entirely individual way in which they spin their yarns, I admit that I'm not likely to be of any use whatsoever. They'll just have to dig around for that on their own. I can point them in the right direction, can show them examples of other peoples' voices, and can even tell them when they haven't found it. But finding it is a personal expedition.

This business of description and setting is rooted firmly in both craft and voice. The careful brush strokes that bring your story to life, the delicate tightrope walking between too little and too much, and the careful choice of a locale that makes your tale accessible to the guy in Sheboygan will require all of the tools in your kit and your ability to employ them. Jumbled in there — like screwdrivers and hammers — are metaphors, similes, sentence-and paragraph-length variation, onomatopoeia, allusions, flashbacks, and many more things. Your job is to lift each one out as it is needed and — in your distinctive voice — put it to work.

And while voice can't be taught — at least within the strictest definition of the word, by a teacher in a classroom or the pages of a how-to manual — it can be learned. The process through which it finally emerges is a refiner's fire of mystical components, made up of honing the basic skills of storytelling, devoting plenty of time to reading a wide assortment of talented writers who have found their voices and put them to good use, and then undertaking, meticulously and slowly, the ancient enterprise of wordsmithing: the careful selection of each and every word and phrase.

THE TRINITY

In each chapter, we'll look at various conventions and devices that undergird effective writing (craft), we'll dissect specific examples of how established writers have provided description and established setting (models), and we'll look at ways that you can go about the planning, writing, and fine tuning necessary to write quality fiction (wordsmithing).

Let's set some ground rules. Instead of dealing with craft and voice as two things, let's consider them from here on out as one. The tools and your unique use of them must be a single enterprise, the two fusing continuously into what will eventually be your finished product: a story or a novel. The same is true of our dual topics, setting and description. One depends entirely on the other, and separating them in our thinking or our treatment won't be helpful. For that reason, I've chosen not to break this book into two parts, one dealing specifically with setting and the other with description. They're going to have to work together in your fiction, so let's go at them as a single entity.

Finding and polishing the writing voice in which you will describe your setting is a solo voyage with you alone at the helm. But if you tinker sufficiently, using the many tools available to you, and pay attention to how other writers have used them, then your style will surface, like Ahab's white whale off there on the horizon. And it will get clearer and clearer as you row toward it. Here's a warning, however. This thing you are chasing is likely to give you as much trouble as the whale gave Ahab.

Good writing is hard work, any way you look at it, and not always a lot of fun. It's a lonely business and oftentimes a frustrating one. We might as well have our first bit of wisdom from Flannery O'Connor, and you should get used to it. Some of my students call her Saint Flannery since I invoke her words pretty often.

“I'm always highly irritated,” O'Connor says, in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, “by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It's a plunge into reality and is very shocking to the system.”

So prepare to have your system shocked. But prepare also to reap the rewards of your struggles. I'm not talking about a huge advance from a publisher and a national book tour and plopping yourself down opposite Katie Couric on the Today show. You can't be concerned with any of that just yet. What has to occupy you for a good while now is the actual writing of this piece that might or might not provide your deliverance. The rewards I'm referring to are more basic: the good feeling of having written well for a few hours and the satisfaction of crafting a piece of your story in your very own way, putting your own stamp on it.

Good, clear writing that has been sufficiently wordsmithed, that's what we're after. A solid, well-written work of fiction with your name under the title and your voice throughout. A story and a cast of characters that will make the guy in Sheboygan continue to think about them even after he's finished the reading.

Two of the most essential components are description and setting. Before you can work one bit of the magic in that story or those characters, you have to make your reader fully aware of the place and the time, of what the weather is like, what things look like, smell like, and feel like. All of these — and many more — are the details that add up to create the world that you're offering.

PUTTING THE READER IN THE SETTING

Saying that description and setting are important in fiction is like saying that an engine is important in a car. Other things are essential too, like a steering wheel and tires and dozens of other gizmos. The car won't do much without most of them. But it won't even start without an engine. Neither will your story really start until your reader is aware of the time and the place.

Here are several examples of how writers have chosen to introduce their reader to their setting. Consider these options, determine which might work best to draw your reader in, and place them where you want them to be.

Giving the Lay of the Land

Slapping the reader in the face with the setting in the first few sentences is not usually the best approach. The first image that you paint in his or her mind is enormously important; that image — that first taste of your story and your voice — will shade their impression of what you're up to. If the first paragraph is a straightforward description of a house or a city street or any other place, with nothing evidently happening there, then the reader might assume that nothing much is going to happen later, either.

That's not to say that it can't be done, and done effectively. Look at John Steinbeck's opening paragraph in East of Eden:

The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay.

This is pure telling rather than showing, a topic that we'll take up in chapter four. It is reportage. But Steinbeck goes on to quickly establish that the place itself is essential to his story and to the narrator. Notice that we meet the place before we meet the narrator or any of the characters; such is its importance to the tale we're about to be told.

A first time novelist starting to write a story set in Bolivia would be ill advised if told to begin with a description of its topography, climate, and gross national product. What he's likely to end up with is a report about Bolivia and not a story about the elderly rancher who has his sights set on the pretty peasant girl who is in love with his son. The writer will eventually get around to all of that, but what readers are likely to have lodged in their minds is that little geography lesson. And it will be hard to overcome.

So, how did Steinbeck pull it off ? His first two sentences work in East of Eden because he knew where he was headed and how he wanted to get there. He knew that the land itself would be a living, breathing character in the novel, as essential as any of the other characters. Look at his next paragraph:

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer — and what trees and seasons smelled like — how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.

Now we have the narrator present and accounted for, looking around and beginning to tell us whatever it is that he wishes to impart.

So, while I would be hesitant to suggest that writers who are still finding their feet regarding craft begin their books with a geographical description of the countryside, neither would I tell them not to do it under any circumstances. As a writer, you have to put your readers exactly where you want them to be, seeing exactly what you want them to see. Or, more importantly, what you need them to see to establish the setting in their consciousness. If your setting is going to play a vital role in your story — which it almost certainly will — this may be the ideal approach for you. But don't decide until you consider others.

Using Intricate Details

Don DeLillo begins his novel Underworld with the famous 1951 baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. Here's his first sentence:

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

Readers don't know who he is, not yet. They don't know why there's a shine in his eye or why it's halfway hopeful. They don't know that it's the famous baseball game — or any baseball game — that he's going to. But they are made aware in the fourth word that they are being spoken to directly.

DeLillo goes on, in the next fifty or so pages, to paint a picture, in present tense, of that game that plops readers down in one of the seats at the Polo Grounds on that long ago cloudy afternoon. He infuses those pages with detail after detail after detail that lay the groundwork for the larger part of his story, set fifty years later, which plays out in the next eight hundred pages.

Listen:

People stand in both decks in left, leaning out from the rows up front, and some of them are tossing paper over the edge, torn-up scorecards and bits of matchbook covers, there are crushed paper cups, little waxy napkins they got with their hot dogs, there are germ-bearing tissues many days old that were matted at the bottoms of deep pockets, all coming down around Pafko.

Thomson is loping along, he is striding nicely around first, leaning into his run.

Pafko throws smartly to Cox …

Cox peers out from under his cap and snaps the ball sidearm to Robinson.

Look at Mays meanwhile strolling to the plate dragging the barrel of his bat on the ground.

Robinson takes the throw and makes a spin toward Thomson, who is standing shyly maybe five feet from second.

People like to see paper fall at Pafko's feet, maybe drift across his shoulder or cling to his cap. The wall is nearly seventeen feet high so he is well out of range of the longest leaning touch and they have to be content to bathe him in their paper.

Look at Durocher on the dugout steps, manager of the Giants, hard-rock Leo, the gashouse scrapper, a face straight from the Gallic Wars …

Now notice what DeLillo is up to here. Having called out readers individually in the first sentence of the book (remember the “He speaks in your voice …”), he goes on to show them everything that's going on: people in the stands, the mannerisms of the players on the field, the texture of the napkins that come with the hotdogs. He points his readers in every direction that he wants them to go:

“Look at Mays …”

“Look at Durocher …”

In the wonderful flow of description that winds through the next many pages, DeLillo hovers over several characters at the game. The young boy who “speaks in your voice” — with the halfway hopeful shine in his eye — has snuck in without paying and is nervous, jumpy. The businessman in the seat beside him who buys him peanuts and soda is … “close-shaved and Brylcreemed but with a casual quality, a free-and-easy manner that Cotter the boy links to small-town life in the movies.”

Suddenly we're in the radio broadcast booth with the announcer. Then, in one paragraph, we're in people's houses and in bars and stores across the several boroughs of New York, where they're listening to the game on the radio. Then we're in the stands again, with four men in the VIP section: Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor, and J. Edgar Hoover. There are people we know, men we've watched on television or read about.

Gleason is playing hooky from the rehearsal of his television show, where he's supposed to be running through his lines for a new skit they're trying out this week called The Honeymooners. Hoover learns, during the game, that Russia has exploded an atomic bomb in their first rehearsal of an entirely different sort. Both of these anecdotes serve to anchor us securely into a particular era that is bigger than a baseball game and into a world that is wider than the Polo Grounds. Sort of the thing played out against the bigger thing, which we'll discuss throughout the book.

All of these characters — the ones we've never known and the ones for whom we have a preconceived mental image — are talking to each other and laughing and swilling beer and eating peanuts, and we are — through the courtesy of a gifted writer — right there with them. Sinatra, Gleason, Shor, and Hoover are all dead now. But here they are fully alive; their loosened neckties are as wide and colorful as all the other men's ties on that early 1950s afternoon. Little triangles of handkerchiefs peek out from the breast pockets of their suit coats. Cups of frothy beer are cold in their hands.

This detailed approach might be a good way for you to bring your reader into your story, to carefully paint a mental picture — down to the texture and shapes of seemingly unimportant things — and establish in the reader's mind an image as clear and focused as a good photograph. We'll deal with how to look for those details in the very next chapter. Then in chapter four, how to show them (rather than report them).

Let's go back for a moment to that business about the three approaches to finding your writer's voice: craft, models, and wordsmithing.

DeLillo uses most of his tools: a variety of sentence lengths, allusions, metaphors, similes, the five senses. His mastery of the craft is apparent. I've never met him, but I believe it's a pretty safe bet that DeLillo has read a novel or two, or — more likely — hundreds. And I suspect that most of them made some impression on him as a writer. He undoubtedly found in many of them techniques that he might employ, things that he might do, and plenty of things that he would make sure not to do. And all of it — the practice of the craft, the influence of models, and the fine wordsmithing — results in the sure, comfortable voice that makes the reader want to stay on board for another eight hundred pages.

We talked earlier about using a variety of writing approaches and techniques (the tools in your kit). In a passage like DeLillo's, where there are several paragraphs or maybe pages of details, you'll need to pay particular attention to this in order to keep the reader interested. So mix in metaphors and similes with strong, clever adjectives. Slip in a few sound-words (ono-matopoeia) and maybe some pleasing cadence. We'll be looking closely at these devices and others later, and we'll practice using them. They are the basic building blocks of the craft of writing. These instruments of manipulation are trickery of the most devious sort. But that's okay. In a long passage like this one, such devices are the keys to keeping your reader on board.

This is a good spot for us to make a distinction between literary and popular fiction. Though the terms are too general — there is a wide middle ground where they bleed into each other's territory — we can at least try to pinpoint a place where they differ. The use of description will serve nicely. Readers of literary fiction, like the DeLillo novel we just looked at, will generally be more tolerant of long passages of description since they are as interested in the way the author unfolds the story as in the progression of the story itself. Fans of writers of popular fiction, like Stephen King and Belva Plain and Ken Follett, usually want escapism first and foremost. They want to be entertained, and one of the jobs of the writer is to not bog them down in what they might perceive to be too much detail.

The problem for the writer of popular fiction is to give sufficient description without giving too much. The best solution is to keep your type of reader in mind all the time, and follow what I call the clutter rule: If something isn't serving the advancement of the story, it needs to go. All writers have sacrificed some finely crafted paragraphs or complete chapters to the clutter rule. And while it's not fun to delete writing you've struggled with and polished, your story or novel will work better without it.

Another good idea would be to enlist a few of your friends who read the type of fiction you're writing. Ask them to read your manuscript with an objective eye, trying their best to imagine that they've never met the author — writing groups are enormously useful for this — and the feedback you'll get will help to guide you in your description.

Readers don't usually declare themselves as partakers of literary or popular fiction exclusively, like Democrats and Republicans attending caucuses. Many, many readers enjoy both. And many authors write both. In this book, I'll use both types of fiction as models since each includes numerous talented wordsmiths in their ranks.

Sensory Description

Chapter five will deal specifically with using the five senses in all of your writing. But let's look here at how this approach might be a good way for you to get your story or novel going. Consider how Margaret George starts her novel The Memoirs of Cleopatra:

Warmth. Wind. Dancing blue waters, and the sound of waves. I see, hear, feel them all still. I even taste the sting of the salt against my lips, where the fine, misty spray coats them. And closer even than that, the lulling, drowsy smell of my mother's skin by my nose, where she holds me against her bosom, her hand making a sunshade across my forehead to shield my eyes. The boat is rocking gently, and my mother is rocking me as well, so I sway to a double rhythm. It makes me very sleepy, and the sloshing of the water all around me makes a blanket of sound, wrapping me securely. I am held safely, cradled in love and watchfulness. I remember. I remember …

This is pure sensory description. Before we know the name of the body of water we're floating on or its location, we know what it feels and smells and looks like. Before we know who is telling us the story — though the title of the book would no doubt be helpful here — we know what is quite possibly her earliest memory. And we are experiencing it with her, rocking gently with her, the sloshing of the water and the movement of the vessel setting the tone that slides us gently into the novel.

So, here's another way for you to bring your reader in. Your beginning might benefit from the delicate brushwork of sensory description, letting the reader not only see what's going on, but feel, taste, touch, and hear it as well. In fact, this might be one of the best choices for beginning writers, since relating what things sound, look, feel, smell, and taste like might prove to be an easier chore, starting out, than some of the other approaches.

Setting the Tone

The tone, the pervading attitude or mood, will determine early on whether this is going to be a serious matter or a frivolous one. Funny or sad? Formal? Informal? Heavy or light? And a very good place to begin the establishment of the tone, to get a solid toehold into it, is in description in general and description of your settings in particular.

Steinbeck's tone in the first sentences of East of Eden is straight to the point, with no dillydallying. Here's where we are and here's the layout: mountains over here and a river over there. In Underworld, Don DeLillo works the tone like a musical instrument, hitting every detail just right, bringing the reader fully in. Margaret George's mood is peaceful, almost drowsy; but instead of rocking us to sleep, she's carefully positioning us closer to where she wants us to be. Now look at how Jack Finney starts his novella The Night People:

The great bridge, arched across the blackness of San Francisco Bay, seemed like a stage set now. Empty of cars in the middle of the night, its narrow, orange-lighted length hung wrapped in darkness, motionless and artificial. At its center, where the enormous support cables dipped down into the light to almost touch the bridge, two men stood at the railing staring out at the black Pacific, preparing themselves for what they had come here to do.

There's nothing dreamy here; we're not being eased into this one. The night is dark. The ocean is dark. The bay is black. The bridge is massive and deserted, the support cables “enormous.” The two men are dwarfed by the setting, and they have a mission. We don't yet know what it is that they intend to do, or why. But the tone is set. The game — as Sherlock Holmes used to mumble to Dr. Watson — is afoot.

The tone of a piece of literature is the overall mood. If you imagine your story being played out on a stage, the tone might be a combination of the backdrop, the set, and the lighting. The prevailing tone of The Night People, at least at the beginning, is gloomy and mysterious, maybe a little creepy. So far, it could be an Edgar Allan Poe story. And that gloom is exactly what the author wants us to feel as we start our adventure, whatever it turns out to be.

When starting your story or novel, pay close attention to the overall mood or feeling that you want to convey, then work elements of that particular tone into the opening lines. Carefully choose each adjective and image; in fact, each and every word should be the product of a meticulous selection.

DESCRIPTION AND SETTING THROUGHOUT THE STORY

We're running the risk here, when putting forth models of how writers begin their novels, of making the neophyte author believe that careful description of the setting needs to happen only on the first page or two, like tempting bait impaled on stout hooks. The truth is that the description of time and place must be a sustained effort; it has to be continuously worked at, continuously painted in the reader's mind.

It was a Dark and Stormy Night …

Don't hesitate to let the weather help you set the tone of your story or novel.

Often in good fiction what's going on outside is reflective of what's happening inside of characters and plots.

Here are some examples:

The weather sometimes helps to determine your mood (“rainy days and Mondays always get me down,” and all that), so let it do the same for your fiction.

A short story makes enormous demands on description and setting, since everything has to transpire clearly and succinctly in not too many pages. A novel, on the other hand, being so much longer than a story, usually hundreds of pages longer, makes just as many demands and usually many more. Characters undergo big changes in those hundreds of pages, and their sagas are most often played out in a variety of places. And the description has to be as strong and as useful on page 201 as it is in the opening paragraph. Listen to E. Annie Proulx halfway through her novel The Shipping News:

The hill tilting toward the water, the straggled pickets and then Dennis's aquamarine house with a picture window toward the street. Quoyle pulled pens from his shirt, put them on the dashboard before he went in. For pens got in the way. The door opened into the kitchen. Quoyle stepped around and over children. In the living room, under a tinted photograph of two stout women lolling in ferns, Dennis slouched on leopard-print sofa cushions, watched the fishery news. On each side of him crocheted pillows in rainbows and squares. Carpenter at Home.

Here's detail aplenty. The novel takes place in Newfoundland. But one chapter — chapter sixteen, titled “Beety's Kitchen” — takes place in one room, which has to be rich in its uniqueness. Thus: children that have to be stepped over, the tinted photograph of an odd tableau, the assortment of mismatched sofa pillows and cushions. Later, we hear water gushing into a kettle. We smell bread baking, yeasty and strong in the hot room. We watch one of those children eat yellow bakeberry jam (whatever that is) on a piece of the bread.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to post this little tenet over your monitor or at least in your brain: My reader has to be there, too. The fact that you have to be there is obvious; you won't be able to have your characters walk around and do things in your setting if you don't have a good idea of the layout. But the guy in Sheboygan's perception of it has to be just as clear. You have to take him there.

By the way, you might have noticed in the Proulx model that there are three sentence fragments. In fact, many of her strongest descriptions come in incomplete sentences throughout the entire novel. Here's a good place to say something about the canon of rules pertaining to writing. Namely, that it is sometimes a good idea to break some. What, in fact, is the use of fragments — which many fine writers employ to great advantage — but the violation of a steadfast decree that has been drummed into us since elementary school?

Fragments can often be the very best way for you to emphasize something. Because they are infractions, they stand out; so, if you need something to stand out, here's a good way to do it. But you might get a reprimand from your old English teacher.

The Shipping News, even with its abundance of fragments, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Thus endeth that lesson.

SUMMARY: SENDING THE INVITATION

If a novel works well, it's because the novelist has worked hard. How many times have you heard somebody say that this or that author's prose is so real and comfortable that he bets the words just poured out?

I'll take that bet.

The brutal truth is, when it comes to creative writing, words hardly ever just pour out. What has to happen is that you have to struggle and groan and write something any number of times so that, at the end, the finished product has to look like it took no effort whatsoever. The narrative has to be as easy and relaxed as an old uncle spinning a yarn on the front porch, as smooth as cold buttermilk easing out of a porcelain cup.

In other words, you have to work a little magic.

You'll have to do it other places, too. Remember the bit about good writing having to transcend place and time that we started with? That calls for magic, also. Making your setting accessible to a reader who has never been there, has never lived in that era, or maybe never knew of the place's existence or cared one way or another about it is going to be a tricky task. Here's Flannery O'Connor again: “The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”

The real problem is the eternity part. That's where the magic is required. The eternity that Flannery O'Connor is talking about is the much larger commonality that links us all together. It is — to risk sounding awfully philosophical — the vast human experience that all people share, the enormous connection that allows a reader removed from a setting by hundreds of years and thousands of miles to relate to the story, understand it, and enjoy it.

Adequate use of description and an adequate rendering of time and place in a novel will allow your readers to have some access to your story. Good description and a carefully crafted setting will make them want to be there. This significantly more precise and polished effort will make them want to settle in and stay a while, to get to know the characters and their situations, to see how your characters get into moral dilemmas and out again. They want to see how they end up surprising him, or how they misbehave. With good description and a believable setting, your readers will have a front-row, center seat, as opposed to one in the back of the third balcony.

The difference between just being in attendance and wanting to be there starts with an invitation. Good, clear writing has to, first and foremost, lure the reader in. Think of the examples we just looked at, at how Steinbeck, DeLillo, George, and Finney began their novels. Here are four distinctively different styles and settings, four very different voices. Yet what they all have in common is that they were carefully written to entice readers to step right up into the vehicle and, once in, to look around and wonder where they're off to.

Novelists usually have to be stealthier than poets, who can get away with a beckoning as straightforward as Robert Frost's in “The Pasture,” which is usually the opening poem in collections of his work:

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;

I'll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I shan't be gone long. — You come too.

You come too.

That's what your writing has to say to your readers. Something in the situation you are presenting, in your characters and in your writer's voice, has to be compelling enough to bring them on board. And two of the very best places to issue your summons, and to keep on issuing it page after page, are in your description and your setting.

In this book, we'll look at various ways to bring the magic about: techniques and examples and devices and blatant trickery, all aimed toward that moment when your readers will connect so strongly with something you've described, or have such a realistic sense of the place where you want to take them, that they hear your invitation: You come too.

EXERCISES

Throughout the book, there will be several exercises in each chapter to give you the opportunity to try your hand at specific approaches and techniques. I encourage you to do these, so that you can get some hands-on experience. For the introductory chapter, we'll try three ways that might help you ease into this overall process of providing your readers with a believable setting in particular and description in general.

EXERCISE 1

In the next chapter, we're going to look at the importance of gathering details and then working them into your writing. Let's get a little head start. For this exercise, look back at the several paragraphs from Underworld on pages 10 and 11. The author piled detail on detail to firmly entrench his reader in the setting.

I suspect one of the first things that Don DeLillo, the author, did was make a list of the details that he wanted to include. In all likelihood, his list contained many more details than he ended up using when it came time to write the text.

Make a short list of ten or so details or items that you might include in a good description of at least one of the following topics:

There's no need to incorporate your details into any lengthy writing; as I said, we'll go into this in much more detail in another chapter. But, at least do this: Think about how you might work them in, in any way other than simple statements of fact. Then, select one or two of your choices and write a sentence that will bring the detail to life for your reader.

EXERCISE 2

Look back at the bit from The Memoirs of Cleopatra on page 14. Look at how the author conveyed the five senses in that one scene. Think of the list that she might have made before she tackled that paragraph.

Now, choose one of the following topics, and make a list of the five senses, leaving enough room beside each one to come up with several possibilities for description. Then get down at least one example of each sense.

I know. The list looks awfully familiar. That's not because I'm too lazy to come up with another one, but these same five topics can be approached from several entirely different directions by a good writer. This time, instead of coming up with a collection of details or things, focus on the five senses.

EXERCISE 3

Think of five books or short stories that you've read and enjoyed. Now, try to come up with a few words (maybe just one) that convey the overall mood, or tone, of the work. Moods certainly change throughout stories, but you should be able to pinpoint a prevailing tone for each title.

When you've completed your list, it might be interesting — and certainly instructive — to pull those books and stories down from the shelf and dig around in them looking for examples of how their authors went about setting the tone. Searching for ways they worked the magic that you will work in your own writing.

EXERCISE 4

Using one of your manuscripts, look at how you introduced the setting. You might have used one of the approaches discussed in this chapter — giving the lay of the land, using sensory detail, tone, etc. — or you might have used a combination. Now, try bringing the setting in using another strategy and see what works best.