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[ DESCRIPTION AND SETTING IN THE WRITING PROCESS ] illustration

Once you've made the decision to write a short story or a novel, or anything else of a creative nature, you place yourself in the company of countless storytellers that reaches back through several millennia to the first oracle who stood up, cleared his throat, and told the first tale. Most of them followed pretty much the same process from the genesis of an idea to the delivery of the final product, and so will you.

In this last chapter, let's briefly consider how setting and description, specifically, should fit into the process of writing fiction.

THE IDEA

The sources of story ideas differ from writer to writer. Many authors draw heavily on personal experience and childhood memories; others let their imaginations run wild and dream everything up out of thin air. Something as seemingly unimpressive as an old man walking beside a busy highway might be enough of a spark in one writer's mind to end up as a 500-page novel, but a downright harrowing personal experience might not be sufficient for another one to translate into what he or she feels would be a worthwhile project.

In short, wherever you come up with your idea is your business, and I'll leave you to it. But our two major concerns — setting and description — should factor into your selection.

I often encourage my students to locate their piece in a setting that interests them, in a time and place that they would like to know more about. Anyone intending to write something that happens in Chicago in the 1920s will need to do some considerable research. And the eventual description of all those flappers and mobsters and G-men and speakeasies and Model Ts will undoubtedly affect the entire story.

Should the choice of a primary setting and the anticipation of some impressive description be the ultimate determiner of the story itself? Probably not. But it can — and in all likelihood should — have a great impact on your decision.

Maybe you've been toying with the possibility of penning a murder-for-hire saga. You know it's going to involve a love triangle and some sailboats (you like sailboats), but that's about as far as you've thought through it. Love triangles and murders-for-hire can occur just about anywhere, but those sailboats require a large body of water. So, the setting is already one of your first concerns.

Now, where you finally do locate this steamy bit of business will greatly determine many other things in your fiction. A yacht club deep in the heart of Dixie will be completely different — geographically, philosophically, architecturally, etc. — than one in the northeast. The locals will have a different mindset; the customs and even some of the laws will differ. Then there's the landscape; if you intend your hired murderer to toss someone off a cliff, then you'd best not set your story anywhere on the Texas gulf coast, since you won't find a cliff there capable of inflicting any more damage than a sprained ankle. Those sailboats you're so interested in might themselves even differ from place to place; maybe an altogether heartier sort of wood and design are called for in the icy waters of the far north than is needed in the balmy currents of the tropics.

Where and when your story or novel takes place, and the descriptions you employ to tell it, is an essential element in your fiction. So make it an important component in your initial idea.

PLANNING

Now that you've made your decision — your sordid, three-way love fest/bloody betrayal is going to play out on Lake Ouachita, Arkansas — you've got some real planning to do.

Remember, it is not only important but essential for you to know where you're going. I've had students and workshop participants tell me that they don't believe in planning, that they just write. They just give their muse free reign and follow where she leads. When I've read their stories, I believe them. Because what you'll almost certainly end up with if absolutely no planning goes into the process will be a rambling collection of clutter. There must be method to your madness, and the method is a plan.

When making your plans, setting and description should be constantly on your mind. However you go about it — many writers use detailed outlines; I'm a big believer in plot graphs — you should pencil in loads of details regarding the time, the place, and things and people that will need describing in each scene. If you actually go to Lake Ouachita, take along a camera, your writer's journal and/or a fat notebook, and a sharp pencil. But if your budget forbids such an excursion, then get on the Internet or write to the chamber of commerce and find out about the topography, trees, customs, and anything else that you might need in order to take your reader there.

When your reader settles down in their hammock on a nice summer afternoon or in a comfortable chair beside a roaring fire on a blustery winter night, they should, when they begin reading your story or novel, be at Lake Ouachita. They should smell the pine trees and see the small, rocky peninsulas that jut out into the water. The Ozarks should lift up there in the distance. And here are some of those sailboats that you've envisioned, their white sails puffed full of afternoon breeze, their sleek hulls skimming across the crystal blue lake. And over there, at the Mountain Harbor Lodge, two parts of that lover's triangle are plotting against the third, and your story is set into motion.

Before any of that can happen, you have to do considerable planning. As you can see, the time and the place, and the description you will use to deliver them to your reader, need to be very important ingredients of that planning.

WRITING

I am a firm believer — some of my students might say to the point of fanaticism — in the idea that this most important and creative stage of the process should be separated completely from the others. A writer who is serious about his or her task should set aside a block of time each and every day for writing. This time should never be for planning, researching, revising, or editing. Perhaps most important, it shouldn't be for thinking about writing (writers are, if you haven't already noticed, great procrastinators). This predetermined daily time should be for writing. And it should be sacred time.

My block is from four until half past five every morning. And I try awfully hard to write for that hour and a half seven days a week. Now, this isn't meant to imply that I only write for those two hours. Many days I log many more than that. What I want to you to understand is this: I write for at least that amount of time every day. I know; you're probably not an early riser. That's fine; then your block shouldn't be when mine is. Maybe yours should be late at night, when mine absolutely shouldn't be. I'm very much a “morning person,” and I doubt if I could compose even a coherent grocery list at midnight. I'm a better writer early in the morning, and I've discovered that a strong advantage to my predawn ritual is that nobody ever bothers me. Believe me, if the phone rings that early in the morning, it's either a wrong number or an emergency.

So one of my unbreakable rules is that I am at the keyboard for that hour and a half every day. The other one is that I am writing for all of that time. Many mornings I feel pretty certain that what I'm writing is garbage, and sometimes it turns out that I'm right. But the funny thing about garbage is that there is usually something buried in there that can be salvaged. The worst thing a writer can convince himself of is that he doesn't feel like writing today. I encourage my students to make believe, every time they sit down to write, that they have a deadline to meet for a tough city editor on a daily newspaper. Envision him as a scowling, Lou Grant-type character who doesn't care a fig what you feel like. He just wants your copy on his desk, pronto.

When it comes to setting and description during the actual writing of a story or novel, I've found it very helpful to have photographs, floor plans, or schematics of the specific setting where I can look at them when I write. When constructing that scene about Lake Ouachita — with its blue water and mountains and pine trees — a postcard tacked up over your monitor would be a good idea. And a list of possible adjectives and phrases that you've jotted down in your planning will be essential, as will frequent dips into the thesaurus to scan several options that might work better in your overall wordsmithing. But avoid a spell check and grammar check during your actual writing. Save those for revisions. You don't want anything slowing you down in this, the most crucial phase of your task.

Usually, when writing a chapter of a novel or a section of a story, I won't tackle it in the order that it will eventually play itself out, but will start with the clearest image that I have in my mind and then write “around” it. For instance, if your most vivid image is of those sailboats on Lake Ouachita, then that might be the best place for you to begin. Here again is proof positive that your choice of setting is very important.

REVISION

Now's the time to check over everything and make the first of many changes. I always print out the pages that I've just written and sit down on the couch in my study (not during my sacred block of writing time; remember: that's only for writing) and make plenty of notes on the manuscript with a fine-point mechanical pencil. I draw arrows to indicate when I want to move words, phrases, or whole sentences. I take things out and put things in. I declutter and make things clearer. Sometimes I scribble out entire new paragraphs in the margins, their sentences wandering around the edges of the page like rats in a maze. Sometimes I reward myself with little checkmarks for a bit of nice wordsmithing. Everybody needs a pat on the back occasionally, even if it is self-inflicted.

This stage of the writing process is the most likely candidate for being shortchanged, I suspect. After all, we all know full well how enormously important planning and writing is, and we sometimes look down on revision as something less creative than the first two. But believe me, revision is every bit as essential if you intend to finally come up with a finished product that is both publishable and readable. Revision is your refiner's fire; it is the polishing of your work to the highest possible shine. So build in enough time to make a proper job of it. The revision phase is the time that I pay very close attention to my description and my setting. I weigh every adjective against other possibilities. And I try to become the guy in Sheboygan, who has never been to Paris (if I am writing about Paris) or to Lake Ouachita. It is essential that I attempt to see my writing through his perception, to make sure that I have adequately described the time, the place, and the characters.

FEEDBACK

When I am first working my way through an idea for a story or novel, and then when I do the planning, writing, and initial revisions, I make it a point not to seek any outside input or to accept any. Too many cooks in the kitchen early on will indeed spoil the stew. In fact, when people ask me what I'm working on, I usually lie and tell them nothing at the moment. If I tell them I've got an idea for a story or a novel, they will inevitably ask what it's about, and that is exactly what I don't want to go into at that stage of the process. This thing — whatever it ends up being — will have to work in my voice, from my perspective. So I need to be the lone ranger in the first vision, the planning, and the first and maybe second draft.

Then, I throw the doors to that kitchen open wide to other people whose opinion I respect. Patricia Soledade, a fellow teacher and a wonderful friend, is my constant reader, and her input has been invaluable over the years. But Pat never hears about possible ideas, never sees plot graphs, and never sees first drafts. That's when it would be detrimental to have her, or anybody else's, ideas tripping over mine.

When I take a chapter or a story to Pat, it has been planned, written, and revised. Then she digs into it and brings me back the thoroughly marked-up and Post-It-noted manuscript. I spend a lot of time with that batch of papers, considering each of her recommendations, changing some things and leaving others as they were. And, of course, I ask her for clarification on some things. The ultimate decisions are mine, but my work is stronger because of the skillful input I've received from an excellent and dependable sounding board.

Finally, I make my next round of revisions and send the manuscript off to my agent and my editor. Then, of course, there are things they want changed or enlarged or done away with. Sometimes I yield, sometimes I compromise, and sometimes I dig in my heels. Every once in a while, it can be a frustrating process, but it's always ended up being a productive one.

One last thing, if you aren't fortunate enough to have a Pat Soledade, I suggest you get yourself into a writer's critique group that meets frequently in your community. Go online to locate one, or call a local bookstore or your library to see if they know of any. There will be, I assure you, one or two Pollyannas in that group that won't be of much use to you because they'll gush over every offering and never find anything wrong with anybody's writing, and there will be a Scrooge or two who will find everything wrong and never anything right. But there will also be, if you are very lucky, a core group of talented writers who will provide fair, constructive feedback from which your fiction will benefit greatly. And you will do the very same thing for them.

SUMMARY: THE FINISHED PRODUCT

I get asked fairly often to speak to writer's groups like the ones I just described to you. They usually meet in bookstores or in the community rooms in shopping malls and, though their main order of business is to critique each other's fiction, they do sometimes invite published writers in to say a few words and to answer questions.

The vast majority of questions put to me over the years have regarded how to go about finding a publisher or an agent or — this is the most frequently asked question — how to make the most money at this writing gig. Rarely am I asked any questions that I can actually answer, like how to better develop a character or instill a bit of irony or make the best use of setting and description. Sometimes, these John Grisham wannabes seem disappointed that I was invited at all. And the fact that I'm there, instead of John Grisham, should have been a dead giveaway that I don't know anything about making a lot of money from writing. People who do that generally charge a lot of money to speak to groups that can get somebody like me for free.

A Fews Good Rules for Good Writers

All I can tell those groups is what I have tried to tell you in these pages: Wordsmith the very best story or novel that you can, crafting every word, sentence and paragraph precisely, in your unique voice. Work it through as many revisions as it needs. Then get yourself a good resource full of agents' or publishers' names and — armed with a perfect query letter — wander into a marketplace that will likely break your heart many times before it makes it glad. Be persistent. There is on a shelf in my closet a shoebox crammed full of rejection letters that came my way in regard to my first book, which was finally published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, one of the most prestigious publishers in New York. That book went on to make the short list of finalists for a national PEN award. But during the writing of it, I didn't let myself focus on anything other than the story I was trying to tell and the best ways to do exactly that.

In a nutshell, don't worry about agents or publishers or marketing your wares when writing. Just concentrate on writing well, on using all the tools in your kit, not just the two — setting and description — that we have been talking about. If you do that, then you'll end up with something that will be worthy of your faith in it and of the persistence you'll use to put it “out there.”

You will be a wordsmith. Welcome to the club.

EXERCISE 1

Look over these basic story ideas. Then jot down several possible primary settings (times and places) where the ideas might be fully realized. Think of places where you have been or places you have an interest in and would like to visit. And consider reasons to set the story in one place (or time) rather than another:

EXERCISE 2

Make a list of at least five people you know that will be good readers for your second draft manuscript. I suggest you don't put down your significant other, since he is too close to you, and perhaps to your writing. Friendship shouldn't be your only criteria, or even a major one; choose people who do a lot of reading of fiction and ideally someone who has done some creative writing themselves.

EXERCISE 3

Using two markers — one red and one green — dig into a manuscript that you've been working on. Circle strong, clear phrases, sentences, or paragraphs with the green marker, then locate their counterparts, the sections that need work. You might just notice a pattern emerging; the green passages are good for certain reasons, and the red ones are found lacking for other reasons. Get to work pulling the red ones up to snuff, transforming them into green.