7

[ TIME AND PLACE ]

In chapter four I pointed out that it is essential when writing fiction to tell a story rather than write a report. The reason is simple: Stories are more enjoyable than reports and easier to digest. You want proof of that? Dust off your Old Testament and start reading, not for any spiritual enlightenment but just for comprehension. You'll probably like Genesis, what with Adam and Eve misbehaving and Noah getting his odd instructions regarding a particular boat and Abraham's test and many other things. Then read on through Exodus, with God continually asking Moses “What's with these people? I promise them all these neat things, give them food that falls out of the sky, and all they do is whine.” That's good stuff, best-seller material if ever I saw it.

Now take a stab at Leviticus, which is a long catalog of specific dietary and ritualistic rules. Leviticus has undoubtedly brought legions of people intent on reading straight through the Bible from start to finish to a screeching halt.

In Genesis and Exodus there is drama; there are murders, betrayals, and interesting characters with various motivations in various dilemmas. In short, there are stories. In Leviticus there is just that seemingly unending list of decrees.

And there is one more difference — perhaps the single most important one — between the Old Testament's first two books and its third. All of those stories are grounded in specific times and places. They each have a definite setting; Abraham looks out across the vast unknown territory that he has been told to traverse, Noah watches the waters cover up the world and gets bumped around by all those animals in the close quarters of the ark, and Moses actually sees the promised land, rather than just hears about it. Readers see it too, since they are right there with him. There's none of that in Leviticus, since the reader is never given any particular place to be.

Nothing so solidly anchors a work of fiction in readers' minds as knowing when and where something is taking place. Settings provide bases of operations for everything that happens in your story or novel, and, as importantly, they — along with the characters that will do things in there — provide you with a means to actually tell a story, rather than simply report information.

In this chapter, we'll look at a few ways for you to put your readers in the times and places where those stories can emerge.

THE CREDIBILITY OF YOUR SETTING

One night my wife was watching television while I tried to read student manuscripts. Bits and pieces of whatever she was watching began to mingle with the words I was reading, and soon I began to realize that I was paying as much attention to the movie as I was to what I was supposed to be doing.

The plot involved a middle-aged woman who had fallen into a romance with her young renter, who had taken to cavorting with the woman's teenaged daughter. The whole mess ended tragically for the mother and daughter — a hatchet was involved — with the amorous renter languishing away in an insane asylum. When I commented on the absurdity of the situation, my wife looked at me and said these words: “It's based on a true story.” Then she leaned forward and secured the story's credibility with this surefire endorsement:“It really happened.”

Those words come close to carrying magic, don't they? We seem to be constantly on the lookout for some level of reality — of credibility — in real life that we seem to think fiction denies us. That's why the phrase “stranger than fiction” packs such a punch. That's why when someone says that a particular movie or book is “based on a true story” they are implying that that fact somehow elevates it from events and characters that have been fabricated by a storyteller.

Now here's the deal. For you as a writer, every one of your stories should really happen in the mind and eyes and ears of the reader. They should happen as surely in fiction as they would if actually transpiring in fact.

We're really talking about two things here: (1) establishing your characters and their situations and the details of the setting so completely that it all could possibly take place (the overall credibility) and (2) the effective conveyance of those characters and situations and details so that the story does take place. One of the very best ways to ensure that both of these things happen is to pay close attention to the description of your setting.

Let's look to Hemingway for our example. In this opening paragraph from his story “In Another Country,” he takes us to a time before most of us were born and to a place where most of us have never been. And yet, through his description and the use of small details, the reader is actually there, seeing the things that the narrator is seeing, feeling the biting cold of a long-ago evening:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

For the reader, this event really happens as surely as the events that inspired that movie my wife told me was “based on a true story.” More than eighty years separates Hemingway's writing of the words in that paragraph and my writing of these, and yet when I read his, that little scene comes through as clear and crisp as if I were standing on the sidewalk on that cold night, looking at the game outside the shops.

Your fiction should seem that real to your readers. The only way to make it happen is to pay close attention to the details that you want, and need, to convey in a scene and then to choose the very best words that you can come up with in order to describe the details. A list — kept close by when you are writing — of all of the images that you feel need to be included will be quite helpful to you; that way you can check off the things that you include, cross out the ones that you've reconsidered, and make little notes — like “do later” — beside others. Also helpful will be other lists, perhaps of adjective possibilities or metaphor or simile candidates.

The end result of all of this thinking and scribbling will be — you can only hope — a work of fiction that will bring your readers in and give them a realistic sense of where things will be taking place.

THE BIG PICTURE AND THE SMALL

One of the first decisions you'll have to make when conveying your time and place will be how to provide your reader with that always-important first impression of your setting. There are numerous ways for you to bring the location to life and then keep providing a strong sense of the setting throughout the entire story or novel, but before you can do any of them, you'll need to decide if you're going to start with a wide frame and tighten your focus or begin with that narrower viewpoint and work within it.

Making a Plot Graph

Completing one of these for each and every scene in your short story or novel chapter will help you to locate, and then remember, all of the details that you need to establish your setting. Then place each one side by side to provide you with a linear representation of your overall plan. It also lets you see at a glance if some of your minor characters are popping up too frequently or not often enough. Prominently placed on the wall in the room where you do most of your writing, this graph will let you pinpoint problems and make modifications. It might also provide you with the assurance that progress is actually being made, something that all writers need to feel when working in the trenches of a project.

PLOT GRAPH

Scene Number__________________________________________________

Time__________________________________________________

Month/Year__________________________________________________

Clock Time__________________________________________________

Place__________________________________________________

Weather Conditions__________________________________________________

Geography____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Architecture (Layout of Room or Place)

______________________________________

______________________________________________________________

Food__________________________________________________

Characters in This Scene__________________________________________________

(Very) Brief Summary of Action

_________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

Things, Actions Needing Description

_________________________________________________________

___________________________________________

You will probably employ the latter most of the time, but there will be many opportunities for you use the wider vision. Let's take a look at both approaches.

The Macrocosm

The word macrocosm actually means the totality of everything, as in a universe, but for our purpose it indicates a large setting as opposed to a specific one. In fiction, a macrocosm can be a more far-reaching series of events than one little action by a character or two, as in a single soldier going about the business of staying alive inside the gigantic thing swirling all around him that is a world war or two kids who fall in love within the ancient feud in Romeo and Juliet. In chapter ten we'll look at how the larger view can help to move your fiction along, but here let's consider it in a much more specific way: at how you can give just a glimpse of this totality to your readers then move them into a smaller, more detailed place.

This bird's eye view can be done rapidly — sort of slipped in — with a mere mention of the distant viewpoint, as John Steinbeck does in the last sentence of this offering from The Moon is Down:

Near the mine entrance the guards watched the sky and trained their instruments on the sky and turned their listening-instruments against the sky, for it was a clear night for bombing. On nights like this the feathered steel spindles came whistling down and roared to splinters. The land would be visible from the sky tonight, even though the moon seemed to throw little light.

Or you can go into more detail, taking advantage of this lofty perspective to establish your setting, as I did in The Windows of Heaven, when describing Galveston Island:

From the air she would resemble an awkward creature trying to take flight, her head, wider and heavier than the rest of her, making an effort to lift all of her up and away, the long, slender body lagging behind. The side of her short wings, straining to pull her up, was the pointed jut of land above Offats Bayou, and most of the rest of her was sand and salt grass, the curving beach separated from the flats and marshes by sand dunes, odd shaped structures born of wind and tide. Only toward the head of the creature had much civilization taken hold, as if the town had grown out of the thing's brain, and been blown back over its body by the wind accompanying its ascent.

You might notice that I transform the island into a living thing so that my readers might see it more clearly. On a map, Galveston does indeed look like a bird taking off, so I played that to the hilt. If you decide to use this approach, spend some time looking at either aerial photographs or maps of your large setting, trying to come up with things that they look like (I've always thought the continental United States resembles a hefty side of beef, with Maine as the thick neck, Florida as the stubby front leg, and Baja California as the tail).

Once you've come up with a visual image that works, try different ways to work it into your description. A metaphor might be the way to go: Don't underestimate Italy, the slender boot poised to kick a field goal with Sicily, or maybe a simile will be your best bet: Cape Cod stretched itself into the Atlantic like an arm flexing its muscles, its fist clenched tight against whatever the ocean might bring.

Whether you choose to take the stealthy, brief approach — like Steinbeck's — or the longer, more elaborate one — like mine — will depend on what you want a reference to do for your reader. If you just need a different perspective, then brevity will work just fine, but if you want to help establish what will be an important place, where important things will happen, then you'll need to dwell on it somewhat longer and in more detail.

Another way to convey the big picture is to let your reader's mind's eye move across the setting, rather than down into it, like the slow panning of the camera across a landscape in a widescreen movie. Look at how Stephen Harrigan does this in his novel The Gates of the Alamo:

The light crept down the hills, then swam across the shallow river valley until it reached the field where the Alamo stood, and then moved on to the river and the village beyond. In a cypress tree along the banks, a hawk sat ruffling its feathers, shaking off the cold that had seeped into its bones during the night and beginning to rouse its mind from the sleep that held it fast.

This use of visual description is considerably more effective than simply saying the sun rose. Harrigan also makes nice use of personification, not by comparing the entire scene to a living thing, as I did in the preceding example about Galveston, but by having just one thing, the light, creep and swim. Notice, too, that he moves that light gradually, first over the Alamo and then into the village and past it, as if illuminating the set where important things are about to commence. Then, when he's got his wide stage lit, he focuses on the smallest of things: a single, sleepy hawk in a tree. By the time he gets around to some action — and plenty of it in the form of one of the most famous battles in history — readers are well aware of the setting. They have front row seats.

The use of dialogue offers yet another opportunity to establish a tiny setting within the enormity of a larger one. A classic example is in Our Town by Thornton Wilder, when one character tells another one about some recent mail:

“I never told you about that letter Jane Crofit got from her minister when she was sick. He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: It said: Jane Crofit; the Crofit Farm; Grover's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America … Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; The Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God — that's what it said on the envelope.”

You will more than likely not make your macrocosm as all-inclusive as Wilder's, but search for opportunities to occasionally give your readers the big picture — the panorama or bird's eye view — before you focus in on a much smaller place and situation. If your setting is a brownstone near Central Park in Manhattan, it might be a good idea to drop in slowly, showing the entire island at first and then coming down to where your story will take place, like the opening scene in the movie West Side Story. This overall view won't be something that you'll want to use more than once in a short story, and probably not any more than that in a novel, but it does serve to remind your readers that your specific setting is only one piece in a much larger puzzle.

Description of or reference to a macrocosm will work nicely for you occasionally, but its opposite, the micro cosm, is where you will be setting most of your fiction.

The Microcosm

We're talking here about a little world — a world in small. The home you grew up in might have been exactly that for you, populated by people who sometimes went out into the bigger world but always came back to that more important one. It might have offered safety and stability; it almost certainly provided nourishment and shelter and, hopefully, love and support. It was probably — at least in your youthful, nai¨ve perspective — a self-sufficient, independent place. To borrow a phrase from Robert Frost (which I've already stolen outright as a title for a novel) it was “a place apart.”

To your way of thinking, that home — and perhaps your entire hometown — was incredibly clearer and more distinct than the wider world beyond it. And that clarity and distinction is what you should aim for in your fiction. If a particular room in your story or novel is going to be important — or if important things are going to happen there — then it should not just be a generic room, essentially no different than countless other rooms. It should be the room that you envision in which something in your story will be played out.

In this bit from The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth, a young narrator is shown into a room by a famous writer.

The living room he took me into was neat, cozy, and plain: a large circular hooked rug, some slipcovered easy chairs, a worn sofa, a long wall of books, a piano, a phonograph, an oak library table systematically stacked with journals and magazines … Beyond the cushioned window seats and the colorless cotton curtains tied primly back I could see the bare limbs of big dark maple trees and fields of driven snow. Purity. Serenity. Simplicity. Seclusion. All one's concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the grueling, exalted, transcendent calling. I looked around and I thought, This is how I will live.

That room makes quite the impression on the narrator, so it should make equally as much of one on the reader. Look back at the fine details Roth puts in to make this just the right room: the comfortable, worn furniture, that table stacked with books and journals, the nice scenery through the window, even the author's succinct, one-word assessments. Then look at that declaration at the end, leaving no doubt that this is a room the narrator won't soon forget.

It's not unlike the vivid, detailed description of that room in The Shipping News we looked at in chapter one. And you will need to use details just like that in your fiction in order to bring rooms and streets and parks and many, many other places to life for your readers. Let's say you've got a character being interviewed for a job; she's sitting in someone's office and answering the questions as he asks them. This sort of scene would seem to lend itself to a dialogue-driven treatment, but don't overlook making the setting work for you also. What sort of room is it? Is it a corner office with a breathtaking view of the city, which would indicate the person conducting the interview is a big cheese? Are there photographs of his family on the wall? Is it a dark place, lots of oak paneling and leather chairs, or a bright one, with huge windows and rows of track lighting? What is there about this room that might help the reader see more clearly the personality of the man who inhabits it or the nature of the position that this woman is seeking? Maybe there are documents scattered around on the desk that are obviously confidential, alerting her to a possibility of impropriety or unprofessional laxity.

Or maybe the setting you are describing is someone's backyard. If the shrubs and trees are all neatly trimmed, a pair of Adirondack chairs in precise alignment, the lawn perfectly manicured and raked, the birdfeeders topped off, and a vase of fresh flowers on the patio table, then your readers will assume that a particular type of person lives there. If the grass is overgrown, the flowerbeds full of weeds, and cheap plastic folding chairs sit upended on the unswept patio, then they will assume someone quite different.

In short, make the settings of your fiction more than just places to be. Make them repositories of numerous details that help to tell your story and define your characters. A very good way to do this is to look for microcosms — little worlds — in your settings, scene by scene and in the work as a whole. When you do this, you'll come closer to being able to convey the settings — and the treasure trove of details they contain — to your reader.

A PAIR OF ESSENTIALS

When using those details, don't overlook two areas that are vital to a full representation of a particular time and place: weather and geography. If your readers don't get some idea of what the climate and the landscape are like, then there will be some awfully big holes in their overall perception of the time and place. These are two constants in everyone's daily lives, so it would be a mistake to ignore them when describing your settings.

Weather

I'm a big believer in plot graphs (as seen on page 123), linear representations of where things are taking place in a story and where things are generally heading. For each scene of a story or a chapter in a novel, I make sure I put down things that will help me focus on details that will be essential in my writing. One of these is weather. Even if the scene takes place inside a room that has no windows, I still need to know what the climate and conditions are outside, especially since scenes usually come wedged in between other scenes, which might take place outdoors. And because characters are more than likely affected by the weather. If you're at a place in your war novel where a group of commanders are at a staff meeting deep inside a bunker, you won't be expected to describe what the weather is doing outside (since there are no windows). But you do need to convey these men's crankiness due to the fact that it's been raining for a week and showing no signs of stopping in spite of the fact that a major landing is on for tonight.

Bright, sun-washed skies, driving rain, howling winds, a Winnie the Pooh blustery day — all of nature's various moods and conditions are some of the best tools in your kit. So don't forget to use them.

Look at how Belva Plain, in her novel Her Father's House, came up with a better way of telling the reader that the weather outside is frightful:

Still frazzled, he boarded the train. Red-faced passengers, people with wet coats and windblown hair came in stamping their feet and rubbing their cold hands …

That's a classic example of showing rather than telling. We've all seen cold, wet, red-faced people step inside and stomp their feet and rub their hands. So we know exactly what the weather is like without having it reported to us. Now think about how much stronger the image is in readers' minds than if they had been told that it was a cold, wet day. As I said in chapter four, it's always a good idea to go on a hunting expedition in your manuscripts, looking for places where showing will work much better than telling.

And, as I also said in chapter four, there will be places where telling might work just fine, as it does in this sentence from Harvard Yard by William Martin:

It was one of those March evenings when the lingering light promised spring, but the air was as cold as February, and January still whistled in.

This is still better than simply telling that it's cold out. The author calls upon the reader's preconceived notions of weather conditions of three months in this example. So, rather than spend too much time describing that lingering light and cold, whistling air, he chooses to convey the image in one fell swoop. The plot, at this point in his novel, is not dependent on what the weather is up to, but this brief description makes the setting more realistic. It's a small detail that adds to the overall image that a good writer is constantly striving for.

When writing about the weather, or anything else, it's not always a bad idea to bluntly state the obvious. Remember, showing is usually better than telling, but that's not always the case. The first sentence in the first chapter of the first book I ever wrote is It is snowing. You can't get much more straightforward than that. It just so happened that I wanted my readers to know this from the get-go. So I chose for it to be the initial image.

When planning your story or novel, know — for every scene — exactly what the weather is up to. And make sure you let the reader know it, too.

Geography

Most of us are impacted — positively or negatively or probably bits of both — by the physical landscapes that we live in. Let's face it: A person who lives in the big sky, wide-open vista of Wyoming is apt to have a different worldview than someone who lives in a congested, noisy city. And that worldview will undoubtedly spill over into his or her life in many ways.

Here's an example. It might be true, as John Donne maintained, that no man is an island. But more than a few live or have lived on one, and island folk are usually quick to tell you how hearty and independent they are. And — guess what? — more often than not they are. Maybe they've convinced themselves of it, or perhaps being an island dweller actually does set people apart from mainland inhabitants. I don't know. But I do know this: When I wrote my novel about Galveston Island, I met many, many of its citizens. Those who had actually been born there always told me quickly they were a BOI (born on the island), a distinction they wear as proudly as if it were a Medal of Honor.

I would have been foolish, when writing that novel, to have not described that pride and grit and independence in those Galveston people. Because those qualities determined entirely by geography were essential components of who they were and are.

In your own fiction, look for places to instill those qualities and quirks and mannerisms that derive from the land itself. But be careful not to end up with a cliche´. The stereotypical western loner, out there on the sweeping western range, looking for no more companionship than his trusty horse, will be all too predictable if he wanders into your story. Using elements of that independence and standoffishness in a character might work just fine, but to transplant the Marlboro Man into your fiction whole cloth will be a mistake. Remember, stereotypical characters are usually much too unsurprising and one-dimensional. The same applies to settings; Texas is not all cactus and prairies any more than England is all heather and hedgerows.

Your more common use of geography will be the actual description of it. In most cases the lay of the land won't be any more pivotal to your plot than the weather is, but, like your occasional references to the weather, the reader needs, and wants, to know what the landscape looks like. Here are Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in a railway car on their way to the country in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” by A. Conan Doyle:

It was a perfect day, with a bright sun and a few fleecy clouds in the heavens. The trees and wayside hedges were just throwing out their first green shoots, and the air was full of the pleasant smell of the moist earth. To me at least there was a strange contrast between the sweet promise of the spring and this sinister quest upon which we were engaged.

Notice the carefully laid on springtime images both meteorological and geographical at the start: perfect day, bright sun, fleecy clouds, the first green shoots, the pleasant smell of the moist earth. Then all of these niceties give way to something not so nice, to this sinister quest that will be the business of the remainder of the tale.

Doyle calls upon both the weather and the landscape to help him introduce that quest. In your fiction, do the same thing: Use whatever is going on around your characters and their actions to give the reader a clearer view. If you've got something happening on a seashore, make sure you describe what kind of beach it is. A beach in Maine with rocky cliffs and tall evergreens is likely to be altogether different than one on the gulf coast, where the land is as flat as the sea. The very colors of the sand and water are different in those two places, so you'll need to get it right.

Which brings us to this word of caution: Do your research. Make sure when you mention mountains or hills on the horizon that you are placing them where mountains and hills would actually be. Having a character stumble over kudzu in Colorado would be as silly as having someone pick edelweiss in Mississippi. My novel set in northern Ohio has a photograph on the cover with a crepe myrtle tree in a front yard. The problem here, as more than one northern Ohioan informed me, is that there are no crepe myrtle trees in that part of the world.

CREATING BELIEVABLE SETTINGS IN IMPOSSIBLE PLACES

In Mark Helprin's novel Winter's Tale, the setting is New York City early in the twentieth century, but with a few modifications. For instance, there is a constant fog bank so thick that it scrapes and sometimes dents the tops of trains that rumble through it. And the novel starts one early morning with a bored horse that strolls across the Brooklyn Bridge and eventually learns to fly.

Both things sound impossible, don't they? And of course they are. But, owing to the fine storytelling from this talented writer, they aren't unbelievable, anymore so than the existence of evil Nazi-like rabbits in Richard Adams's Watership Down or the dogged persistence of an unassuming hobbit in saving Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Whether or not your setting works for a reader is not dependent on whether or not it is physically possible, but on how well you establish its credibility within the context of the story. I'm fairly certain there isn't really a land somewhere over the rainbow, with wicked witches and grumpy apple trees and Munchkins, but that doesn't keep The Wizard of Oz from working on every level at which a good story must work. The Lion doesn't evolve as a believable character because he's a lion, or even because he's cowardly, but because he finally locates the compassion and courage that he didn't think he had, and because we've sometimes surprised ourselves also and can relate to him. The expedition on the Yellow Brick Road doesn't work because of all the odd adventures and strange places along the way, but because we've all made difficult journeys.

If you choose to place your story or novel in an impossible setting, you'll need to remember that the setting is only a stage for the more important business that you'll be about: the interaction of your characters and the situations in which you place them. If you have a colony of people living on a planet in a galaxy far, far away — having been transported there by a technology that hasn't yet been developed — you'll need your story to depend on how these characters behave in that given setting. In other words, you'll need to place them in situations that we earthbound readers in the here and now can identify with. Let's face it: stealing a canister of hyrocaspicular mertatron on the third moon of Salantgris isn't all that different from robbing a bank in Grand Rapids. They're both stealing, and they both involve the inevitable planning and nervousness and suspense that are part and parcel of all theft. Most certainly, you will have chosen your setting for a reason; it will have some significance in the story and sometimes the setting itself will be a character.

When writing about impossible — maybe we'd better say improbable — places, it's essential that you create a system of rules for that world and that you stick to them. Your rules might not be anything more complex than a group of space travelers not being able to breathe the atmosphere of a given planet without wearing helmets or they might include various levels of things, as J.K. Rowling employs in her Harry Potter series, where the physical laws of nature are altered considerably. When you build such a system of rules, you'll have to apply them consistently in your work, for an oversight here will lose readers quickly.

Remember, let your characters and their motivations and actions drive your story, not the setting. If you do that, then go ahead and make the time and place as impossible as you want to. Your solid story will render it entirely possible within the context that you have established.

BEWARE THE COMFORT ZONE

When I pick up one of the Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald and plop myself down in my hammock to reread it, I get a sense of coming home. Here again is Travis tinkering around on his houseboat, The Busted Flush, in a St. Petersburg marina. And here is his friend and sidekick Meyer, the old economist whose home floats in the next slip. The Florida sun shines down, the early 1960s creep slowly along, and all is well. I'm so contented with the setting and the characters that I haven't yet been able to forgive MacDonald for dying and depriving me of more novels.

That comfort zone — that relaxed, good feeling you might get when you delve into a new book or story — is a good thing. You should only hope that your readers feel that secure and comfortable when reading your fiction; it means you satisfy them as a writer and that they will continue to buy your books. But here's a warning regarding the comfort zone: As a writer, you should avoid falling into it yourself.

John D. MacDonald never got so cozy with his setting and his characters that he had page after page of that Florida sunshine and tinkering on the boat and chatting with Meyer over scotch on the rocks. MacDonald understood that one of the unbreakable tenets of good fiction is that it has to move, and at a pretty steady clip. This is especially true when writing for a popular fiction audience, as opposed to one with more literary tastes. He infused his stories constantly with all of the elements that make me feel so at home with McGee and his sun-kissed, laid-back lifestyle, but he kept the plots churning along, often times putting his characters and that lifestyle in harm's way.

Let's say you've got a character who grew up in the city and buys herself a nice little house in the country. Here's a fine opportunity for you as a writer to have her fix the place up, plant some petunias, paint the mailbox, meet the neighbors, join the church, and do countless other things. Here's the opportunity, also, for you to have her do only — or mostly — these things, rather than pushing a story forward that will hold your readers' attention. All of those things that she does should be a subplot, each woven carefully into the bigger plot that will center on the box of old love letters she discovers in the basement or the body in the flower bed or the strange man who lives next door who just might know something about the checkered — or downright criminal — past that she moved to the boondocks to escape.

Remember, Holmes and Watson don't always sit cozy by the fire in their Baker Street rooms on foggy London nights, they get up and do things. And Miss Marple, Agatha Christie's sleuth, doesn't just putter around the garden of her cottage in St. Mary Mead, she spends much, much more of the story's time snooping around to see who poisoned the vicar.

There's nothing wrong with your reader feeling a comfort zone in your fiction, at least occasionally. But make sure you make them feel it in little doses, not in long descriptions. As importantly, you should avoid getting so caught up in it that it impedes your more important goal: to relate a compelling, active series of events.

FRAMEWORK SETTINGS

Frameworking — the inclusion of several things into a larger context or frame — is one of the world's oldest literary devices. Odysseus's adventures were all played out in the bigger story of the return to Ithaca after the Trojan War, and The Canterbury Tales, perhaps the most famous framework piece, is comprised of stories told by pilgrims on their way to visit the shrine of Thomas Becket. So all of these individual stories of Cyclopes and killer whirlpools and talking roosters and the Wife of Bath are little pieces of something bigger, in these cases two journeys: from Troy to Ithaca and from London to Canterbury and back again.

The physical settings of fiction can also be frameworked, not by actions or events this time, but by the places themselves. For instance, James Michener's novel The Source covers several thousand years by focusing on one small place throughout all of that time. And the framework that he chooses to employ is an archeological dig in which several artifacts are discovered at different depths. Each jar and spearhead and buckle that is excavated has its own story to tell as it turns out, and those stories become the many chapters of the novel.

Even if you don't undertake such vast time travels in your writing, a bit of frameworking in your own setting might make your story or novel more interesting. Maybe you've got two old siblings reunited at the house they grew up in, and the crumbling house becomes, in a flashback or a back story, a newly built, handsome structure. This way, the disintegration of the house itself serves to highlight similar changes in the old men. Or maybe you've got a couple on their honeymoon in France, ending up at the very same little hotel where one of their grandparents had their own honeymoon many decades before. Perhaps you'll have one of your characters come across a dilapidated old building that becomes the setting of the backstory that will be the major plotline, as Fannie Flagg does in her novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe´.

Using a framework can be a very effective and creative way to tell a story. If you choose to do it, make sure that your major emphasis is on that story and not the framework. Remember, the Canterbury tales are the important things, not the fact that their tellers are on a common journey.

SUMMARY: BEING THERE

There is a wonderful place in The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury where two characters have a chance meeting on a Martian plain on a nice night. One is from Mars and one is from Earth and at first they can't communicate. Then the Martian makes a technical adjustment and begins speaking English, and in not too many minutes they each begin to notice that the other one is not really there. In fact, what each of them sees off in the distance — a group of ruins for one and a vibrant, active town for the other — isn't really there either. We finally see what is going on: that the two characters are at the same place, but the times at which they are there are actually separated by tens of thousands of years. After a while, these two decide that, rather than try to figure out how this oddity came about or what they might do to fix it, they should each accept the settings they are in and enjoy them.

I've come to believe that that is exactly what good fiction does; it allows us to be immersed in a particular time and place for awhile. Your job as a writer is to deliver those settings.

We'll look in the next chapter at ways to establish settings in particular types of fiction. Here we've considered several ways to do it in general. The times and places in our fiction must be sufficiently credible to make your readers believe they can exist (even in impossible places), and they must be sufficiently delivered to make readers believe they do exist in the context of your plot. Look for ways to incorporate the larger view (by offering a bird's eye view or a framework) and such things as the weather and the landscape. Good settings are comprised of many details, and good fiction is comprised of nicely crafted settings.

EXERCISE 1

Using one of your manuscripts, find places where you can go into more detail regarding weather conditions and geography. You'll be surprised how much more clearly your setting will emerge when your reader is aware of these things.

EXERCISE 2

Take down your world atlas and start flipping through its pages. Look specifically at the shapes of states, nations, and continents. Now, determine how you might go about describing a few of those shapes for your reader. Every place can look like something, and your comparison might be a good way to establish your setting. Pick a couple of places, and write a paragraph or two in which you bring those places more clearly into your readers' minds.

EXERCISE 3

Using that manuscript again, or another one, search for places where you can let your characters' dialogue help establish your setting. You might use inflection or dialect that is unique to a particular place, or your might have your character refer to a city or region.