9

illustration [ USING DESCRIPTION AND SETTING TO DRIVE THE STORY ]

I once sat in a parked car on a broiling summer afternoon in Jackson, Mississippi for no other reason than to gaze at a house that was not very much unlike the ones on either side of it. It was an old house situated nicely among old trees across the street from an old college. The reason I was looking at it — along with two or three other people who had stopped to do the same thing — was the old lady who was, we assumed, inside. For this was the home of Eudora Welty.

I was in Mississippi to teach at a writer's conference and the unlucky fellow who had been designated to drive me around sat there with me, both of us watching the house and its pretty lawn as if something was actually going to happen. Nothing did, and I didn't expect anything to. But I figured I shouldn't pass up the opportunity to pay some homage, however slight, to one of the giants of my line of work.

Welty, who died not too long after my vigil, shares the upper echelon of luminous southern literati with the likes of Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner and a few others, all of whom were, obviously, absolute masters of the art and craft of writing fiction. And one of the specific skills that elevated them to that rarified air was their use of setting and description to make their stories and novels work, to drive everything forward. Welty was particularly good at that, and it occurred to me, as I watched her house on that summer afternoon, so pleasant amid its sprawling trees, that it would make a perfect setting for a southern yarn, with a Blanche Dubois or a Colonel Snopes standing on the wide porch, mint julep in hand, everything described in an assured, leisurely voice full of the softness and fragrance of magnolia blossoms tempered with a pragmatic tinge of grit and gristle. And a good writer would use that setting for more than just a place for things to happen, she'd make it emphasize other aspects of the story.

So, how can you use a place and time — and description in general — to do such a large part of the work that you have to do in your writing? Look at how Welty did it in her description of an aged black woman talking to herself while walking to town to get medicine for her sick grandson in “A Worn Path,” which is arguably her masterpiece:

“Walk pretty,” she said. “This the easy place. This the easy going.”

She followed the track, swaying through the quiet bare fields, through the little strings of trees silver in their dead leaves, past cabins silver from weather, with the doors and windows boarded shut, all like old women under a spell sitting there. “I walking through their sleep,” she said, nodding her head vigorously.

The place itself is as much a tangible reality as the old woman. Its stark reality is highlighted by adjectives — easy, quiet, bare, dead — and by the use of an unexpected color — silver leaves and silver cabins, both that peculiar color because they've been there too long. Notice that Welty uses the word silver twice, when she could have easily used it just once. She wants to make sure that we see it; she wants us to not miss the similarity between the old, used-up land and buildings and the old, used-up woman. Now look at how she employs personification to drive that imagery home even further; the cabins are “like old women under a spell,” and the old woman feels like she is “walking through their sleep.”Finally, look at the sparse dialect; she uses the fewest words possible, as if every syllable is an effort, which would actually be the case for an elderly person walking a long distance. All of these elements — the fine wordsmithing, the evocation of the land and the dialect, even the mood of exhaustion — make this character's journey come completely alive for the reader.

When writing your story or novel, look for ways to use your setting and description to do exactly what Welty does here. Whatever your time and place, you can find plenty of details to enlarge and amplify your entire story. Three of the best ways to do this are to let your setting and your description magnify some overall theme, convey the general mood, and enlarge one or more conflicts.

MAGNIFYING A THEME

When dealing with themes in fiction, keep this in mind: Don't constantly pound your reader over the head with whatever social, religious, or political message you might be trying to convey. In fact, I'd advise against trying to convey any such messages at all, or at least to a large extent. Sure, Upton Sinclair might have set out to bring about improvements in the meat-packing industry when he wrote The Jungle and Harriet Beecher Stowe might have wanted to abolish slavery with Uncle Tom's Cabin, but modern readers aren't looking to be reformed. They want to be entertained. So your fiction shouldn't be a crusade; it should be a story. And if you expect to get it published, and then read, it better be a darn good one.

One way to make it that good is to let the setting and your description emphasize a theme. First off, the term theme, or at least my perception of it, needs some clarification. Many people come away from their English classes thinking that literary themes are a precious few haughty ideals — like pride, truth, or equality — that are chiseled deep into granite. Teachers who advance such a notion do a great disservice to the literature itself and to their students, because very few things in either reality or fiction can be so conveniently fit under such all-inclusive umbrellas. My idea of a theme is anything that the writer is attempting to convey in a particular scene. So, instead of everlasting love, your theme in the sixth scene of your story might be trying to get a date. Instead of having one lofty theme, your story will have several, probably many.

One of the strongest themes in Greg Tobin's novel Conclave is the excessive manipulation and intrigue that sometimes occurs in powerful places, in this case during a papal election in the College of Cardinals. Look at how he uses delicate description and the ominous presence of the surroundings — an assemblage of cardinals, ecclesiastical movers and shakers of the highest order — to get that point across:

The camerlengo turned to Mulrennan. “You may address the assembly.”

Again Vennholme started to protest, but Portillo directed him to his seat with a firm shake of the head. Vennholme stood in place a moment, looking at the faces of his brethren, then complied.

Timothy Mulrennan walked to the head of the room and turned to face the senate of holy elders whom fate, or perhaps Divine Will, had made his judges.

The tension is high in that room, and between those characters and the author's deft description of it — the aborted protest, the study of somber faces, the slow approach to the front — serves not only to show that tension but to magnify that theme. Allen Drury utilizes the same theme in Advise and Consent, relocating the setting to confirmation hearings in the United States Senate, and you might use it in a setting not anywhere so imposing or powerful as the Vatican or the Senate chamber. After all, manipulation and intrigue occur in any number of places. Maybe your story is set in a break room in a factory, where one of your characters is about to undercut a union election that will send thousands of workers out on strike. Use the room itself — the slow ticking of a clock, the raspy gurgling of a coffeemaker, the drab, completely utilitarian carpet and walls — to highlight the dreariness and tension. Or introduce a morsel of intrigue at a breakfast table, when a sly teenager who intends to finesse a scheme gets his comeuppance from his father, who is wise to the scam. In that case, maybe a toaster should loudly launch two slices of bread at exactly the moment that the teenager realizes the jig is up. Or maybe you could describe him as catlike, since cats are as stealthy as he thinks he is.

Let's turn now to a classic work of nonfiction, to see how a good writer can use description of a physical setting to emphasize a theme, something that is not physical or tangible at all. In C.S. Lewis's Surprised by Joy, a chronicle of his early life, he carefully paints a word picture of his surroundings on the afternoon of his purchase of a book that will ultimately nudge him from atheism to Christianity. It is, as you might imagine, an enormously important moment in his life, and he wants his readers to see, hear, and feel the place itself, to get a real sense of the prospect of change, of new possibilities that are not only within him but manifested in the everyday, commonplace bit of the world that surrounds him. Here's how Lewis describes the long ago October afternoon when he reached into a bookstall and lifted out a secondhand copy of George MacDonald's Phantastes, a book that would quite literally change his life:

I and one porter had the long, timbered platform of Leatherhead station to ourselves. It was getting just dark enough for the smoke of an engine to glow red on the underside with the reflection of the furnace. The hills beyond the Dorking Valley were of a blue so intense as to be nearly violet and the sky was green with frost. My ears tingled with the cold. The glorious weekend of reading was before me.

He, the young man on that platform, is about to undergo a change, even though he is quite unaware of it. Notice that the setting is changing also; darkness is falling, the colors of the distant hills and the sky itself are changing. He uses things that are there — the train station, the last light of the day, the chill, those hills — to call attention to something that is not there, the great alteration that is about to occur inside him. And he ends with a statement about the promise of a good weekend of reading that lies ahead of him, not realizing the fulfillment of greater promise that is in his future, which will be initiated by the small used book that he will begin reading on the train.

Your fiction should contain an abundance of places like that station, where your description of the setting calls your reader's attention to whatever theme you are striving to convey. If one of your characters suffers from low self-esteem or an unflattering self-image, then you might do well to plop her down in an ice cream shop, shoveling down Rocky Road and watching large people wedge themselves into small booths. The fact that the inhabitants of those large bodies aren't doing anything about their problem points your reader to the conclusion that your character isn't either. So, you've utilized a setting and its description to magnify a theme that will make the character's situation clearer for your reader and will drive the story toward some sort of resolution or lack thereof. She'll either do something about her problem or she'll get another scoop of Rocky Road.

CONVEYING MOOD AND TONE

Whatever mood you find yourself in will pretty much determine how your day goes. The same holds true for the characters in your fiction and for the stories themselves.

In the Iliad, Achilles spends most of those long years on the wide plains of Troy pouting in his tent, trying to decide if he should fight for Greece or take his men and go home. Since the Iliad is about those years leading up to the business of that giant wooden horse and the climatic battle itself, and since Achilles is, perhaps, the major player among the Greeks, his mood pretty much determines the brooding, ominous tone of the entire saga.

When, at long last, he bursts out of his tent — and out of his snit — and flies into action, making short work of Prince Hector and any other Trojans who make the mistake of getting in his way, things perk up considerably. The overall mood changes from one of quiet contemplation, plotting, and endless waiting to one of loud, sword-clanging, bugle-blowing action. The mood of the entire story changes because the mood of one character changes.

This will happen in your fiction, also. Or, at least, it should. The mood of a place or a character should drive your story, as Achilles' moods drive the Iliad.

Often, the prevailing mood doesn't come from a character at all, but from the setting itself. And your description will have to establish it. It was a dark and stormy night is one way to do it. But it's not your only option, nor usually the best. Both setting and description — and description of a setting — can be mighty useful here. Consider this sampling from Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, one of his Sherlock Holmes novels:

It was impenetrable. All about me was a wall of sulphurous smoke, stinging to the eye and noxious to the lungs. London, in a matter of hours, had been transformed into a creepy dream-world where sound replaced light.

From different quarters my ears were assailed by horses' hoofs striking upon the cobbled street and by street vendors' cries as they hawked their wares before invisible buildings. Somewhere in the gloom an organ grinder creaked out a sinister arrangement of “Poor Little Buttercup” …

In those two paragraphs, the overall mood is established entirely by the description of the place. Look back at how it is done: the fog (notice that the word itself is never used) is many things at once; it is impenetrable, a wall of sumptuous smoke, stinging, and noxious. Then, when we've seen and felt the setting, we shift sensory gears and hear it. We listen to horses' hoofs on cobbled streets, vendor's cries, and finally an unseen organ grinder playing a tune. Notice the strong use of a verb, creaked, and an adjective, sinister, to secure the gloomy, baleful mood for the reader. Think back to all that we talked about in chapter five regarding the use of sensory description. When establishing a mood or tone, making the reader see, hear, feel, taste, or smell the physical surroundings might be the best way to do it.

So, now that the reader is fully immersed in all this fog and gloom, how does the immersion serve to push the story along? Here's how: No reader, after having been given a description like that one, is going to expect a happy-go-lucky love affair or a syrupy sweet plot involving a boy and his faithful dog. They expect murder most foul, crafty criminals and clever sleuths, and suspense and plenty of it. Once you've established a prevailing mood, you've pretty much set the course of your story. So careful attention to the establishment of that mood is some of the most important work you'll do in your writing.

There are many ways to do it. Often it is best brought about by describing simple actions, as Dashiell Hammett does in The Maltese Falcon:

Spade mashed the end of his cigarette in his plate and made one draught of the coffee and brandy in his cup. His scowl had gone away. He wiped his lips with his napkin, dropped it crumpled on the table, and spoke casually: “You are a liar.”

She got up and stood at the end of the table, looking down at him with dark abashed eyes in the pinkening face. “I am a liar,” she said. “I have always been a liar.”

We don't have to be told that these are two tough cookies. Because we have been shown that they are. And that tough, edgy tone is evident in more than just the characters. Look back at the specific wordsmithing that brings this image to life for the reader: the slow mashing of the cigarette butt and the one gulp of coffee and brandy, then the quick use of the napkin and dropping it crumpled on the table. And all of these important — yet very common and simple — little actions before the important words that are spoken about being a liar. Then, a tiny action of the female character's own — standing up and then looking down (with those “dark, unabashed eyes”). Finally, notice that Hammett gives us no instructions as to how she delivers those lines. He used italics to indicate how the man's words should be heard, but nothing here. This is a good example of that; we can hear this gal deliver those few words in several ways. But each of them is chockfull of an attitude. Each of them leaves no doubt that she is what Hammett might call a cool and collected dame, which fits perfectly into the mood that he wants the reader to perceive.

Now, you might be thinking that I've made entirely too much of those two short paragraphs; after all, my dissection and explanation of them is longer than the paragraphs themselves. That alone should prove my point: that every word and phrase that you decide to use should work toward the effect that you are trying to achieve, and every syllable beyond that is clutter. This extra work on your part is essential to keeping that desired effect front and center in your reader's mind.

In your story or novel, if you want to convey a festive, carefree mood, then you might choose a festive, carefree setting, like a carnival or a sunny day in the park. Or you might rely on the description of a character's actions or mannerisms. Maybe a normally subdued fellow is suddenly overcome by giddiness and flicks water from his glass on a lunch companion.

Remember, never resort to the easy, obvious approach of simply telling readers that “the mood that day was festive and carefree.” Show them, by either the surroundings or some action, or a combination of both.

When Shakespeare put King Lear up on that cliff howling at the storm, he couldn't very well have him screaming out how much he loved his daughters. The mood of the character and the mood of the day had to coincide in order to be effective; the tempest within Lear — his sense of betrayal by his children and his anger because of it — had to be equal to the lightning, thunder, and wind that surrounded him. In the same way, allow mood to drive your story.

ENLARGING CONFLICT

When it comes to writing fiction, there are very few absolutes. Here is one: If there is no evidence of any degree of conflict, then you don't have a story. And a good way to ensure that you do is to use your description and setting to enlarge conflicts.

In Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton gives us the following exchange between the title character and Mattie, the young woman who works for Zeena, Ethan's wife, who has gone on an errand to another town. Ethan and Mattie have begun to realize the mutual attraction they feel and — given the social and religious boundaries that would have been rigidly in place in a small New England village in the first years of the twentieth century — a fine, festering conflict grows up around that little farmhouse. Ethan has just mentioned that he hoped Zeena made it to her destination before bad weather set in:

The name set a chill between them, and they stood a moment looking sideways at each other before Mattie said with a shy laugh, “I guess it's time for supper.”

They drew their seats up to the table, and the cat, unbidden, jumped between them into Zeena's empty chair. “Oh, Puss,” said Mattie, and they laughed again.

Ethan, a moment earlier, had felt himself on the brink of eloquence; but the mention of Zeena had paralysed him. Mattie seemed to feel the contagion of his embarrassment, and sat with downcast lids, sipping her tea, while he feigned an insatiable appetite for dough-nuts and sweet pickles. At last, after casting about for an effective opening, he took a long gulp of tea, cleared his throat, and said:“Looks as if there'd be more snow.”

She feigned great interest. “Is that so? Do you suppose it'll interfere with Zeena's getting back?” She flushed red as the question escaped her, and hastily set down the cup she was lifting.

Look at how dexterously this awkward predicament is played out. A much lesser writer would have reported that these two were nervous around each other and gone onto something else. But that doesn't even come close to what Wharton wants to convey. Here is something between flirting and trepidation; both speakers tiptoeing around a gorilla of a dilemma, both knowing what they want, and knowing they can't have it. Now there's a conflict worthy of the designation.

Wharton tells us about the chill that exists between them, then proceeds to prove it, with all that feigned interest in unimportant things, like the cat and the meager supper. Then, notice, things perk up when the possibility of more snow is mentioned, for that means that Zeena won't be coming home tonight and that presents undreamed-of possibilities. Instead of telling us this, Wharton shows it in that perfect last sentence. Mattie's actions and mannerisms enlarge the overriding conflict as surely as those two in The Maltese Falcon amplify the mood of that scene.

Using Home for Something More Than a Place to be

When choosing a setting, don't limit yourself to what you know. Many of my students feel that they can only write about places they've been, that they can only adequately describe places they have personally seen, touched, tasted, smelled, and heard. There are, I agree, obvious advantages to writing about a place with which you are familiar. But remember all those science fiction and historical authors who had no firsthand experience at all regarding their settings. Remember, too, that Shakespeare, whose greatest works were set in Denmark and Italy, never left the British Isles. They pulled it off, and so can you.

On the other hand, many fine authors have chosen to locate their fiction in places where they grew up and have chosen to live. Faulkner created Jefferson, Mississippi, and pretty much stayed there for all of his fiction, as did John O'Hara with Gibbsville, Pennsylvania. Anne Tyler never strays very far from Baltimore in her novels. And though Mark Twain wandered as far away as Arthurian Britain, any high school student even half awake knows that his best work is played out on the Mississippi River.

While it's certainly true that these writers stayed in their own backyards, so to speak, the much more important thing is that they used those times and places to be considerably more than stages for the action; they put them to work driving the entire story or novel along.

When using your setting and your descriptions to enlarge a conflict, think of things or actions that will help bring this about. Let's say you have a woman who hasn't spoken to her son in over a quarter of a century, and now a situation has arisen where she will have to. The perfect way to call the reader's attention to the conflict might be to set the reunion in the house where she raised her son, among things that he hasn't seen in all that time, maybe working in bits of backstory that tie in a sofa, a picture on the wall, the fireplace. Or you might want to highlight the conflict by describing their mannerisms when they have to acknowledge each other at the door.

Either approach, or both, will be tremendously more effective than telling your reader that these two are laying eyes on each other for the first time since the Carter administration.

SUMMARY: DESCRIPTION, SETTING, AND THE WRITER'S VOICE

In this chapter, we've looked at three ways to use setting and description to help drive your entire story. By emphasizing themes, moods, and conflicts, you can better deliver a work of fiction that your reader can connect with.

Description is a matter of wordsmithing, of selecting precisely the right words to create certain images. So you need to make every description count; make every adjective or phrase serve to bring things into clearer focus in your reader's mind. The setting is another thing entirely and depends on more than just the careful selection of words. The setting is securely anchored in geography and time. It is a fact; either your story takes place in Seattle in the 1860s or it doesn't. So one of a writer's most important jobs is to choose a place that will be more than just a place and a time that is more than just a time. It should be a time and a place that serves other, bigger functions in the story, like theme, mood, and conflict.

EXERCISE 1

Remember all that nervous tea sipping that Ethan Frome and Mattie did? That's because Edith Wharton wanted the reader to feel and see the tension brought about by that particular conflict. Look through one of your manuscripts and find places where specific details might add to the reader's perception of a conflict, theme, or mood.

EXERCISE 2

Come up with at least one thing that might represent each of these common broad themes:(an example, aggravation: a prescription bottle that won't open.)

EXERCISE 3

In that manuscript you already have out, find places where you used setting or description to accomplish one or another of the three things — magnify a theme, convey a mood or tone, enlarge conflict — we've discussed in this chapter. Then look to see if that same setting or description doesn't work for one or both of the other two, also. For instance, look back at those paragraphs from Ethan Frome. We saw how the description enlarged a conflict, but doesn't it also convey a mood (nervousness, awkwardness) and amplify a theme (sidestepping an issue)? And if it doesn't, maybe it wouldn't take too much tinkering to make it serve more than one function. After all, the clearer the image you present to your reader, the better.