CHAPTER 11

WHY SETTING MATTERS

BY LISA LENARD-COOK

Does it matter where your story unfolds? Not only is the answer yes, it’s true in far more ways than you may have previously considered. It matters, for example, if you want to use your setting to help reveal your characters and plot. Think about what Hogwarts reveals about Harry Potter and his friends and their story, what Africa reveals about The Poisonwood Bible’s multiple narrators and their stories, even what a largely unnamed suburbia reveals for Rick Moody’s or Ann Beattie’s characters and plots. And it also matters if you want to make an immediate connection with your reader, immersing her at once in your story’s particular universe.

In fact, the term setting encompasses far more than the place a story unfolds; it establishes a story’s mood, feeling, and historical era. In addition, setting is tied to a story’s point of view—so much so that until point of view has been firmly established, the setting can’t really be distinctly rendered. Of course, while the term point of view refers only to sight, the strongest settings are created by using all of the senses (even—or especially—the sixth).

Last but not least, your story’s setting offers it—and you, its author—credence, by way of its veracity. In other words, the truer your setting is, the more believable the fictional world you invite your reader to enter.

SETTING AS STORY

When creating a vivid palette, it’s important to choose details that are right for your particular story. Here, for example, is Scout Finch in the opening pages of Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird:

Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter, then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

In this brief paragraph, Lee sets the stage for all that follows by employing the classic (dare I use the word?) formula for setting: accuracy, originality, and the telling detail.

Let’s look at each of these three items individually. First, accuracy: The particularity of the details Lee chooses lends the novel a credence that feels “true” to the reader. Second, originality: Look at how Lee describes the rainy streets: They “turned to red slop.” Or, the verb she chooses to describe the men’s “stiff collars”: They “wilted by nine in morning.” More striking, however, are the details themselves, which in their distinct originality show us not only the heat but how this specific heat affects the people (and, in this case, the animals) in this town; for example, those ladies who “by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”

This is an especially perfect detail because it not only describes the ladies and the town but also shows us something else about the town at the same time—that this is the kind of place where such teacakes might be served. In fact, the best details will always relate to the greater whole, or, to put it another way, they’ll belong in a particular story. If Lee had used, say, Saharan desert imagery to describe her Maycomb, not only would the reader be confused, the author wouldn’t have fulfilled the secondary purpose of using setting to reveal character and plot. But because Lee uses details that belong in this story, this paragraph moves far beyond the usual visual description. We feel the sagging courthouse, smell the mules flicking flies, and can almost taste those ladies like soft teacakes.

Finally, in addition to drawing us a vivid portrait of this sleepy southern town, this marvelous paragraph tells us some important things about its narrator. First, she’s a reminiscent narrator. We are clued in to this because of phrases such as “when I first knew it” and “it was hotter, then.” A reminiscent narrator will have the advantage of hindsight when looking back at her story, as the now-grown Scout does. Secondly, we learn that our narrator is curious, that she notices things and then reports them. This will become more and more important as the story unfolds.

SETTING AS MOOD

As surely as the weather, setting creates a story’s mood. The first paragraph of To Kill a Mockingbird lets us know this novel will be full of slow, hot days, during which even the slightest of movements will take some effort. A different story, however, will begin with a different setting, as does Raymond Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep:

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie, and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved, and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

“Now, wait!” you might be saying. “That’s a whole lot about what he’s wearing and only one bit of setting!” I’m using Chandler as an example largely because of that objection. Chandler, like most seasoned writers, mixes all his fictive techniques together. So while it may seem like we’re getting Marlowe’s wardrobe of the day, we’re also getting the time (11 A.M., mid-October); the weather; Marlowe’s voice, character, and point of view; and the setting (Marlowe’s “calling on four million dollars”). It tells us everything we need to know about where we are.

Of course, in the next paragraph, we get a lot more detail on what “four million dollars” looks like. The paragraph begins, “The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high,” and continues on to describe a stained-glass panel over the entrance doors in great detail before moving on to the outdoors visible at the back of the hall. Here, too, Chandler can’t help but give us voice, character, and point of view: “Beyond the garage were some decorative trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs.”

I can see those trees; can you? In fact, I can picture everything about the Sternwood place, just from the details Chandler provides. This is because we see it through Marlowe’s cynical eyes and hear his jaded voice telling us what he sees. In this way, the contrast between his internal and external environments sets the mood. The best telling detail acquires a sort of guilt by association, in this case, the “hard wet rain” of an L.A. October and the voice of a “well-dressed private detective.”

SETTING AS MYSTERY

Even if you’re not writing a mystery, you can establish questions in a reader’s mind via your setting. Here’s a brief example from my short story “Wild Horses.”

Neighbors watched for her little pickup along the county road. Sometimes Althea would pull over, or not pull over, and stop. Janet Kendall once found her sitting on her tailgate in the middle of the road just over a rise, had slammed on her brakes and skidded to a dusty halt just short of the rear bumper.

This section appears fairly early in the story, and, while it’s clear from the outset that something’s not quite right with Althea, we don’t yet know what’s wrong with her. This brief scene, which further establishes the story’s southwest Colorado milieu, at the same time adds to the reader’s curiosity about what’s wrong with Althea.

SETTING AS COMFORT ZONE

Still another way of using setting to convey mood is by creating a sense of comfort. This can go two ways, of course. Consider just about anything written by Stephen King, who lulls the reader into a false sense of security by the very everydayness of his opening settings. Or, read the opening of To Kill a Mockingbird, which practically rocks us to sleep with its familiar, slow, hot summer afternoon.

SETTING AS TIME PERIOD

Still another thing both Lee and Chandler are doing via their chosen details is establishing the historical period, Lee with her powdered ladies and Chandler with his dressed-to-the-nines private investigator. Details in settings are like clues, and the astute reader will learn more about a fiction’s time period from the right details than from a tidy header that reads, “Los Angeles, California, 1939.”

Here’s an example from Judith Freeman’s Red Water:

We landed at the port of Boston and traveled across country by train, in boxcars fitted out with special seats, reaching Iowa City on July 5th. With the help of the Perpetual Emigrating Fund, which advanced us much-needed money for our journey, we were able to secure a place with the Willy Handcart Company, and although it was late in the year to begin the crossing of the plains, our party was anxious to set out, for nothing less than Zion awaited us in the mountains to the west.

Notice how this selection establishes voice (via its nineteenth-century phrasings) and mood (anticipation, fear, and longing), as well as its historical period. In fact, the voice is part of what clues us in to the time period. Contemporary settings are similarly immediately recognizable to a reader, as in this brief aside from Carol Shields’s novel Unless:

Emma Allen sent me an e-mail from Newfoundland yesterday. She and her daughter and her widowed daughter-in-law were off to a health spa for the weekend, she wrote …

Just as the fact that Freeman’s narrator must take a train across the country alerts us to a nineteenth-century America, Shields’s e-mail and health spa let us know we’re in our own time and milieu.

One last thing to be aware of as you use setting to create a time: As you likely learned in high school, you need to beware of anachronisms in your story. Nothing pulls a reader out of your story’s world faster than having a character check his wristwatch before they were invented or having a letter arrive by Pony Express after its demise.

SETTING AS VIEWPOINT

The final key to making a setting vivid is to see it through one intense point of view. After all, if you want to make an immediate connection with your reader, you’ll want to immerse him at once in your story’s particular universe. It’s easy to see the difference between these two settings, the first from George Eliot’s Adam Bede and the second from Shields’s Unless:

1. It is a very fine old place, of red brick, softened by a pale powdery lichen, which has dispersed itself with happy irregularity, so as to bring the red brick into terms of friendly companionship with the limestone ornaments surrounding the three gables, the windows and the door-place …

2. On a December morning I went walking hand in hand with Tom in the Orangetown cemetery. … The cold weather had broken, and the tops of the old limestone monuments, sun-plucked in their neat rows, were shiny with melting snow.

In the first example, Eliot reports the setting as if it were a gift from author to reader. Notice the vague adjectival clauses (“very fine”; “happy irregularity”) and the lackluster verbs (“is”; “has”). Now compare this with the second brief example, from the vivid point of view of first-person narrator Reta Winters. Notice how we’re looking at one thing, rows of gravestones, from one point of view. Even the limestone in the second selection appears clearer to the reader. Shields was a masterful writer (as was Eliot in her day), one who understood how the right verb (in this case, “sun-plucked”) could do the work of three tired adjectives. But the lesson here goes further: When we see a setting through only one set of eyes, whether via first or third person, we see it far more clearly than we will when we view it from a distant omniscient point of view. Even when you’re working in omniscient point of view, render physical detail through one character’s eyes, and your reader will see your settings far more vividly.

The next time you’re creating a setting, don’t settle for the tried and trite. Make your setting work for you and for your story.

  LISA LENARD-COOK is a PEN-short-listed novelist.