Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
IOFTEN FIND MYSELF GAZING AT MY ONE-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER and dreaming about the many ways she might fulfill my own unrealized hopes (she will play the electric guitar! she will have a lightning-fast metabolism!), and as a writing teacher, I have a tendency to regard my students with the same wistful and expectant air. I want very much for them to become adept in precisely the areas where I am most lacking.
One of those is setting, the necessary matter of when and where. As a young writer, I couldn't be bothered with all that commonplace information! Time, locale, weather, geography, historical period—it seemed a tedious bit of business to get through. Why describe those things when you could rely on the miraculous process of osmosis instead? The reader should intuit the setting, without the writer's dwelling on the dreary facts of time and place like a newspaper reporter.
And so, repeating this questionable logic to myself, I neglected a wonderful element of fiction. It languished and rusted in my proverbial toolbox. My characters moved about in blank apartments, nameless towns, and indeterminate eras; they occupied a landscape without discernible seasons or features. Certainly one can argue that the absence of setting may act as a compelling environment in and of itself. But I wasn't avoiding setting as a bold aesthetic choice; I simply lacked the confidence and discipline to identify the physical surroundings in which my stories were taking place.
A revelation for me was the idea that setting isn't merely a practicality, a means of conveying dull yet essential information—setting also does the thrilling work of conveying emotion. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Denis Johnson's novella “Train Dreams.” Absolutely particular with regard to time and place—it spans one man's life, from 1886 to 1968, and occurs around the Idaho Panhandle—“Train Dreams” is a story where setting proves more riveting and more dynamic than even plot or character. Every description is alive, shot through with wonder and yearning.
A passage that is especially poignant to me describes the small cabin where the main character once lived with his wife and daughter. While he is away building bridges for the railways, his family and home are lost in a terrible fire. Years after the fact, he has a vision of his burning house: the moss on the roof curling and smoking, the logs in the walls popping like cartridges, the pages of a magazine spiraling upward, the cabin's one glass window shattering. The curtains begin to blacken at the hems, the wax melts off the jars of tomatoes, beans, and Canada cherries. He imagines all the lamps alight, and a metal-lidded jar of salt exploding, until finally the whole structure ignites.
The density of historical detail here astonishes. With this single image we understand what life was like in one of the last remaining corners of American wilderness in the early twentieth century. The cabin is spare, rough-hewn, isolated, and most likely dark, yet the small, determined gestures toward comfort—window curtains, preserved cherries, a magazine resting on the table—make it unmistakably a home. And though the passage's tone is perfectly straightforward, the choice of detail moves us as we watch these objects go up in flames. Everything is animated. The power of setting lies, perhaps, in this alchemy of action and emotion. If we saw this world in stasis, would we feel as keenly how dear and hard-won this home was, and also how precarious, how contingent? This description does more than tell us about the Idaho Panhandle in 1920; it tells us about the experience of loss.
Describe a place you love by detailing its destruction. Or describe, as Denis Johnson does, a place your character loves. Nature could be the destructive force—fire or flood or the ravages of weather— but feel free to interpret the idea of destruction broadly. Consider the erosion of neglect and poverty, or the damage that comes with discovery, or the harm that's done in the name of improvement. Your setting could be anything from a hurricane-torn backyard to a city block that's being gentrified. My hope is that the parameters of the exercise will offer—even for those who, like me, are tentative writers of setting—a foolproof means of generating descriptions rich with both movement and feeling.