Setting

The subject of setting prompts frequent questions from beginning writers. How much should I do? How much is too much? How much is not enough?

These questions all have a maddeningly subjective answer: it depends.

The amount of setting detail you should include depends on many factors. How important is your location to the actual story? Which details are important to the story? Why is description of place relevant?

And perhaps most important, remembering the rule that every sentence, every paragraph in your story must serve at least two purposes, if not three or more: apart from the visual description of a character's current location, what do your descriptive passages achieve?

In the short story Lightning Rod, I use several techniques to fit setting into the context of other things that are happening in the story. In this somewhat unusual case, the story's primary setting – the cornfield where Rod Spencer was repeatedly struck by lightning - is only seen in flashback. His house is never described, because it isn't important.

The cornfield is important. We get an early look in the fifth paragraph of the story, between the bottom of page 1 and the top of page 2:

Spencer’s hand jerked back as if he’d been burned with a cigarette lighter. His head filled with visions of a vast cornfield, an enormous black oak tree as its centerpiece.

A hot blue flash bleached the vision. Spencer blinked.

The early description is a tease, giving the reader a sense of mystery. See the lesson on exposition for more on story questions and the timed release of information.

A couple of pages later, I give a little more description – again providing just enough information to keep interest without playing my whole hand. The following example demonstrates a brief description through dialogue, followed by a more conventional narrative description:

“Once upon a time,” the man said, “there was a boy who had a very special talent. God shined a light down on him when he was only four years old, playing in a field behind his house.” Spencer closed his eyes and saw the corn again. The spidery oak, branches fanning out toward heaven.

I give just enough information to frame things up, and then I get back to the action and character again. I have two reasons for doing this, and they're closely related.

First, I assume that the majority of you have been in a cornfield and seen an oak tree, and know enough about the general experience of seeing those things to make the appropriate connections. That particular experience is common enough to be considered universal. If it's universal, I don't have to spend a lot of time describing it. I don't have to write an aisle-by-aisle description of your local Wal Mart. I just have to say Wal Mart, and you know what I'm talking about.

Second, as soon as you come across the description in the text, your imagination begins to fill in the blanks before I have a chance to offer much in the way of detail. If I provide the basics, a very powerful thing happens: you imagine your cornfield. Not mine. The one outside your town, not the one outside mine.

Next thing you know, the story is unfolding where you live - in your home, your town. I want that to happen. That familiarity leads to association, which means you make a connection between where the main character is and where you have been. And association leads to identification - relating to a character who's going through something you have experienced yourself.

If you're doing your job correctly, identification will lead to empathy, which means you actually experience the same emotions as the main character. That is what we're ultimately shooting for – you not only like Jimmy, you're inside his head, thinking and feeling what he thinks and feels.

You may feel we've drifted away from setting a bit, but we really haven't. Setting is a physical reflection of your character's emotional reality, or the internal circumstances that help define his conflict. When external reality mirrors internal reality, your work achieves a depth beyond simple entertainment. Patterns are everywhere in fiction. Setting is no exception. Recognize the patterns and use them to your advantage.

There are times when you will want to do more than suggest – when you're dealing with a setting that isn't universal, for instance, like a space station or an underwater drilling platform. In those cases, by all means create the kind of detail necessary to evoke the setting. But keep in mind that visual shorthand can still be used when aspects of your alien environment are similar to places your readers may have been.

Everything in your story relates to your characters in some way. Setting is certainly no exception, and is often a great visual metaphor for aspects of character. Movies use this technique – often exclusively – because the medium is visual. As a fiction writer, there are other tools available to you, but using setting as “visual characterization” is still very effective in many situations. It's immediate, visceral. It promotes what we, as writers, are looking for - association, identification, empathy.

If you have empathy, your readers are hooked. They'll stay with you for the whole ride.

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