Put Meat, Not Fat, On the Bones of Your Setting

Janet here. Last month I talked about fleshing out our characters by adding meat to their bones, those details that bring them to life and hook the reader. Yet if we fatten them up too much or too early, we risk slowing the pace and boring the reader.

The same holds true of setting. When we attend a play, we don't want actors to move around on a bare stage. Nor should our characters move around in a vacuum in our books. 

I think of a bare bones setting as a silhouette, a flat colorless outline lacking the rich detail that brings the setting alive. You might recognize the silhouette of this skyline even without "Chicago" written below it. But think of all the lost opportunities if this is all of setting our story showed. When we flesh out our settings, readers will buy into the world we’ve built and be grounded in the where (location) and the when (time frame) of our story.

As with our characters, if we fatten up the setting too much with lengthy descriptions, especially in the opening, we risk slowing the pace and boring readers. It's much better to sprinkle setting in. 

                 1. Set the stage with vivid description 
                                           Use snippets of setting in every scene.

Not just any old description will do. Use strong descriptive words to paint vivid pictures and readers will join us in our story world, able to see, hear, smell, touch and taste the setting. 

    

This is the opening paragraph from Susan Elizabeth Phillip’s Dream a Little Dream:

The last of Rachel Stone’s luck ran out in front of the Pride of Carolina Drive-In. There on a mountainous two-lane blacktop road shimmering from the heat of the June afternoon, her old Chevy Impala gave its final death rattle.

(Note: the first line is a great hook.) See how quickly Susan fleshes out the setting with no fat. She tells us it’s June, hot, mountainous, probably in the Carolinas. Did this brief description put you there? It did me. I’ve seen blacktop shimmer with heat. The drive-in and Chevy Impala suggests a time frame. When my dh and I were dating, he bought a used red Impala convertible. That car was cool. And a reminder that setting isn’t just flora and fauna, weather, scenery... Setting is also inanimate objects. Setting is whatever surrounds our characters that we deem worthy of notice.  

As we ramp up the details in our descriptions of our setting--in this case Chicago--becomes more three-dimensional, more vivid. Yet as pretty and detailed as the image is below, as real as it feels, the aerial view distanced the reader from the setting. We can make setting count for a lot more. 

In the next image of Chicago, the setting is up close. When the character is immersed in the setting, we can use his surroundings to show the character and increase emotion. Then the setting will be integral to our stories. Not just a pretty or ugly or interesting or challenging backdrop characters move around in or use. So how do we do that?

        

2. Use setting to show characters and advance plot. Details are the key to writing effective settings. Select those details that reveal mood, biases, wounds, memories, quirks. Use setting to establish the tone of the story, to sprinkle in back story, to advance the plot (everything should advance the plot), even to trigger flashbacks.     

We can make the setting do double duty by carefully selecting the elements of setting that show the character, as we show his surroundings. Setting can contrast or mirror the character’s state of mind, which ups the emotion and adds tension on the page. 

In this opening paragraph of Debby Giusti’s Protecting Her Child, Debby uses setting to match—even enhance—the heroine’s mood:

Meredith Lassiter’s throat ran dry and her pulse raced as the wind outside whistled through the tall pine trees. The old house moaned in protest, its creaks sounding like footsteps in the night. Ever so slowly, she eased back the edge of the curtain and peered into the darkness.

In this excerpt from Julie Lessman’s A Passion Denied, the setting and character almost become one:

Marcy stood at Mrs. Gerson’s kitchen window, in bleak harmony with the rivulets of water that slithered down the pane. It was a slow and steady rain, endless weeping from a gray and dismal sky, and Marcy felt a kinship with it. It showed no signs of letting up, much like the grief in her heart over the loss of her husband. A silent mourning over a spouse who was still very much alive, but whose love was as cold and dead as any corpse.

             3.   Use elements of setting to up the emotion. 
                
To take setting to the next level, we need to show how the setting is seen through the point of view character’s eyes. I'm not talking about showing a rainy day as matching the character's mood or how a creaking house ups the tension and matches the character's fear. All of these are essential if we want to bring our settings alive. But to give setting even more significance, use a detail that might not normally seem important but is very important to the character. Perhaps because of something that happened to them in the past or is happening to them now. Level Three is hardest to write, at least for me. It requires digging deep into the character and sometimes into the writer.

I used setting in this scene from my debut Courting Miss Adelaide to help the hero calm an upset child and to show the character's wound:

Tears spilled over her pale lower lashes, becoming visible now that they were wet and spiky. If he didn’t do something, she’d start bawling. The prospect sent him behind his desk. He jerked open the top drawer and rummaged through it until he found what he sought--a bag of peppermints. “When I was a youngster,” he began, “on my way home from school, I’d pass Mrs. Wagner’s house. She’d be rocking on her porch, wearing a gray tattered sweater, no matter how hot the day...”

Emma stopped crying, but looked far from cheerful.

“She’d call me up on the porch, ask if I was studying and behaving. Then, she’d reach into the pocket of her sweater and pull out a peppermint.” Charles took a candy from the bag. Emma’s eyes widened. “She’d say, ‘You’re a smart boy, Charles. Work hard and one day you’ll make something of yourself.’ And, she’d drop the candy into my palm--like this.”

He opened Emma’s small hand and let a peppermint fall into her palm. When the corners of her mouth turned up in a smile, a peculiar feeling shot through him. As it had for him all those years ago, the candy once again worked wonders.

           His entire adult life, he’d kept a stash of peppermints around, to remind him of Mrs. Wagner, the one person who had believed in him, who’d given him a desire to improve his lot. The candy still tasted as sweet as her words.  

Another character might pull out a peppermint to soothe a child, but that isn't using this object of the setting to up the emotion. But when the candy is used to show the heartache of Charles's past and the significance it holds for him, setting will up the emotion for the reader. Use judiciously or risk losing its power and irking readers. 

I brought a spread of fruit and bagels with an assortment of toppings served on the screened porch of the cafe with a lovely view of our quaint town. 

For a chance to win one of the Seeker's books, your choice, leave a comment. If you can, share a snippet of setting from a wip or favorite book.