Importance of Setting in a Novel

Create memorable settings using time, place and circumstance.

Setting grounds your writing in the reality of place and depicts the theme of your story through powerful metaphor. Without setting, characters are simply there, in a vacuum, with no reason to act and most importantly, no reason to care. Without a place there is no story. Setting serves multipurpose roles in story. It helps with plot, determines and describes character and gives metaphoric links to theme. Setting, like the force in Star Wars, provides a landscape that binds everything into context and meaning.

Place Your Story

According to acclaimed novelist Richard Russo, if you’re not writing stories that occur in a specific place, you’re missing the opportunity to add depth and character to your writing. We are creatures of our environment, adds Robert Louis Stevenson. Our outlook on life is colored by the setting in which we find ourselves. Editors have told me that they have little faith in the vision of writers who don’t clearly depict the world their characters inhabit. Imagine Thomas Hardy’s characters without Egdon Heath or Scarlet O’Hara without her beloved Tara or Dorothy without the Land of Oz.

Setting includes time, place and circumstance. These three form a kind of critical mass that creates the particular setting best suited to your story. If you change any of these it will affect the quality of the others.

Setting as Character

Settings can not only have character; they can be a character in their own right. A novelist, when portraying several characters, may often find herself painting a portrait of “place”. This is setting being “character”. The setting functions as a catalyst, and molds the more traditional characters that animate a story. The central character is often really the place, which is often linked to the protagonist. In Lord of the Rings, for instance, Frodo is very much an extension of his beloved Shire. Setting, then, comes to mean so much more. Setting ultimately portrays what lies at the heart of the story.

Setting as Metaphor

When you choose your setting, remember that its primary metaphoric role is to help depict theme. This is because place is destiny. Russo tells us that place is crucial to human destiny and the formation of human personality. “The more specific and individual things become, the more universal they feel,” says Russo. This is not an oxymoron, but an example of the principle of a truism, which comes to us in the form of paradox (like all good truisms).

Detail provides the color and texture of your story and helps it resonate with a sense of place. This does not necessarily translate into lots of exposition; but it does require creative choice of words. So, instead of “John took a drag from his cigarette as he drove his sports car along a winding road in the country” (twenty words) try something like “Vinnie sucked on a Camel as his red Corvette careered the hair-pinned curves of Hell’s Gate” (seventeen words).

Setting & Emotion

The setting may amplify a character’s emotions or contradict them, depending on the circumstance of the character, her mood, disposition, tendencies, and observational skills. And the kind of story you’re telling. Either way, setting provides an “emotional landscape” upon which a character’s own temperament may play counterpoint or may resonate in a wonderful symphony. The writer should think of the less obvious, of contrast, and how you can increase tension and emphasize the character’s situation.

Setting as Weather

Weather conveys the mood and tone of both story and character. Weather is not just part of the scenery. To a writer, weather is a device used in plot and theme. A good example is Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and how he used the desert setting and the hot winds to evoke mood, character, tension, theme and ultimately story:

“The desert could not be claimed or owned—it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East”

In summary, here are some suggestions that will help you create vivid, memorable and meaningful settings:

• Don’t “tack” setting in; make it an integral part of the story; give it purpose
• Describe selectively and with purpose—through integration in “scene” rather than exposition
• Be specific (e.g., soft pink rose, not flower; beat up Chevy, not car; old clapboard cottage, not house)
• Use similes, metaphors, and personification to breathe life into setting
• Use the senses like sight, sound, smell, taste, feel
• Don’t tell, show (e.g., don’t say the time is the 1920s; show the cars and dresses. Don’t tell the reader it’s raining; show them by describing the dripping trees, etc.)
• Compare and contrast settings and relate them to the point of view characters
• Don’t describe setting all at once in the beginning; work it in slowly throughout the story; let it unfold as the story does

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of novels, short stories and essays. She coaches writers and teaches writing at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For more about Nina’s coaching & workshops visit www.ninamunteanu.me. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for more about her writing.

How to Hook Your Reader and Deliver

A great story opening arouses, delays and rewards. Constructing a compelling beginning—often called a hook—is a common challenge for even established writers, and one of the most important parts of a story.

The opening of a story should sweep the reader into the story like a tidal wave. It doesn’t need to be wild action. It just needs to compel the reader to want to know more. This is accomplished by engaging the reader with “intrigue”. In his article “Three Ways to Keep Your Readers Hooked” in the April 2001 issue of Writer’s Digest, Joe Cardillo suggested that the three elements of hooking a reader resemble the steps he uses to train his Samoyed puppy: 1) arouse interest; 2) delay, then 3) reward.

The writer arouses interest in the reader by providing enough detail to get the reader to ask questions. Now they want something. You tease them with the delay; that keeps them reading and turning the pages. It also gives them the chance to try to come up with the answers themselves. The reward comes in stages. Don’t answer all their questions at once. That’s what the book—the story—is for. The reward, parceled out in stages, lets the reader know that you can deliver and will ultimately provide them with a fulfilling story at the end. The beginning of your book sets up a covenant between you and the reader, a covenant for a journey you will take together toward resolution.

There is no beginning without an end. In her book The Sell Your Novel Tool Kit (Revised Edition, Perigee Trade, 2002) Elizabeth Lyon suggested that the beginning of a novel should “reflect the entire book. There should be a tie-in [between] the beginning and the end”. This is sometimes called “framing” a story, where the principal thematic problem is given in the beginning and then resolved in the end. In his book, A Story is a Promise (Blue Heron Publishing, 2000) Bill Johnson describes it as a promise to the reader.

“Dramatic story-issues revolve around issues of human need,” says Johnson. “The need to be loved. To have control of one’s fate. To feel a sense of purpose. To be able to overcome obstacles. To be able to grow and heal from life’s wounds. To understand and make sense of the events of life.” He warns that “if you can’t name the issue at the heart of your story [the theme], it risks being unclear to your audience.” And this needs to be identified, at least intuitively for the reader, at the beginning of the story. You do this through intrigue in the beginning and pointing out through scene what is at stake or at issue in your story.

Additional things to consider in openings include:

• Avoid starting your story at “the beginning”: instead, start mid-way, when something is already happening—preferably to someone important in your story and at the pivotal point when you provide the “story promise” pertinent to the theme.

• Quell the urge to put in a lot of information about setting, character and situation: get things in motion first, then reveal here and there. Let the details unfold with the story like a flowing piece of artwork.

• Trust your reader: novice writers have not yet gained the confidence to trust that they won’t lose the reader in the beginning if they don’t tell them everything right away. The key is to choose just enough to whet their appetite for more. And, yes, it is critical what you choose. What you choose should relate to your story’s theme and its story promise: the problem.

A great opening is a seductive tease, deliciously delivered; it promises an exotic ride that only you can fulfill.

Recommended Reading:

Cardillo, Joe. 2001. “Three Ways to Keep Your Readers Hooked”. Writer’s Digest, April, 2001, volume 81, no. 4.

Johnson, Bill. 2000. A Story Is a Promise. Blue Heron Publishing. Portland, Oregon. 187pp.

Lyon, Elizabeth. 2002. The Sell Your Novel Took Kit. Revised Edition. Perigee Trade. 320pp.

Munteanu, Nina. 2009. The Fiction Writer: Get Published, Write Now! (Chapter B) Starfire World Syndicate, Louisville, KY. 264pp.

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of novels, short stories and essays. She coaches writers and teaches writing at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For more about Nina’s coaching & workshops visit www.ninamunteanu.me. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for more about her writing.

Sensual Writing and Why I Love the Smell of Smoke

Last week, as I was driving down a winding country road on my way to Bridgewater from Lunenburg, I caught sight of the billowing smoke of a small fire. Someone was obviously doing some roadside autumn clearing.

Without thinking, I slid the window open and inhaled deeply as I passed through the billows. I was preparing to experience the exquisite “taste of home”. As I breathed in the aroma of burning vegetation, memories of outdoor campfires and old wood-burning stoves flooded in from my childhood. A goofy smile slid across my face as I bathed in the joyful innocence of adventure, wonder and the comfort of the hearth. I’d had a wonderful childhood and the smell of smoke brought it back to me in its full glory.

What does this have to do with sensual writing? Everything. That’s because writing is metaphoric. That is what storytelling is: sharing universal truth through metaphor, delivered from the heart, where these lie. Sensual writing doesn’t just involve making sure to include at least a few senses like sight, sound, smell, taste and touch in your narrative--though this is a good writing mantra. To write sensually involves much more than the simple description of a sense, though this is certainly the first step (and something all too often neglected by novice writers).

The Novelist: The Importance of Setting in Fiction Writing

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore--Dorothy in Wizard of Oz

In my online writing classes and workshops I cover several common pitfalls of beginning writers. One common pitfall is to forget the importance of setting in story. Think of Frodo in Lord of the Rings without his beloved Shire. And what about wayward Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz without her dear home in Kansas and the contrasting Land of Oz…

Setting includes time, place and circumstance of the story. Without a place there is, in fact, no story. In the examples I gave you, place plays a major role in defining major and minor characters. Like the force in Star Wars, setting provides a landscape that binds everything into context and meaning. For author Richard Russo, it goes beyond place; he suggests that “If you’re not writing stories that occur in a specific place (my emphasis), you’re missing an opportunity to add depth and character to your writing.” He describes some of his students’ responses to his challenge, “where does the story take place?”: “it doesn’t really matter; it’s really more about the people.” The irony is that we do want to know and, oddly enough, the more specific you get, the more universal your truth becomes.

A Hero’s Journey: Part 1, the Journey

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost—Dante Allighieri (Divine Comedy)

Summoned or not, the god will come—motto over the door of Carl Jung’s house

According to Christopher Vogler (author of The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers) “all stories consist of a few common structural elements found universally in myths, fairy tales, dreams, and movies. They are known collectively as The Hero’s Journey.” The Hero’s Journey is essentially the three-act structure of the ancient Greek play, handed down to us thousands of years ago and consisting of Beginning, Middle, and End (otherwise known as Opening, Development, Conclusion or “the decision to act”, “the action”, and “the consequences of the action”).

The Novelist: Sensual Writing

We have five major senses and several minor ones we aren’t even consciously aware of. The major ones include sight, hearing, smelling, touch, and taste.

In the April 2000 issue of Fiction Writer Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander, tells us that we are biologically and psychologically designed “for intense experience in a richly sensual world. But we find ourselves in a senses-depleted world, a world limited largely to visuals, and ersatz ones at that.” She suggests that our readers are starving for sensual information. “For fiction writers, the senses are not only a window onto external reality, but also the gateway into the inner realms.”

As writers we are in a unique position (at least for now) to describe what the visual media can’t (yet). We can provide our readers with a rich spectrum of sensuality such as what a place smells like, the texture of an object, the taste of a food, as well as the nuances of light and sound. Readers don’t just “watch” a character in a book; they enter the character’s body and “feel”.

So, how do writers satisfy the readers need to experience the senses fully? Description, yes. But how cold is cold? What does snow really smell like? What color is that sunset? How do you describe the taste of wine to a teetotaler?

The Novelist: He said, She said, Using Dialogue

One of the most important devices to spice up narrative and increase pace is the use of dialogue. There’s a reason for this: we read dialogue more quickly; it’s written in more fluid, conversational English; it tends to create more white space on a page with less dense text, more pleasing to the reader’s eye. Dialogue is action. It gets readers involved.

Good dialogue neither exactly mimics actual speech (e.g., it’s not usually mundane, repetitive or broken with words like “uh”) nor on the other extreme does it proselytize or educate the reader through long discourse (unless the character is that kind of person). Good dialogue in a story should be somewhere in the middle.

While it should read as fluid conversation, dialogue remains a device to propel the plot or enlighten us to the character of the speaker). No conversation follows a perfect linear progression. People interrupt one another, talk over one another, often don’t answer questions posed to them or avoid them by not answering them directly. These can all be used by the writer to establish character, tension, and relationship.

Below, I provide a few tips when using dialogue in your story.

• Show, don’t tell: a common error of beginning writers is to use dialogue to explain something that both participants should already know but the reader doesn’t. It is both awkward and unrealistic and immediately exposes you as a novice. For instance, avoid the use of “As you know…” It’s better to keep the reader in the dark for a while than to use dialogue to explain something. Which brings us to the next point.
• Have your characters talk to each other, not to the reader: for instance, “Hello, John, you loser drunk and wayward son of the most feared gangster in town!” could be improved to, “You stink like a distillery, John! Wait ‘til papa’s thugs find you!”
• Avoid adverbs: e.g., he said dramatically, she said pleadingly; instead look for better ways to express the way they said it with actual dialogue. That’s not to say you can’t use adverbs (I believe J.K. Rowling is notorious for this), just use them sparingly and judiciously.
• Avoid tag lines that repeat what the dialogue already tells the reader: e.g., “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “Do you have a dog?” she asked.
• He said, she said: reduce tag lines where possible and keep them simple by using “said”; another sign of a novice is the overuse of words other than said (e.g., snarled, hissed, purred, etc.). While these can add spice, keep them for special places as they are noticed by the reader and will distract otherwise.
• Pay consistent attention to a character’s “voice”: each character has a way of speaking that identifies them as a certain type of person. This can be used to identify class, education, culture, ethnicity, proclivities, etc. For instance one character might use Oxford English and another might swear every third word.
• Use speech signatures: pick out particular word phrases for characters that can be their own and can be identified with them. If they have additional metaphoric meaning to the story, even better. For instance, I know a person who always adds “Don’t you think?” to almost everything they say. This says something about how that person… well, thinks… I knew another person who always added “Do you see?” at the end of their phrase. Again rather revealing.
• Intersperse dialogue with good descriptive narrative: don’t forget to keep the reader plugged into the setting. Many beginning writers forget to “ground” the reader with sufficient cues as to where the characters are and what they’re doing while they are having this great conversation. This phenomenon is so common, it even has a name. It’s called “talking heads.”
• Contradict dialogue with narrative: when dialogue contradicts body language or other narrative cues about the speaker, this adds an element of compelling tension and heightens reader excitement while telling them something important. Here are a few examples:
  
  “How’d it go?”
  “Great,” he lied.
  
  “I feel so much better now,” she said, jaw clenched.
  “It’s okay; I believe you.” His heart slammed.
  
  Well, you get the picture, anyway. Hope this helps. Keep writing!

This article is an excerpt from The Fiction Writer: Get Published, Write Now! (Starfire World Syndicate) 2009. It is also part of a workshop series I give throughout North America and Europe called The Writer's Toolkit. "The Writer's Toolkit" will be available for purchase in summer of 2010. 

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of novels, short stories and essays. She coaches writers and teaches writing at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For more about Nina’s coaching & workshops visit www.ninamunteanu.me. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for more about her writing.

The Novelist: Common Pitfalls of the Beginning Writer—Part 2: Language

Are you just starting to write? Or better yet, nervously thinking of sending your cherished tome out? You may wish to do one more round of edits and apply these five things that I guarantee will improve your story:

The Novelist: Finding Your Muse

O Muses, O high genius, aid me now!
O memory that engraved the things I saw,
Here shall your worth be manifest to all!—Dante Alighieri, Canto II of the Inferno

As a published author of novels and short stories I often get asked how and where I draw my inspiration from. How do I find my muse? And how do I keep it? (i.e.,, how do I defeat “writer’s block”?).

Writers Conference

As a part-time writer and scientist, and a mother, I have to balance my life with my art as well as the business side of my writing with its muse-side. A large part of that consists of attending conferences and conventions on writing, science and science fiction. But I can only afford to attend a few each year. Nancy Kress was the reason I went to “Write On, Vancouver” held by the Vancouver Chapter of the Romance Writers of America. She’s the author of 23 books (11 of them science fiction, including her ‘sleepless’ trilogy beginning with “Beggars in Spain”).
Nancy Kress is an elegant, warm-hearted lady who quietly radiates class and great presence. In several workshops, Nancy tirelessly and cheerfully tackled some of the most difficult and daunting elements faced by published and unpublished writers alike. Topics included: writing Page One; plotting strategies; and what makes us write in the first place.
Quoting Proust to Falkner, Nancy enthralled a crowd of writers and readers with a presentation that educated, illuminated, and inspired. “All of us are tightrope walkers,” she said. Writers strive to balance art with life and personal taste with societal tastes. "Fiction is about stuff that gets screwed up...every novel is a war," she added and, quoting Susan Sontag, suggested that sometimes, “real art makes us nervous.”
Here are some of her tips on Writing Page 1:
>Introduce an individual character (usually the main protagonist) DOING something
>Orient us in time and space
>Use concrete details to help visualize the scene (including smells!)
>Create an interesting first line (hook).
Nancy shared four approaches to plotting. The one that was most familiar to me and worked best for my current novel was based on the ‘Hero’s Journey’, using mythical archetypes and adapted for writers by Christopher Vogler. Here are the nine steps:
1. Ordinary World
2. Call to adventure
3. Crossing the threshold (into the special world of the story: “a fish out of water”)
4. Tests, allies, rivals, and enemies
5. Approach to first climax (of 2)
6. First climax
7. The road back
8. Second big conflict (climax)
9. Denouement

I came away from the conference all jazzed and vindicated in my choice. Thanks, Nancy!

If you’re interested in more details, pick up Vogler’s book or just google “hero’s journey” and you’ll find lots of good information. You can also find my own example of a “Hero’s Journey” as applied to “Farscape” in the Scapecast podcast (March 16,07; episode 25, http://www.scapecast.org/) and in a later post on this blog.

I also cover this popular plot approach in my upcoming writing guide The Fiction Writer: Get Published, Write Now! (Starfire World Syndicate) to be released in 2009 and available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Chapters. It also forms part of my lecture series and online writing classes and workshops called "The Writer's Toolkit" that I give throughout North America and Europe. The workshop series will be available in a DVD set in summer of 2010 and you can purchase it through Amazon or The Passionate Writer.