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 Continuing his series on the Craft of Writing Fiction, Alan Ackmann advises Relief writers to consider using setting as a tool for deepening characterization.
As Heather mentioned last week, I’m in Daytona Beach, Florida at the moment scoring AP English essays. As you can imagine, this is a pleasant change of scenery. Since my grandparents live in St. Petersburg I grew up seeing the beach once a year, although Daytona—an Atlantic Beach—has more waves and fewer shells than its gulf coast counterpart. There’s a pier here where all the shops have closed save for a henna tattoo parlor and man with no legs who paints moonscapes on velvet. A magician outside my hotel shackles himself in a straightjacket every two hours or so, and a sky-bucket ride glides folks along the pier and over one of Daytona’s many seafood restaurants—whether those folks are wealthy tourists staying in the five-star hotels on the east side of A1A Beachfront, or unshaven, hardscrabble drifters living in the one bedroom beach-houses on the west side of the street. It’s as far from Chicago as you can get and still be in America, and for this week’s blog it all got me thinking about setting.
Before getting into opportunities setting can provide, I’ll start with a caution: Setting, like many elements of fiction, is a secondary feature best utilized as an augmentation to more primary elements such as character or theme. While it is true that significant details can add texture and dimension, stories designed solely as an explanation of a culture or place—rather than a person or idea—often feel more like ethnographies than narratives. Readers lose patience when they sense that details are stacked on top of one another just to serve themselves, or (even worse) to serve as proof of the writer’s talent. You therefore have to be selective with detail, taking care not to let description overwhelm other, more vital elements. When I began writing, I would often use exotic bits of historical or cultural trivia as a substitute for more fulfilling dimensions of fiction—but I’ve come to accept that a description of setting can rarely, if ever, sustain a cohesive story by itself.
Setting, however, can be a fantastic device for deepening a story that survives on other elements. First, it can work magic on character—in terms of both scene and plot development. Simply put, when people change locations, they change behavior. Don’t get me wrong—when a character moves into a new environment, nothing integral about a person typically shifts, but every small movement will be shaped and transformed. In my last blog, I talked about how people reveal themselves through incremental gestures, which are often influenced by setting. A confrontation about why a father left his family years ago will be completely changed if it takes place on a cruise ship instead of a coffee shop, or a living room couch as opposed to a hospital bed. Each location exerts new tensions, and readers will learn more about characters if the writer acknowledges how their internal conflicts respond to these external pressures. Some of the best scenes take place in settings that constrict their character’s behavior, or that allow them freedom to take liberties they sometimes wouldn’t have. More globally, a change of scene can serve as the catalyst of an entire story. Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs, for example, deals with two Americans living in London, and how their personalities, priorities, and ambitions are modified by the change of location. E.M. Forster went so far as to say that there were only two archetypal stories: “Man goes on a journey” and “A stranger comes to town,” both of which hinge on some kind of modification of setting.
Furthermore, since setting is tied to description, characterization can exert further influence on style. There is a fantastic exercise in the back of John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction where Gardner asks students to describe a cabin on the lake from the point of view of a woman who has just learned that her son has been killed in war, but students cannot mention the son, the death, or the war. Poorly written responses commit a descriptive emotional fallacy and communicate the emotion through weather (sometimes rain, occasionally ice). Better responses match emotional tone to the rhythm of sentences, and seize upon the details one would notice in this state, which subsequently alters style and detail. Think of it this way: whenever you see anything, what you see will be altered by the forces affecting your psyche. An ocean like the one I’ve described above, therefore, can be nurturing and humbling to one person yet expansive and terrifying to another. A person in one state of mind will notice the sunbathers, the pick-up soccer game on the back dunes, or the never-ending calypso music drifting from the hotels, and be enthralled, their sentences blossoming and flourishing. A person in another state will notice the horizon line of rain some miles off away, or the deteriorating paint on the piers and empty lifeguard towers, or the upturned, dying jellyfish washed up on shore. Their sentences will be stark. Complacent. Full of clarity and grit. On CSI, investigators once commented that eye-witnesses are inherently untrustworthy because no two viewers will interpret a scene the same way. What is a hindrance in criminology is an asset in fiction.
The gist of this blog is that setting, if appropriately calibrated, should be neither the entirety of a story nor one of its forgotten elements—if harnessed appropriately it can deepen style and characterization.
Incidentally, many of the stories in Relief’s upcoming issue feature setting prominently, and in many of the ways just discussed. So when that issue hits the stands, you should check it out. I, meanwhile, plan to check out the fireworks display beginning off the edge of the pier in about twenty minutes.
I’m in a good mood, and so suspect they will be beautiful. Previous Articles:
Alan Ackmann, Relief's Fiction Editor, received his MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas and teaches at DePaul University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Clackamas Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Ontario Review, and elsewhere. He is a former fiction editor of The Evansville Review and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2007 Sewanee Writer’s Conference. Find out more at www.alanackmann.com.
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