Inline Settings 101 · 3:06am Oct 30th, 2014
The setting occupies a curious place in literature. In theater and film, setting occupies the background. We are always dimly aware of it because it is at the back of every shot. On the other hand, a story is told one word at a time, and for anything to be directly present it must step to the foreground. This is why a book's settings are so seldom seen. They are banished to the start of scenes only to pop up indirectly when Twilight needs to grab a book from a shelf or Pinkie Pie blows up another wall with her party cannon. Afterwards, the setting is left to mope all alone and forgotten like Rudolph on the other 364 days of the year.
But it does not have to be this way. There is a middle way between talking heads in a white room and paragraphs so overstuffed with description that we forget what is going on. We must find a way to slip the setting between the cracks.
Setting is between the lines
The beginner's setting (when present at all) is full of details. How can we be accused of talking heads syndrome if we just spent the opening 20 paragraphs of our scene describing the exact configuration of dust on Twilight's reading lamp? The problem is that all of this detail seldom comes up again. If we are always in the library, and our our setting is doing its job, we should always be feeling like we are in a library somehow, and that feeling needs to be different from being in Canterlot or the Ponyville market. The problem is that if the setting is present only in detail, then it is too big to fit entirely into our story. Where would we put the plot or characters if it is all setting all the time?
The only solution is to somehow slip our setting between the lines. In real life, we do this unconsciously. We might remind ourselves we are in a library when we walk in the door, but soon the mind settles back to the book we are going to check out or the cure librarian unicorn whom we are not quite convinced is reference material. However, we still lower our voices. If the halls are quiet, we might notice our hoofsteps echoing in the silence. Perhaps we are nearly offended when someone speaks too loudly for comfort: don't they know they are in a library? Settings can and should seep into every corner of our scenes even when the words on the page concern other things. One could argue that if a setting looms effectively enough, that introductory paragraph might not be necessary at all.
Start with presence
A haunted house that does not make our hair stand on end might as well not be haunted at all. Ponies go to Sugarcube Corner because it will lift a few pounds off their shoulders as they step in the door. To make a standout setting, we must forget all the little minutia that we spent scribbling down on our setting maps in the start of the scene and ask ourselves: how does this space make us feel? Is it busy? Happy? Claustrophobic? What is the one overarching impression that it hits you with?
What about the setting makes us feel this way? We might be quiet in a library out of respect for the readers, but if the walls are marble and the space is so big that our voice gets lost, we might find that it feels like the acoustics of the space are somehow reaching out and sushing us. Maybe the shelves are so high and imposing that we feel small. These are the specific details we need to be calling upon when we introduce our setting to the reader. The goal is short, evocative, and unobtrusive.
That is more than enough for the paragraph in which we happen across the setting, but when we visit a second time, we usually find first impressions can be wrong. Even if we are never coming back, we might be curious as to how the setting feels after you have been in it awhile. We must abandon that first impression and look around for the next most impressive part of the setting. After the shock of the looming shelves wears off, you can still feel small in their presence. Or they might fade into the background entirely because you are more concerned with figuring out how the hay a sane person is supposed to navigate those twisting aisles. Now the shelves are bullies that you swear are shifting themselves around whenever you turn your back. Jerks. Now instead of needing to go check out a book, you have to go into that musty maze made by crazy professors who fail sane floor planning forever. The less you take your setting for granted, the more room you have to make discoveries and keep it fresh in your readers' minds.
In short, whenever we are in a setting, there is a constant conversation between what we expect from the setting and how the setting is relating to us right now. This conversation happens via what details our characters happen to notice, their prior opinion of the setting, and how they adjust their behavior because of the setting. The more we remember to start and cultivate this conversation, the fuller our settings will be even if we are not adding much to the actual word count.
Words are Time
People are bad at keeping track of time. "Ten minutes" passes as fast for the reader as "Ten seconds". Both are as long as it took to read two words. Ten minutes can pass in a myriad of different ways. They can be ten awkward sulking minutes in your room or ten relaxed, peaceful minutes looking at the clouds. Seconds can go by like days. Hours can pass like minutes. It generally ends up that the number of words used to convey the passage of time is proportional to the amount of time the reader feels has passed. When our characters pause, there is an opportunity to let our setting sneak to the foreground.
What does relative silence feel like in your setting? A market might be noisy even when your characters are not. A library tree might be full of warm silence like a blanket. A stone library might have cold, stony, echoy silence. Whenever you need to pause, it is time to use the background to promote the mood. This is not limited to lulls in conversation, but can apply to any time you need to convey an action that lasts longer than a second or two. "Applejack halved an apple" could take place as is: noun-verb happens nearly instantaneously. But if she were dicing an apple, we might go longer: "The knife rapped against the time-worn counter top." The longer the pause or action is supposed to feel like, the longer you have to hush the characters and let the setting do some talking.
Let the setting come to you
Settings are only inert when we forget about them. There are always tiny interactions lurking about waiting to be discovered. The most obvious of these are when the setting includes active elements. Shout in the library and your lips are going to be locked by magenta magic. Yell "bomb" in Canterlot castle, and a horde of armored ponies will want to give you a vigorous hug at full tilt.
Potential interactions are everywhere. If you are talking in a crowded market and need an interruption in conversation, have someone shove you out of the way. Stop to watch an entertainer or to window-shop. If you are taking a date out to a restaurant, you might have a waiter to flag down or other people to sneak glances at in case they are silently judging you. It is always good to keep a note handy listing the 2-3 most likely distractions and interruptions that fit the impression you are going for. Even if you never use them, they are still at the ready when they are appropriate.
Setting is the most important aspect of a story that you do not want to spend words on. Details alone are aimless and soon forgotten. It is only when we commit ourselves to speak through these details and actively pull them into the action that our backgrounds can work as hard as our foregrounds.
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That was an interesting read. Thanks for taking the time to write this up!
Choreography is relevant here. Think about where your characters are within this environment. This governs with what they see and can touch and with what they can interact.
If you're standing at the front desk of the Great Imperial Library of the Crystal City, you can see and talk to the librarian, you can see the entrance and the general layout of the library. If you're way up in a row of side shelves on the top level, you can see and examine some interesting books, but you can't easily talk to the librarian at the help desk.
If you're in the main ballroom of the Royal Palace at Canterlot, you could participate in a formal waltz. If you're in one of the palace's many broom closets -- not so much. Though you might be able to find a mop and bucket and cleaning fluid more easily there.
If you imagine the characters in the setting, with a good eye as to where they are in the setting, you know what to describe. If you're standing atop Mount Avalon you can see the countryside for dozens of miles in every direction. If you're standing in a ten foot deep pit at the bottom of the mountain, all you can see are the walls of the pit and a limited view of the sky and maybe the mountainside.
Also, character vision is selective. When you are standing before the mare of your dreams, you may focus on little details of her face, her body language, her clothing, her scent ... you will not be paying much attention to the details of the Manehattan street scene behind her, unless there's something pretty amazing going on there. On the other hand, if you're a Manehattan beat cop patrolling to keep the peace, you may briefly notice the pretty filly, but then your eyes will rove the crowd trying to spot the notorious Mares of Diomedes gang that you've heard are out on the loose. The details noticed depend on character motivation.
And knowledge. Applejack would look at the old book on the table and think "Hmm. An old book. Looks like it was printed a while ago." Twilight would look at it and just from the cover have a good idea of how old it was, and she might well open it to see its date of copyright, because she finds books fascinating. She could probably discourse on the author and the historical significance of the work. Their positions would be reversed if the object on the table was a rare variety of apple..
When all else fails, write what makes sense.
2563563
All excellent points.
2563413
And thank you for reading
Well, this is fortuitous. I've been wondering about how to better incorporate scenery description into the narrative. It's like you read my mind. Please ask in the future.
Seriously, this is very helpful. And it's nice to see that a few techniques I've sussed out for myself like words as time are in fact a thing.
2563936 You're welcome!
2563989
I fear I cannot turn it off. These things just happen
Hmm, what do you think of excess description?
I don't think it's wrong, per se; I doubt there'd be many qualifiers that writing excessively would fail to meet. However, sometimes simple scenes described between the lines, and simple points that can be expressed in relatively few words, are combined or reiterated again and again in such a way that they're not short and succinct at all. Instead, they are long, spanning multiple sentences when they only needed to span multiple words, and yet they give so much detail it's as if the reader is walking through a slow motion video and taking time to appreciate the beauty, for example, in Twilight's expression, which may be a slightly tilted head with one eye more open than the other and pursed lips while she attempts to choke back her confused chuckles.
2575605
I think excess description is excessive and should be avoided by definition. Otherwise, we would be calling it something else
As for going "high res" per your example, I would refer you to "words are time" and add "words are focus." If it is sufficiently important right now that we get a snapshot of Twilight's expression, then it is completely reasonable to take a few extra seconds to give it a good long look. Alternatively, it may be that we more or less do this for every character all the time, in which case I would hope that the author has given us sufficiently developed characters and sufficiently nuanced subtexts for the extra description to be rewarding to read. So long as the author knows what they intend and can make whatever level of description match up with that end, they can write however much they feel they need to.
2575605 That's a brilliant cartoon, thanks!
ST, I like this post & don't have anything to add.
2600623
But you have added an Applejack