Bickham on Setting · 2:16am May 15th, 2013
Here’s a couple of tricks taught by my strange hero Jack Bickham in his book Setting. I don’t recommend Setting, because it spends most of its time telling you obvious things like “Don’t set your story in the old west if you want to talk about urban slums.” But it gives a few specific techniques, the kind Bickham excels at and great writers never mention because they are too pedestrian and make writing sound like bricklaying. I haven’t tried these myself, but they sound reasonable.
You can only change so much at one time
Specifically, when you change from the point of view (POV) of one character, back to the POV of an earlier character in a place we’ve already seen, do not describe anything in the earlier setting that we haven’t seen before until the reader is re-oriented. Specifically mention things that the reader has already seen, to help them figure out the transition. If you really want to talk immediately about the clock tower when you switch back to an earlier setting, mention that tower in the previous scene in that setting.
This doesn’t apply only when changing POV. Any time that so much is happening that the reader is in danger of becoming disoriented, reduce the confusion by turning new things into old things, by planting references to them in earlier scenes. That includes references to the setting. Recently I read a famous pony fiction that the author began with two long action scenes [1]. In the second scene, the protagonist walked through a strange setting to meet a villain, then ran back out the way she came in while fighting. I could have visualized the fight more clearly if the author had described on the character’s way in everything that the character saw on her way out, because the fight on her way out was fast and confusing.
Casting against setting requires using stereotypes
Bickham says that fish-out-of-water characters, like Gene Wilder in The Frisco Kid or Dr. Fleishman in Northern Exposure, must begin as stereotypes of people from their original setting. If your point is to show how the character’s background clashes with their present circumstances, making a realistically complex character who does not exactly fit the expectations of their background blurs the distinction between adjustments the character makes to the new setting, and the character's original idiosyncrasies.
[1] Don't do that.
Ya know, for all my going around boosting the Brandon Sanderson creative writing videos, it kind of amazes me how much more I can get out of a short blog post by you than I get out of a good long stretch of those videos. Maybe it's just a matter of the difference between things I've already spent time thinking about and things I haven't. But these two pieces of advice are wonderful, and things that I doubt I'd have had the perspicacity to identify in my own writing or in other people's writing, even if I could recognize the clarity problems they can create.
I think (I hope) I'm following the second piece of advice on "Bell, Book & Candle", though if I am it's largely because I lucked into it on intuition.
I don't really have a lot to say in response to this, except thank you. But I feel it's something of a contractual duty for me to ramble for a while anyway, just to stay in character.
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Well, in fairness, we don't know too much about that time period in the Pony-verse, so we kinda have to go with at least some generalizations to begin with, based on things inferred from past periods in our own history. That probably helps actually.
I love the use of setting and motif in fiction -- it's one thing I wish more authors here would attempt. It requires a deft hand, lest it squish the rest of the story, but it has the potential to add a new dimension to your writing.
1080621 Well, here's a recent story with a vivid setting.
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You know, I'm actually thinking of turning that into a kind of experimental meta-story. Each chapter will describe some landmark of one of the tribes, and in their sum they will tell the tale of the unification.
Isn't the second point kind of moot when dealing with established characters, such as in fanfiction? It makes sense when you are building the character from scratch, but I don't think it is an issue when talking about an existing character (Ash in Evil Dead 3 would be a good example).
No wonder the guy's Wikipedia page lacks a picture.
My character is traveling Equestria, so the reader will understand the change with easy since it does not come out of nowhere.
~Hearn
1080825 To some extent I agree, though I think there's still plenty of room for that advice to inform characterizations with established characters. For example, I haven't read "Sunny Skies" yet, but it seems like a solid case for fish-out-of-water with established characters, and if you want to play up the fish-out-of-water element there, you're better off looking at elements of Celestia's personality that are more stereotypical for her role. Now, I suspect with a really well-developed character (say Twilight in Equestria Girls – yes, I just went there), you might be able to play off established subtleties of character more, but I think even then it will continue to be true that the easiest (read most effective) way to do fish-out-of-water will still be in emphasizing more stereotypical traits of the character. But, again, I'm not talking about pure stereotyping; rather focusing on more stereotypical aspects of existing characterization.
I think there's a lot of good opportunity to tell fish-out-of-water stories in fanfiction, though – both with established characters and with OCs – so I find the second point pretty germane. Though, then again, I'm writing a fish-out-of-water story right now, so of course I'm going to feel that way.