{"id":247,"date":"2014-09-25T08:22:19","date_gmt":"2014-09-25T12:22:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revision.ws\/wordpress\/?p=247"},"modified":"2014-09-25T08:22:19","modified_gmt":"2014-09-25T12:22:19","slug":"ii-setting-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revision.ws\/wordpress\/ii-setting-2\/","title":{"rendered":"II. SETTING"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"setting\"<\/a><\/p>\n

II. SETTING<\/p>\n

Every story takes place somewhere. And yet every year I receive from learning writers stories that seem to take place nowhere, that is to say, without any narrative depiction of the time and place wherein which the present action of the story occurs. What exactly do we mean by Setting? Here it is:<\/p>\n

SETTING = TIME and PLACE<\/p>\n

What does Time mean? It does not mean 10:30 a.m. Time does not mean time-of-day, nor even time-of-year. Rather, it means Year, as in what year does this story take place. The precise year need not be identified with military precision, but the era should be clear from the narrative details: is this Ancient world? The Medieval Age? The Renaissance? Age of Enlightenment? The Victorian Era? Nineteenth Century? Twentieth? Is it post-World War I? The Great Depression? The Nineteen-Sixties? Is this story set in contemporary times? The future? Your reader should know, from the very first page, if not the first paragraph, when this story takes place.<\/p>\n

What does Place mean? It does not mean the living room, or the back yard, or the high school auditorium, or even the train rolling down the tracks. These are all settings, but they are not the setting for your story. Rather, Place means geography: where in the world does your story take place? Is this Ancient Greece? Medieval Italy? Renaissance Europe? Revolutionary America? France in the Age of Enlightenment? Victorian England? The Russian Revolution? America in the Sixties? Europe in the Eighties? South Africa in the Nineties? And once you establish the geography of your story, then you can and should fill in the local details, then we want to know whether we are in the high school auditorium, or the bowling alley in town, or in the living room or back yard of a residence.<\/p>\n

How do you depict setting without being obvious about it? Good question; after all, you don\u2019t want to open your story with: It was August, 1969, in Bethel, New York, and I was walking through a field of mud on the way to the stage to see Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. That\u2019s too clumsy. Better to write: The rain threatened again, it had rained in spots all weekend, and now new clouds gathered above the open field where Brian rested from his long hike. From the top of the hill he gazed over the heads and shoulders of sixty-thousand people, a carnival of naked skin and dancing, of tents and mud and the small chimney puffs of smoke that rose into the dark sky from a thousand joints. He could not see the stage beyond the next hill, but he could hear the music: Blood, Sweat & Tears were playing \u201cSpinning Wheel.\u201d He still had time to get there, but he would have to make it through the swarm of flesh and mud that lay below. If only he could fly.<\/p>\n

Not everyone will recognize the setting as the Woodstock concert in August of 1969, but many will. And in any case, you\u2019ve done your job, you\u2019ve provided the evidence, and will continue to do so as the story develops. You need not come out and say \u201cIt was Woodstock, in upstate New York, in August of 1969.\u201d That\u2019s too heavy-handed. The passage above is more natural, the reader gets the necessary information without quite knowing how. <\/p>\n

Another example: suppose you write a scene wherein two characters are exchanging dialog. Here is a scene that is typical from a beginning writer:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you mean by that?\u201d Sheryl said.
\n\u201cI mean you can\u2019t tell her,\u201d James said. \u201cShe\u2019ll leave.\u201d
\n\u201cGood. Let her,\u201d Sheryl said.
\n\u201cNo, then what? Who\u2019s going to take care of us?\u201d
\n\u201cI don\u2019t care,\u201d Sheryl said. \u201cI will.\u201d
\n\u201cYou and who else? You\u2019re a child,\u201d James said.
\n\u201cAm not. I\u2019m fifteen.\u201d
\n\u201cAnd I\u2019m sixteen. Who\u2019s going to drive us to school, Miss fifteen year old?\u201d
\n\u201cWe can walk.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of that is great, it\u2019s nice dialog, and we want to know who they\u2019re talking about, and how it will turn out. But it takes place in a vacuum, meaning that there is no narrative to inform the dialog with context. We do want scenes with characters and dialog, yes. But, we want the rest, too. We want setting and the feeling that this story is happening somewhere. Look back at the scene: where is it taking place? I don\u2019t even know, and I just wrote it. Now, let\u2019s try again, with setting:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you mean by that?\u201d Sheryl said. She stood at the kitchen counter, holding the tea bag she had just pulled from her porcelain mug.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean you can\u2019t tell her,\u201d James said. \u201cShe\u2019ll leave.\u201d He was seated at the kitchen table, the Journal News spread before him and a plate to the side, nearly emptied now of the Dunkin\u2019 Donut holes that had been piled there ten minutes earlier.<\/p>\n

A car went by on the street, its rear tires throwing up a spray from the rain that had been falling since daybreak.<\/p>\n

\u201cGood. Let her,\u201d Sheryl said. She swung the tea bag by its string and let go, watching it sail in a short arc to land with a splat in the sink. \u201cTwo points,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, then what? Who\u2019s going to take care of us?\u201d James said, taking up the remote control. He aimed it toward the living room to change the channel of the flat panel mounted on the wall.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t care,\u201d Sheryl said. \u201cI will.\u201d<\/p>\n

The grandfather clock in the hallway chimed the hour: nine o\u2019clock.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou and who else? You\u2019re a child,\u201d James said. He rose from the table and brought the plate to the counter, leaving it in front of her.<\/p>\n

\u201cAm not. I\u2019m fifteen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I\u2019m sixteen. But who\u2019s going to drive us to school, Miss fifteen year old? There\u2019s two cars in the garage and you can\u2019t even drive one.\u201d He turned and went into the living room and plopped himself on the sofa as SportsCenter began.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can walk,\u201d Sheryl said, but he was no longer listening.<\/p>\n

In the first passage all we have is dialog; the scene can be taking place in an apartment, in a castle, on a train, or in a playground. We don\u2019t know because the narrator never tells us. But in the 2nd passage we know exactly where they are: a suburban middle-class home, with cars passing on the street, porcelain mugs, tea bags, newspaper delivery, flat panel TVs, grandfather clocks in the hallway, and Dunkin\u2019 Donuts. The first passage takes place \u2018nowhere,\u2019 or \u2018anywhere.\u2019 The second passage takes place in a very specific setting that the author carefully depicts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

II. SETTING Every story takes place somewhere. And yet every year I receive from learning writers stories that seem to take place nowhere, that is to say, without any narrative depiction of the time and place wherein which the present action of the story occurs. What exactly do we mean by Setting? Here it is: SETTING = TIME and PLACE Continue reading II. SETTING<\/span>→<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":248,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revision.ws\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revision.ws\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revision.ws\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revision.ws\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revision.ws\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/revision.ws\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249,"href":"https:\/\/revision.ws\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions\/249"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revision.ws\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revision.ws\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revision.ws\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revision.ws\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}