Bringing Story Settings to Life
If you followed the advice in Getting to Know Story Settings, you will now know your setting like you know your own neighborhood.
You will be able to close your eyes and take a mental stroll around it - seeing the sights and hearing the sounds.
You will also have carried out any necessary research - on the central character's occupation, perhaps, or the local weather patterns or whatever aspects of the novel's setting you were not sufficiently knowledgeable about.
Now it is time to take all those notes you have made and work them into your novel so that the readers can get to know your story's setting as well as you now do.
In particular, you need to work out how you are going to portray the setting in Chapter One, how you will portray it in Chapter Two, and so on, so that the readers can get to know the setting gradually and not be hit with a mass of information all at once.
In this article, I want to look at two areas...
- The Order of Revelation
- The Importance of the Gradual Revelation of Story Settings
A Quick Bit of HouseKeeping
Before getting started, a quick word on how this two-step approach to building story settings fits into the overall Novel Writing Process...
Getting to know your setting by fleshing it out on paper happens during the part of the process where you plan each story element individually - in this case, Constructing Your Novel's Setting.
Working out what aspects of the setting you will reveal in each chapter of the novel is best tackled when you Combine the Story Elements to Make a Master Plan.
However, if you are simply not a "planning" kind of person and would prefer to crack on with the writing as soon as possible, you can equally use the information in this article when you Edit Your Novel.
I wouldn't recommend trying to think about the information presented here when you write the first draft. Then, you will want to concentrate on the language and the storytelling, not the pattern on the wallpaper or the color of the leading character's car.
That is the idea of working out these things in advance in the form of the "Master Plan". That way, all of the information you require for each chapter will be right there in front of you when you write it. You will be free to concentrate on the creative act of writing.
But, like I say, if you are not a planning kind of person and prefer to work out the mechanics of bringing story settings to life during the revision process, that is fine too.
(Click here for an article on the pros and cons of Planning a Novel in Detail.)
Oh, one last thing...
Please note that this article is not about how to describe your story settings - you will learn how to do that later in the section on Descriptive Writing. The aim here is simply to show you how to take a pile of setting notes and work them into the novel's overall plan in the correct way.
Back to the 2-Step process for bringing story settings to life...
1. Revealing Setting in the Right Order
When describing story settings, always work from the general to the specific. If describing a house, for example, begin with an overall impression of the house, just like the reader is seeing it from afar. Then, little by little, move in closer and mention those details that were not visible from a distance.
As a matter of fact, it can be useful to think of describing settings as a very similar process to the way film directors set the scene in a movie...
- In a movie, a scene often begins with a wide-angled shot showing the town or the house (or whatever) from afar.
- Next, the camera zooms-in on the scene, or else cuts straight to the close-up view.
Picturing a novel's setting in your mind's eye in this way, prior to attempting to describe it in words, can be very helpful to the beginning writer.
Another principle worth remembering is that it is a good idea to move from the concrete to the abstract in your descriptions.
What I mean by the concrete are the tangible elements of story settings, things you can see and touch - bricks and mortar, wooden doors, stone steps.
More abstract aspects of a setting would include things like a chill in the air, an unpleasant smell, a sound the character can't quite place - things which are more to do with a setting's atmosphere than its architecture.
"The novelist's job is to reveal and unfold, not simply portray. The novelist works with the things that pass unobserved by others, captures them in motion, brings them out into the open."
- Joao Guimaraes Rosa
The Importance of Revealing Story Settings Gradually
I talked about the importance of gradual revelation in the article on Bringing Fictional Characters to Life. There, I said that, just as we get to know a real person in small stages, so readers of a novel must get to know fictional characters bit by bit.
Although the way writers treat setting in a novel is very similar to the way they treat characters, the principle of gradual revelation doesn't work in the same way with settings as it does with characters.
People are more complex than places, meaning a character has more layers for the writer to reveal. And setting, although important, is not as important as character. You shouldn't devote the same space to it.
With that in mind, here is how you should reveal setting to the readers...
The first time that a setting is mentioned, paint the full picture for the readers. I am not just talking about the overall setting here (the town as a whole, for example) but each of the locations within it where scenes will be set - houses, rooms within houses, restaurants, and so on.
The purpose of setting is to add atmosphere to the story being told, and for a description to create atmosphere it needs to be sufficiently "full".
I don't mean you have to write pages of description. (In fact, you shouldn't. Great novel writers are capable of creating entire pictures with just a few broad brush strokes.)
But your description of a setting the first time it is mentioned, whether you manage to do it in one short paragraph or six long ones, should paint the full picture and not reserve aspects of it for future revelation, as is the case with characters.
The next time that a scene takes place in this setting, it will clearly not be necessary to describe it all over again. However, you should be careful not to make the mistake a lot of beginners make and fail to describe a setting at all from its second appearance onwards.
If you describe a creepy Gothic mansion in the opening chapter, for example, the picture you painted will still be in the readers' minds when you return them to the mansion in Chapter 4.
Nevertheless, it is still important to provide one or two "reminders" of the original description. So if you mentioned the crooked chimneys in the original description, mentioning the chimneys again will remind the readers not only of the chimneys but of all the other details you described.
The mere mention of a chimney might be enough to remind readers of the original picture, but you will still want to build upon this with a little extra description.
And the best way to do this is to describe details that you didn't mention in the original description - the cobwebs sealing the letter box, perhaps, and the cold touch of the door handle, even though the day is warm.
Remember, you are not particularly looking to deepen the readers' knowledge of the setting in this second scene (because story settings are not as multi-dimensional characters).
You are simply looking to re-evoke the picture you originally painted - first by "reminding" them of the original picture by mentioning a key detail, and then by homing-in on some details you didn't mention the first time around.
Next Up: Setting and Description
