This next chapter is easily overlooked. Setting and pacing are so simplistically difficult to get right and so painfully obvious when ill written. There is a balance that the writer must decide for each piece of writing. It always changes.
CHAPTER 7
SETTING AND PACING: I’M HERE THEREFORE I AM
By Caren Gussoff
I intuitively understood the importance of character, and what they do in a piece of fiction. They not only give a reader a focal point, but they also act, interact, react, have relationships, offer judgements, tell us about other characters, speak with other characters, describe, ruminate, think...and, most importantly, they change.
My characters paced aimlessly through my stories like caged tigers, and, worse, I often couldn't even write beyond a few pages. Things just stalled.
I was missing the world surrounding my characters and the enormous impact it had on them, not to mention the impact on the overall story.
When readers read a piece of fiction, they expect it to feel real, even if it's a life they don't know and never will know. They want to enter into it, to live there, with the characters. Setting--which refers simply to time and place--grounds the reader in the story in the most physical sense.
It's easy to dismiss setting because, frankly, it can be easy to miss. Look carefully at effective stories and you'll find the setting is so deeply combined with the character and the action that it's almost unnoticeable. Like a master woodworker whose joinery is invisible, the writer has embedded the setting into the story. But if you really attune your eyes, you'll see that this implanted setting has an immeasurable impact on the characters and plot and, well, everything else.
PLACE
When writers talk about place, they mean the specific and definite location of a story, on a large and small lever. What planet, continent, country, state, city, neighborhood, street are the characters in?
When dealing with place, don't neglect the possibility of including weather. Chances are there's something about the weather where you live that affects you dramatically, even though you may have ceased to think about it. Weather immediately deepens the visceral sensation of "being" in a fictional place.
When writing your fiction, you should always be asking yourself where the characters are. And you need to give the readers some indication of where the characters are, be it one setting or numerous settings. Some places you may paint in great detail, others not, but you and the readers need this awareness of location at all times.
Place also affects the action of a piece.
How does the place, or place, in which your story is set affect the action? If the answer is not at all, then you should probably look for ways to make the place play some kind of a role in what happens. Otherwise your characters just might be drifting through a vacuum.
YOUR TURN:
Return to something you have written, perhaps using one of the previous exercises. If you haven't dealt with the place of the piece full enough, revise with an eye toward doing this. Don't choke the passage with too much setting, but ground the reader in the place and let place have some impact on the action. If you have already dealt with place fully, then revise the piece drastically altering the place. Whichever route you choose, you should end up with a visibly different piece.
TIME
The notion of time is as integral to setting as place. Time can give us a sense of the backdrop of the story in the big sense--the era, century, year--and in the small sense--the season, day of the week, and time of day.
As with place, you always want to locate your characters in time, whether or not you spend much space describing it. Be aware of the time, in both the big and the small sense, and give the reader whatever clues they may need to stay orientated.
SETTING THE MOOD
In addition to grounding the reader in a physical place and time, setting can actually enhance the emotional landscape of a piece, affecting the atmosphere and mood.
The setting is usually conveyed through the consciousness of the POV character.
YOUR TURN:
Imagine a character who is contemplating a major change in his or her life--dropping out of school, having a child, entering a risky business venture...Once you have fleshed out the character a bit, write a passage where this character is dealing with the change. You may or may not choose to have other characters involved. Here's the interesting part: let weather underscore the drama of the passage, be it the first gusts of autumn or a torrential downpour or any other act of the elements.
SETTING AND CHARACTER
While we're on the subject of characters, let me point out that setting plays a great role in who your characters are--how they dress, talk, socialize, work, travel, eat, and so forth. Much like animals, people behave a certain way in their natural habitat, and you want to pay attention to how your characters are shaped by their setting.
If you can easily take your characters out of their current setting and plop them elsewhere with no notable difference in who they are, then perhaps your characters are not affected deeply enough by the time and place in which they live. Don't pound setting into your characters!!!
Stories often contain characters who are forced out of their natural environment, which creates interesting dynamics and situations. In such cases, you'll need to be aware of how a character acts and reacts in a setting that is somewhat foreign.
At its most extreme, this becomes a "fish out of water" story, where the main conflict is between a character and a wildly unfamiliar surrounding. A fish-out-of-water story can be enormously fun, but if you tackle one be ready to deal with your setting extensively.
Offering a new perspective is one of the advantages of placing characters in an alien environment, because it forces the character and the reader to see things with fresh, and often wary, eyes.
YOUR TURN:
Think up a character who is very much the opposite of yourself. Choose some of the following differences: sex, age, occupation, background, temperament...Now write a passage where this character must live for a while in an environment very similar to your own. Let the setting cause as much conflict as possible for the character. For example, if the character is a freewheeling bachelor, perhaps let him struggle tending to your houseful of kids. If the character is a spoiled rich kid, perhaps let her hold down your job for a day. Have fun letting someone else struggle with your setting!
In some cases, a setting becomes so overwhelmingly important that it actually performs as a character in its own right--it can act and change, and even become one of the most dominant features in your story.
SETTING THE DETAILS
If the purpose of setting is to ground the characters, and the readers, in the physical world of the story, and perhaps reflect the appropriate dramatic mood, then you, the writer, are you going to need to create that physical world. With what? With the only thing you've got--words. Largely you'll be painting your fictional settings through the artful use of sensory and specific description.
Conciseness is actually important. You don't want your setting descriptions to hit the pause button on the action too often or readers will go out to have a drink or do some shopping while you're there working carefully at the easel with your brush and paint. Readers depend on the forward movement in a story, so your story is best served by scattering your setting description throughout a piece rather than dropping it in giant globs here and there.
Remember the importance of telling details, those tidbits of information that carry so much power in their little shells? Skillful use of telling details will allow you to convey your settings quickly, yet effectively.
As a rule of thumb, ask yourself how important a particular time or place is to your story and this will help you determine how much "space" to spend describing any given setting.
If you have a compelling reason not to describe your setting, then you have permission to do so.
THE REALITY OF SETTING
Most fictional stories deal with authentic settings, portraying real places and times or at least seemingly real ones. When writing about these real or seemingly real settings, do your best to paint them accurately and vividly.
If you're writing about a setting that you know well, you shouldn't have a problem verifying the details. If you're writing about a setting you don't know well, you should do your best to gather as much information as you can, by visiting or just doing some old-fashioned research, made all the easier by an un-old-fashioned Internet. However, if you're writing about a setting with which you are not intimately familiar, you may want to give it a fictional name so as not to do something like anger the residents of Cleveland by mixing up the names of the cross-streets downtown.
Fictionalizing your location also gives you some dramatic license.
If you find yourself creating settings that are only semi realistic, look for ways to blend the familiar with the fabricated to give your setting a sense of verisimilitude.
Even if you're creating a world that is wholly fantastical, as found in many works of science fiction and fantasy, you will still want the setting to seem real. Believe it or not, these kinds of usually demand more homework than any other kind of setting, if you want your time and place to be convincing.
THE PACE OF TIME
Pacing is the manipulation of time. The fiction writer can manipulate time with the wave of a staff and pacing is one of the great tools in the fiction writer's bag of tricks.
The most prevalent way you manipulate time is by compressing and expanding it to fit the needs of your story. Time passes for our characters, but the writer controls how quickly or slowly it flows. Writers do not show every moment of a plot, every instance in a character's life from birth until death, but instead speed through or skip over sections of time that are irrelevant to the story, while slowing down and expanding sections that are most important.
If you move too quickly through an important section, the reader can feel disappointed or even confused. Likewise, if you move too slowly or dwell on irrelevant events, you can bore your reader.
YOUR TURN:
Recall the most frightening moment of your life. If it's too scary or recent, go for the second most frightening moment. Using yourself as a first-person narrator, write a passage about this moment. Chances are time slowed down for you as you were living that moment, so slow time way down as you describe this experience. Include minute details and the panoply of your thoughts. You may end up writing several pages about several seconds. Feel free to embellish, though you probably won't need to.
One of the chief ways pacing is achieved is by alternating scene and summary. Your pacing choices will be greatly affected by the length of your fictional work. In a short story, where there is a minimum page "real estate," you'll need to be very choosy about what you show and don't show. With a novella or novel, you have more wiggle room, but even with a longer work you should ultimately be reluctant to include anything that doesn't have a significant impact on the tale being told. Think about your work as a whole, and plan how much time (and space) you'd like to spend on each part.
FLASHBACKS
And, yes, the fiction-writing wizard has another great trick in that he can move back and forth through time at will.
Flashbacks come in handy when there is a need to relate something that took place before the chosen time frame of the story. Instead of just having the narrator briefly allude to the event, you may want to show the event with some depth of detail, which will mean actually drifting back to the event.
Flashbacks are usually better off not running too long, though they may include actual scenes of dialogue. But don't rely on them too much. If you find yourself needing pages and pages of flashbacks, you may have begun your story at the wrong point in time, in which case your story may take on a disjointed quality. Flashbacks can also be quite confusing to a reader unless you clearly delineate them, remembering to anchor them to the story's present. As with setting, you always want the readers to have a sense of where they are.
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