Yesterday I made my podcast debut on Michelle Hoover’s brilliant, informative, possibly life-changing “7AM Novelist” series – a 50-day writing challenge designed to give new and experienced writers the tools they’ll need to write a solid first draft. Michelle was my instructor at Grub Street Boston, through the Novel Incubator and the Novel Generator, so I can’t recommend her podcast highly enough to anyone who dreams of writing a book.
I was on along with Louise Berliner, author of Texas Guinan: Queen of the Nightclubs, to talk about how to handle setting and time period in your early pages. As often happens when you only have half an hour to talk about a topic, I signed-off positively bursting with still more to say, so I’m doing what I suppose any one of us would do in that situation: blogging about it.
Our conversation started from Louise’s wonderful idea of setting as a “container,” which characters bump up against throughout the story – a site of conflict, struggle, and most importantly of all, drama. Often, writers will make the mistake of thinking of their setting as more or less static, a blank set onto which their characters are air-dropped. But whether you’re writing historical, sci-fi/ fantasy, gothic horror, or contemporary literary fiction, the “setting” in a novel should be dynamic, a hybrid of both time and place that moves and is moved by the characters.
We’ve all heard of or read books that treat setting like a character, but what exactly does that mean? How is it achieved? All novels begin with what some writers refer to as the “Unstable Ground” situation – a nomenclature which, by no accident, suggests setting. In the opening pages, we find ourselves amongst certain people on a particular day, one where something big will be set in motion. Whatever happens, it doesn’t just happen in any time or place, but on this day and no other, in this very spot and no other.
Take Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, for example, which takes place on one particular day. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,” is one of the most iconic opening lines in all of literature. Over the next few pages, we learn that Mrs. Dalloway is part of a culture that is desperately trying to return to a setting that no longer exists, i.e., pre-WWI Britain. As she moves through what could easily be a perfectly ordinary day – buying flowers, sewing a dress, taking a nap, throwing a party – her story becomes entangled with the ghosts of war. Her search for the comforts of the ordinary is constantly interrupted by reminders of all that she and her country have lost, in the form of supporting characters like the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith, whose visions of the battlefield create a sense of constant instability in the landscape of London.
Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Smith represent the opposing forces that come together to create dynamic settings: status quo versus change. Or, the “unstoppable force” meeting an “immoveable object,” if you prefer. Each character is embattled within themselves just as they are against the world: wanting to move on by going backwards, which is, of course, impossible. Spoiler alert: it costs Septimus his life.
Woolf’s setting for Mrs. Dalloway was her own present day. For historical fiction, setting takes on an even larger presence, firstly because it is always unfamiliar to the reader. Every author will interpret history differently, choosing to emphasize certain details over others, offering different answers to historical mysteries, or characterizing historical figures differently. Each year, about a dozen novels based on the life of Anne Boleyn come out, and yet no two feature exactly the same take on their protagonist.
Historical fiction is where the “setting as container” notion really comes into play. This is partly because, as modern writers, we are ourselves frequently in conflict with the era that we are trying to bring to life. Hilary Mantel likened this task to “chasing ghosts” – although in her words, the ghosts often chase us back. It is through these conflicts between the author and the past that we often find our way to the characters’ conflicts with their own time. In my case, Lightborne is about queer men living in an era fraught with dangers for anyone stepping outside the status quo, and so their conflict with the setting is quite literal. Many books of historical fiction feature protagonists who don’t exactly “fit” into the world around them, and thus offer ever-fertile ground for stories about outsiders.
Historical fiction and sci-fi/ fantasy books also often come with a map somewhere in the opening pages. This is partly because the settings are so unfamiliar to average readers, but it’s also a consequence of just how important the settings are to these stories. The landscape of Middle Earth or the streets of medieval London shape who the characters are and who they are becoming, while also being shaped by the characters throughout the course of the novel. The maps represent both time and place.
There is no escape from the hours and the days. Neither from tomorrow, nor from yesterday. There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us.
Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit
I think this is a good quote to keep in mind when working on setting. Every novel begins with Unstable Ground – the time and place when the story is propelled into being by circumstances that exist even before page one. After that, the ground continues to shift – time and place “deform” the characters as they pass through it, and are “deformed” by their passage. As the ground shifts, details will emerge, pathways will be uncovered, exits will be blocked. The setting is alive – and has a big role to play.
Of course there’s still plenty more to say about setting. WAY more than I can fit here. Another post, perhaps?
HESSE PHILLIPS 