Group Hug: Playing with Setting

In Rah's world, the word "tomorrow" doesn't always mean "tomorrow." Sometimes it means "I know I said on Thursday I'd post the next day about writing about setting with The Three, but on Friday I was too busy rock climbing and eating tacos (not at the same time), and on Saturday I was too busy rock climbing and eating a Proper Pie (ditto on not at the same time)." I think we can all agree that these are awesome reasons to not get around to posting.

Anyway, The Three and I did write about setting on Thursday. Since so many good things come in threes, our writing exercise about setting had three steps.

Step One: Get a Character

Start by choosing a character name from a random name generator. Spend five minutes writing a brief bio of the character. You can write anything you want about the character, but he or she must be contemporary. The character name we picked was Jude. The Three love an androgynous name.

After we wrote about Jude, we spent a few minutes talking about what The Three know about setting, which was pretty much what I talked about with The Further Four back in January.

Step Two: Get a Setting

Now, spend five to seven minutes writing about the carousel in the picture, in list or paragraph form, whatever rocks your world. Be sure to include as many of the five senses as you can, and don’t forget to include the carousel's surroundings (meaning if you're riding the carousel, you can see outside of it to what's going on around it).

I loved how a couple of The Three ended up giving the carousel a personality: ominous or lonely. Because that's where we were going next, with the discussion of setting having a personality.

Once we'd had that discussion, it was time to try out writing about setting as a character.

Step Three: Give the Setting Some Anima

(Not anime. Anima. Important distinction.)

Now we want to look at how setting can play a role in how your character behaves. We’re going to place him or her in the setting we wrote about earlier, but we want to give this setting a personality. When you write, you can add in as many other characters as you want—or none at all—but you must assume that there are a bunch of people in this setting, just like in the picture. Write for 10 minutes. Share.

This can be a little tricksy, so you can always assign a personality for the setting: You want the setting to annoy your character or confuse your character or protect your character. In fact, try it all three ways and see how each affects your character and the plot, because the harmony of the world digs things in threes. Like three tacos or three rock climbing partners or three really fabulous teen writers who let me experiment on them every month with writing prompts.

Going Deeper into Location, Location, Location

The setting: Rah's living room, with seven inches of snow outside. Tea and cocoa and some miraculous cookie/brownie concoction, compliments of the tasty brain of L. A random name generator on the laptop and a feather ballpoint pen that doesn't work. A candle that smells like grass and the spring that is Way. Too. Far. Off.

At its most basic, setting is about how a character’s physical surroundings look, feel, sound, smell and taste. Setting locates the reader in our world. Setting helps the reader believe. (Like Rah believes that she is over winter.)

But setting isn’t just a backdrop for a character’s actions. Setting can reflect something about a character’s personality. It can be a kind of secondary character itself, helping or hindering the animate characters in the story. It is also something of a tyrant who likes things just so.

Ivan, dude, you can put flowers
around you, but it doesn't
make you less Terrible.

Setting is a Tyrant

Our world has rules: Rules of physics limit our physical movements; laws of government and cultural customs regulate our behavior (more or less). Part of the fun of writing is weaving a world a little or a lot different from ours, but a believable world will have rules. They can be outrageous, but they must be consistent—unless your plot involves the magnetic poles of your planet flipping and totally screwing up the telepathic abilities of your three-legged frog creatures.

Awooga-awooga! Keep it under control. I can’t say it any better than this great comic by xkcd.

Setting is a Mirror

Things Rah is not allowed
to touch.

Look around your room. Is it Scandinavian neat or typhoon messy? Is that a half-empty Big Gulp at your elbow or a turned mug the color of a sunset, teabag dangling over the side? Is that flower pot inhabited by a meticulously trimmed bonsai or a sad stick that might once have been a plant?

Setting is personal. What we surround ourselves with and how we take care of it says something about us—though what it says isn’t necessarily obvious. That sad stick of a plant doesn’t mean you have a black thumb like Cranky Rah. It could mean that lying scum of an ex-boyfriend gave it to you, and you’re just treating it now like he treated you.

But setting doesn’t have to be familiar to our characters to illuminate them. We can reveal a lot about our characters by throwing them into situations that make them uneasy or downright miserable. That’s where we learn what kind of people they really are.

We can also learn a lot about a character’s mental state. Say Special Agent Wilhelmina is out of her depth, unsure of herself. All she needs to save the world is a 9-volt battery and leopard-patterned duct tape, but the only store nearby is the Walmart. Shelves groaning with cheap junk from China loom over her; blue-vested employees vaporize around a corner every time she calls out to them; her path is blocked again and again by carts filled with screaming children. Not only does none of this help poor Willi, it reflects her own out-of-controlness.

Ouch! How did that clunky writing
get stuck in my eye?

Awooga-awooga! Stay away from actual mirrors. You’re stressed out. You’ve just discovered that your best friend stole your formula for a cheap, infinite energy source. You storm into the lab to confront her, and you…Pause to take in all the details of the décor. Um, no.

It’s rare that a person takes the time to examine her surroundings. It’s even rarer that she looks in the mirrors to peruse her face at length, dwelling on the shape of her eyes and the number of freckles on her nose and the perfect curl of her glorious raven hair.

While there are times we're surprised by a new place or person and can take the time to describe them, avoid lengthy descriptions where possible. Instead, incorporate setting into action. Don’t describe that collection of colorful Czech hat pins on the mantle; have your character use them to offer acupuncture to party guests who just won’t leave.

  

Setting is a Character

Setting often has a mood, a hint of personality: the creepy, neglected house that seems alive, watchful; the ancient ruins that radiate wisdom; the welcoming cottage. But setting can also act like full-fledged secondary character that interacts with the protagonist, helping or hindering.

Things Cranky Rah doesn't care
to touch. Where are the tacos?!

That Walmart is clearly out to get Wilhelmina. When your protagonist is in a hurry, does the setting throw a traffic jam, a dead end or a maze-like building in her way, or does a taxi miraculously pull up to the curb? Does your newly dieting protagonist see a doughnut shop on every corner or a bunch of billboards for weight-loss products? Is the river going to wash her sins away or flood her already struggling restaurant?

Awooga-awooga! Guard against the expected. Remember that creepy, neglected house that seems alive, watchful? What else do you expect from a creepy, neglected house? Go for the fresh and unexpected; try to use setting in unusual ways. It doesn’t always rain on a sad day; sometimes it’s sunny. Don’t put the first kiss in a quiet corner of a snug café; put it on a busy street corner, where the characters keep getting bumped by oblivious passersby. A loud, busy nightclub can be irritating and overwhelming, or it can be a sanctuary for someone trying to hide from pursuers.  

Despite Rah's terrible winter malaise, The Three and I didn't just sit around drinking tea and cocoa and chowing down on miraculous cookie/brownies. Of course we wrote about setting, too. But that's for another day, like tomorrow.

The Further Four: What Happens Next?

One of the things that seems to make writers weep is the question What Happens Next? I've seen this bring moderately well-adjusted adult writers to their knees. (Okay, okay, the phrase moderately well-adjusted contradicts the word writer; I know. Just go with me.) It's also one of the things I hear from both my writing groups. So when I got together yesterday with The Further Four to talk about plot (the What in our Five Ws of stories), I wanted to give them something concrete to work with in terms of What Happens Next?

We warmed up by randomly generating a character, using the incredibly cool but incredibly boringly named Writing Exercises website. (I used the Story Plot generator in the children's section.)

A lonely girl or mysterious boy?
You decide.

Our generated Character 1 was a lonely girl. We spent about five minutes each writing a very brief bio of our lonely girl, focusing on character only. We didn't want to start telling a story about her, not yet.

Once we had our lonely girl bioed out, we generated Character 2, a mysterious boy, and spent another five minutes each writing a bio for him.

We talked for a few minutes then about plot, about how what a story is is a bunch of things getting in the way of our character getting what she wants. But what are those things that get in the way?

It all depends on the story, of course. You generally won't have a unicorn show up and start miraculously healing people unless you're writing a story that involves unicorns.What happens in a story happens because your characters are certain people who live in a certain world and do certain things. Which is uncomfortably vague, I know.

Unfortunately, no one can tell you what happens next. Your characters and plot have to lead you there. But we can list a few of the types of things that can happen in a plot. Like this:

• Character is introduced or leaves/dies
• Character learns a skill
• Character gets hurt or sick
• Character faces her greatest fear
• Character's weakness gets in her way
• One character betrays another
• Something unexpected happens
• Character finds something hidden or learns something secret
• Character learns about her past
• Bad guy has a triumph
• Bad guy has a loss
• Good guy has a triumph
• Good guy has a loss
• A chase
• A race
• A fight
• A capture
• An escape
• A rescue
• A change
• Something funny happens
• A natural disaster
• Something important breaks

A little eye candy for my DM bud.

(A special shout out to the Dungeon Master for helping me populate this list.)

As we write, we want all these things we're throwing in our character's way to keep getting bigger, harder and more dangerous until she faces her biggest, hardest, most dangerous challenge. At that point, we find out whether she's up to the task, whether she finds what she's looking for and whether we have a happy or sad ending.

After talking through this list of plot point types, we generated a Place—in an aeroplane (it's a British website)—and an opening event—someone is wearing a disguise. So that's where we started our story: Our lonely girl and mysterious boy are in an aeroplane, and someone is wearing a disguise.

I asked the girls to keep the start of their story short, to just write enough that we get a sense of where we are. And once we had established that, the girls decided on what type of a plot point would come next. (I made these cards to spread out on the table.) They chose something important breaks, and we wrote. Then character finds something hidden or learns something secret, and we wrote. Then character is introduced or leaves/dies, and we wrote. (You get the picture, yeah?) Finally, before they picked the fourth plot point, I told them that we were going to wrap up with this one and that they should finish their story if they could. The final plot point? Something unexpected happens.

I didn't see that coming.
Do you think she checked her bags?

What was awesome is that every single one of them wrapped it up. It was a thing of beauty. We had orphans finding a home, mysterious boys finding someone to share their passion for anime with, a long-lost father being tossed out of an aeroplane (don't worry, he survived), and a very unexpected unicorn emerging from the cabin galley to heal a dead guy.

Cranky Rah is more than a wee bit embarrassed to admit the unicorn was hers. Talk about some deus ex machina. And we will, at some point. Oh, we will.