Chapter Nine

The Grounding of Setting

“Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else. … Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming? …”
—Eudora Welty

The right setting is as important in fiction as it is in real life. Where would Spenser be without Boston? Scarlett O’Hara without Tara? James Joyce without Dublin? Harry Potter without Hogwarts? Raymond Chandler without Los Angeles? Atticus Finch without Maycomb County, Alabama? John Steinbeck without California? Candace Bushnell without New York City?

Only in the right setting can your protagonist bloom where she is planted. It’s up to you to plant her in the right place.

I told you earlier about my first writers conference, where I met the marvelous Ray Bradbury. I also met another wonderful writer there, Bill Downey. Bill was a Marine and a World War II veteran who went on to become an acclaimed journalist, author, and teacher at University of California, Santa Barbara, and a fixture at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. The first African-American reporter hired by the Santa Barbara News Press, Bill was a charismatic and big-hearted man who loved writers and writing, and did everything he could to encourage us all to do good work.

Bill was my coach, which meant that he had the dubious pleasure of reading and critiquing the first fifty pages of my lame Nora Ephron–inspired, inanely titled roman à clef, Hearts and Flowers, in which a bored, self-deprecating young housewife (moi) discovers her husband is having an affair and realizes that she has to do something about her life. Seriously.

The good Mr. Downey was very kind to me. He was one of those writing teachers who believed that praise trumps panning every time. He complimented my oh-so-funny voice and then pointed out, oh-so-kindly, that my work had no setting. No setting at all. Nada. Nichts. Niente. None.

An armchair psychologist would tell you that I forgot setting because, as an Army brat, I’d never lived in any place long enough to know what setting was. And maybe they’d be right. But I know now that lots of writers forget setting, forget to ground each scene in place, forget that when carefully drawn, setting can become a character as real as any person.

I went home happily buoyed by Bill’s praise, with a copy of his terrific book on writing, Right Brain, Write On!: Overcoming Writer’s Block and Achieving Your Creative Potential, tucked in my bag. He’d autographed it for me with the following note: “To Paula, with no question in mind that you’ll do well … Bill.”

That note got me through a lot of tough times, especially moments when being a writer was the last thing I thought I’d ever be. I still have that book, which occupies a treasured place on my writing bookshelf to this day. Bill died in 1994.

I never forgot setting again.

“I think a setting is hugely important. I look at setting as a character with its own look, sound, history, quirks, goofy temperaments, and moods.”
—Deb Caletti

"Where" Is Everything

If you’re like me and have a tendency to forget setting, then you need to make a conscious effort to figure out where everything is in your story. If setting comes more naturally, you still need to be sure that you ground your story in place. As the author, you are the locations scout, the stage manager, the set designer, the props manager, the costume designer, and the dresser. You are the decider of the planet, country, region, county, city, street, and building, as well as the room, furniture, and wardrobe of your story.

When you begin a scene, you have to place your players on their stage. You need the equivalent of an establishing shot in filmmaking. With a few quick strokes of the pen you have to do what the camera does in a few seconds. Here are the opening lines of stories by writers of different genres who know how to establish setting quickly, cleanly, and beautifully:

In these openings, each writer lays out the scene before us. We envision the scene, we’re inside of it—whether it’s a battlefield in Iraq or a bird refuge in Utah. Each of these settings is established in about a hundred words, more or less.

Note the specificity of these openings. It’s not just any helicopter; it’s a Bell 222. Not just any flowers, but dogwoods and azaleas and violets and alyssum. Not just any library, but one found in small-town Connecticut, run by an acting librarian who prefers silence to God. Not just any spring, but a spring that could bring a warrior’s death along with it. Not just any marsh, but one threatened by the rising of Great Salt Lake. Not just any neighborhood in Baltimore, but one where you could find love quick before the world came to an end. Not just any strip mall, but one with an Ocean State Job Lot, the poor Massachusetts man’s Walmart.

“I use the setting of a small rural Norwegian community—the kind of place that I know so intimately. I could never write a novel set in a big city, because, frankly, I don’t know what it would be like.”
—Karin Fossum

Just as these writers have done, think of your story setting as if you were making a movie. Set your stage, place your props, and yell, “Action!”

Specificity is the key here. To be specific, you must pay attention, do your research, and name names. This is hard enough if you know a place well; it’s even harder if you do not.

Place Settings

“I never think of an entire book at once. I always just start with a very small idea. In Holes, I just began with the setting; a juvenile correctional facility located in the Texas desert. Then I slowly make up the story and rewrite it several times, and each time I rewrite it, I get new ideas and change the old ideas around.”
—Louis Sachar

For many writers, like Louis Sachar, setting is the portal by which they can enter the story. They understand that without the right setting, they won’t be able to pull off the story they want to tell. Once they find that setting, they can tell their story.

Sometimes it’s a happy accident, as we saw with Alice Hoffman, who was inspired to write The Dovekeepers after visiting Masada. She hadn’t planned on writing that story, but once she’d entered that sacred place, she was compelled to write about it. Other times, a setting from a writer’s past haunts him. Think of Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five, who was a prisoner of war during the bombing of Dresden, as is his hero, Billy Pilgrim.

And sometimes the setting is simply a place the writer has fallen in love with, as Ernest Hemingway did with Paris. This love affair is recounted in his memoir A Moveable Feast, which chronicles his life among American expatriates in 1920s Paris. Based on Hemingway’s manuscripts and detailed notes, the book was put together by his wife Mary Hemingway after his death. One of my dearest writer friends, Susan Reynolds, gave me a first edition to celebrate our mutual love of the City of Light, about which Hemingway most famously said: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Hemingway names dates and cafés and addresses and people in this wonderful book. I encourage anyone who loves writers and Paris, not necessarily in that order, to read it.

The perfect setting for your story can go a long way to helping you:

• Establish your genre. Readers know that any story set on Mars is most likely science fiction (The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury), just as stories set in high schools tend to be young adult fiction (How to Be Popular by Meg Cabot) and stories set in beach towns are often summer beach reads, a.k.a. women’s fiction (Summer People by Elin Hilderbrand). This applies to genres that might defy categorization as well. Sarah Addison Allen, who writes a kind of Southern magical realism (as opposed to the Latin American version or what Alice Hoffman calls Yankee magical realism set in New England), believes the South is the perfect setting for her novel The Sugar Queen: “Magical realism is a blending of the unusual or supernatural into an otherwise ordinary setting. And, to me, this perfectly describes the South. The Sugar Queen involves a lot of magical happenings, but in a very down-home Southern setting. It’s full of things that could almost be true.”
• Achieve the right tone. As we’ve seen, spooky settings can help you achieve a spooky tone (The Shining by Stephen King), just as romantic places can help you achieve a romantic mood (A Room with a View by E.M. Forster) and remote settings can help you achieve a feeling of isolation (Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier).
• Enhance your style. Best-selling author Anne Rice sets many of her stories in her native New Orleans, a city rich in history, lush in beauty, and dark in sensuality—all well suited to Rice’s own rich, lush, and darkly sensual stories of vampires (Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, and more). As Rice says, “I love New Orleans physically. I love the trees and the balmy air and the beautiful days.”
• Underline your themes. Best-selling author Christopher Moore chose San Francisco as the setting for his hilarious and horrific vampire trilogy—Bloodsucking Fiends, You Suck, and Bite Me—because, as he puts it: “San Francisco is a breathtakingly beautiful city, with lots of great contrasts between dark and light, often overlapping each other. It’s a great setting for a horror story.”

Location, Location, Location

The setting you choose may also help set your work apart from the competition—and help you sell it. Setting has played an important role in the success of many of my clients. As we’ve seen with my client Meera, setting her mystery novel on the Henny Penny Farmette helped her win a series deal. Two of my other writer clients have series that take place on islands—Cynthia Riggs’s popular Martha’s Vineyard mystery series, the latest of which is Poison Ivy, and the aforementioned C. Michele Dorsey’s series set on St. John. Another client, James T. Shannon, sets his popular short stories for Alfred Hitchock’s Mystery Magazine in his native Fall River, Massachusetts, where he can build stories around the Portuguese-American families he knows so well, including his own. (He’s also the author of the novel Dying for Attention.)

But perhaps the best examples of setting making all the difference in the careers of my clients concern two very different projects. Shannon Stoker writes science fiction. She set her dystopian trilogy in “an America where girls are breeders and the most beautiful girls go to the highest bidders.” Her ability to build out this world made her project The Registry an easy pitch for me—and an easy sell.

So, too, for Kim Van Alkemade, who was inspired by the real-life Hebrew Orphan Asylum of Manhattan to write Orphan #8, a “moving historical novel about an orphan subjected to experimental X-ray treatments there, who escapes to make a new life for herself, only to face her tormentor years later.” Again, an easy pitch for me—and a multi-book deal for Kim.

“I like to know the places I write about. I feel like it helps me ground the novel. My novels are ‘realistic novels,’ but they can also be fantastical, so it’s nice to have a setting that grounds them a little bit.”
—John Green

Here and Now, There and Then

“Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me, whatever the setting.”
—Katherine Paterson

Even if you know your story’s setting well—it’s the city in which you were born and raised, or the university where you got your undergraduate degree, or the beach town where you’ve summered with your family all your life—you still need to do research. Revisit the places where you set your scenes—and make sure that you can name the streets and alleys, flora and fauna, vehicles and buildings and parks. Best-selling author John Sandford makes a point of going out and looking at the settings he’s using in his stories. “If you describe things carefully,” says Sandford, “it kind of makes the scene pop.”

Be as careful about your smaller stages as your larger ones. If you’re setting scenes in places we’ve seen before—offices and schools and restaurants—find a way to make them unique. I had one client who set scene after scene in his detective novel in diners. Different diners, but diners nonetheless. You need to mix it up.

This is more challenging when your story takes place not in Paris or in an asylum or on a faraway planet but in the “ordinary world” of, say, suburbia. This is where looking for the underbelly—what hides below the surface—can make all the difference. Be sure to scratch your surface and infuse the ordinary with the extraordinary. This is what Chris Van Allsburg, best-selling author and illustrator of such children’s classics as The Polar Express and Jumanji, strives to do in his work. “In the same way that a mundane object can have a personality somehow,” says Van Allsburg, “I try to suggest that a mundane setting can have some menace behind it.”

Harlan Coben, who has penned a string of best-selling thrillers about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances, has purposefully chosen the American suburbs for his settings. He doesn’t write about worldwide conspiracies that lead to the White House or serial killers stalking mean city streets. Instead he prefers to set his stories in what he calls the “very placid pool of suburbia, family life” where he can “make pretty big splashes.” Big splashes, indeed! Coben, one of the most down-to-earth guys you’ll ever meet, is a family man whose family man’s nightmares fuel his work.

It’s hard enough to ground your story in a setting you know well or can visit, but if you’re writing historical fiction, science fiction, or fantasy, creating a believable setting is particularly challenging. In the case of historical fiction, you’ll need to do your research, to make sure you get the details—from bullets to broomsticks—correct. Because if you don’t, even if you’re lucky enough to publish your work, warts and all, you’ll be hearing about your mistakes from your readers. Over and over again. Even if you’re writing science fiction or fantasy, you have to make sure that your setting remains consistent within the context of the world you’ve created.

But most important, you need to drop your reader into the past or the future or in another country or in another universe without slowing down your story. This is quite a challenge—and one many writers fail to meet. It’s one of the biggest—and most common—gaffes writers make, one that will prevent you from selling your work every time. Whenever I critique stories, this problem inevitably comes up. I advise writers to study the work of the masters of world building, who are experts at establishing their settings without affecting the pace. Take a look at the opening chapters of the following works to see how carefully the setting is woven into the tapestry of the story:

• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
• The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
• Divergent by Veronica Roth
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
• The Martian by Andy Weir

Note: If you’re having trouble integrating world building into your narrative, no worries. We’ll discuss how to fix this in greater detail in chapter twelve.

When it comes to setting, you are limited only by your imagination. You can set your story anywhere you’d like. You can send your characters back into the dark recesses of time or fling them far into a future only you can see. You can put them on an island in the Caribbean or on a crater on the moon. You can surround them with French kings and queens or Welsh coal miners and shopkeepers or African zebras and lions. The world of your story is in your hands—and in your hands alone.

“One of the admirable features of British novelists is that they have no scruple about setting their stories in foreign settings with wholly foreign personnel.”
—James Buchan

Make It Yours

Setting, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Take New York. Writers have conjured so many versions of New York. In The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald shows us a Jazz Age New York, peopled with the bored and lost elite of café society. It’s a far cry from the New York Betty Smith shows us in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, in which a family struggles to survive in the early years of the twentieth century in the Williamsburg tenements. Then there’s Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City New York and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth New York and Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities New York and Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s New York and Emma McLaughlin’s The Nanny Diaries New York and Toni Morrison’s Jazz New York and Chaim Potok’s The Chosen New York and Kay Thompson’s Eloise New York and Patti Smith’s Just Kids New York. How many New Yorks are there? As many as there are writers to write about her.

Whichever setting you choose, be sure to make it yours.

“Setting is my primary joy as a writer, building a world and watching people respond to it.”
—Nicola Griffith