Thursday, July 26, 2018

Setting

I ran a setting workshop.  Here are my notes, based of experience and research.


Setting Workshop
Setting impacts every scene of every book.  It can be used to enhance writing or to detract from it.  Below is a brief set of notes describing the three primary elements of writing setting: 1) Relevance: When should you describe setting?  2) Revealing Setting: Through what method should you convey setting?  3) Descriptive Properties: What should be in setting description?

RELEVANCE: Descriptions should bring immediacy to the world, not stall you out.  Use them for multiple purposes. (“Skid Row,” from Little Shop of Horrors establishes setting, conflict, characters, theme, etc.)

Why does the character care? 
•     Does it affect him/her?  Does it inform perception, identity, or physicality?
•     Does the character affect the setting?

Why should we care? 
•     Is that prop important?  What message/feeling are you trying to get across?  What do we need to understand this scene?
•     Does the setting help the reader better understand the characters’ motivations and backgrounds?
•     Does it help the reader better connect to the story?
•     How does the setting prime reader assumptions?
•     Is it interesting?

How does it add to the world building? 
•     Is it consistent?  (Fact checking!)
•     (Setting can be physical, social, emotional, etc.)

Why is it important to the plot?
•     Does it make sense that your characters are there?
•     Is there symbolic or thematic importance?
•     Does it help move the plot forward?
•     Does it add to or subtract from conflict?


REVEALING SETTING: Setting can be revealed through motion, character perception, or exposition.  Setting can be revealed gradually or all at once.  Generally but not universally, setting is revealed either wide shot to close up or abstract to concrete.  More setting description will slow the book’s pace, so how quickly or slowly do you want to dive into the story?  ( For example: fast action sequences generally have less setting description; slow, tense build-ups generally have more.)

Motion
•     Use action to build setting instead of just description
•     Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”:
“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.”

Character Perception
•     Level of experience: Would he know what type of desk the wood was?  Is he in the right state of mind to notice?  How would different characters perceive the same setting?
•     Mood (is the ruin enchanting because they’re in love or creepy because they’re scared?)  (Reader perception and reaction doesn’t have to be the same as character perception – narrative distance.  Does the character think it’s romantic while the reader actually knows it’s dangerous/creepy?)
•     Even a 3rd person narrator has a character and personality and should be consistent.  How do you move the camera?


DESCRIPTIVE PROPERTIES: Regardless of the method used to describe the setting in any particular scene, here are some helpful elements to keep in mind.

Details: What defines the room?  What’s the first thing you see?  What’s unusual about it?  I don’t need to know that the kitchen has a sink.  But if it doesn’t have a sink—that’s weird. 
•     The more precise the detail, the more interesting (my dog is lying against me vs. my dog is curled up against my thigh).
•     Describing in terms of something else—leaves are tresses now.  Don't need to spell it out.
•     Sensory detail: Sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, temperature, kinesthetic, pain, balance, vibration, direction
•     Locale, time of year, time of day (check accurate sun/moon positions!), elapsed time, weather, climate, geography
•     Effects of time’s passage (What was the Shire like when the Hobbits finally returned?  The movie left out the Scouring of the Shire.  Why did Tolkien think it was so important?)
•     Lack of detail: when is it more tactful not to describe.  What should we not describe?  (Sometimes, a brief, dry, clinical description can be more impactful than a page of gruesome prose.  Understatement of that type often feels more real, especially in contrast.)

Background:
•     Consistency (internally, with world, with character perception, etc.)
•     Do your research: know much more than you put down
•     If it’s boring, cut it
•     Are you excited about your setting?  Do you, the writer, want to spend time there? Does it frighten you, intrigue you?  Or do you not really care?

https://www.novel-writing-help.com/story-setting.html
https://www.nownovel.com/blog/talking-setting-place/
http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/settings.shtml


TL;DR: Should you include setting description?  How should you reveal it?  What should you include or not include?


Friday, July 20, 2018

Telling the Reader that Your Character is Epic

Recently, I read a novel about a woman who suddenly became queen after growing up in near-isolation, and her struggles to keep her throne and her life.  Most of the book was from her point of view, but maybe two-thirds of the way through, we switched to a pair of minor character’s POV for a page-long exchange that went about like this:

Character 1: Our queen’s pretty epic, isn’t she?
Character 2: She sure is!
Character 1: It’s wonderful how she’s going to save us all.
Character 2: It sure is!  Gosh, I’m glad she’s epic!

This didn’t ruin the book for me (the queen’s convenient new superpowers saving everything at the end did that), but it did make me start thinking—What’s the best way to make your character epic?  Because although this clunky attempt failed utterly, I have seen it done well and in multiple different ways, including:

Inconvenient acknowledgement of epicness
Villain acknowledgement: In the second book of Lois McMaster Bujold’s marvelous Vorkosigan series, The Vor Game, an antagonist recognizes Miles from the previous book.  He acknowledges Miles’s ability to talk his way out of any situation . . . and so orders his men to cut out Miles’s tongue if Miles says anything. 

Ally acknowledgement: Similarly, Miles gets into various scraps because people recognize his ability to get them out . . . and assume he’s coming to help him when he’s really trying to just pass innocuously through.  But once they beg him for help, he feels he’s obliged to do so . . .

In both situations, Miles looks epic . . . but naturally and thrillingly so.


Awkward and/or painful acknowledgement of epicness
I’m thinking here especially of a book in the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher.  The reader is used to seeing Harry Dresden scrape through encounters with beings far more powerful than he.  Since the books are entirely from his first-person POV, we see his fear and effort and luck.  It seems natural.  Then, at one or two points, a couple of his allies tell him how scary he is because he’s so powerful and always seems to win . . .

(Something similar happens to the titular Alex Verus in Benedict Jacka’s books, when a character points out to Verus that people who go up against him almost always end up dead.)

So we get great characterization and plot advancement while being told that Harry and Alex are epic.  And again, it feels natural.  It makes us more sympathetic to the protagonist—not less (and definitely not disgusted, as I felt about the queen after the ham-fisted attempt at epicness described above).


Untrue acknowledgement of epicness
My favorite example of this is actually from a film—Galaxy Quest.  In it, Alan Rickman’s character has a fanboy who tells him over and over how epic he is, until he just has to live up to that epicness.  (Come to think of it, this happens to some extent to all our main characters in that film.)  It’s inconvenient, embarrassing, and ridiculous—and pretty darn epic.


Overall

I don’t think it’s essential to tell the audience flat out that your character is epic, but I do believe that it can be done effectively and pleasingly while preserving good writing, advancing the story, and thrilling the reader.