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?

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.

Carmen Sandiego: Essential Characteristic

 


 Ah, Carmen Sandiego.  Sometimes her hair is auburn, sometimes black.  Sometimes her hatband and scarf are gold, sometimes her hatband and shirt are black.  Her hat is different shapes and sizes, her coat different lengths and styles, her shoes can be red pumps, black pumps, or black boots.  She usually has bright red lipstick and black gloves, but not always . . . and yet she is always recognizably the same character.

The first Doctor Who I ever saw was the second half of the Eight Doctor Movie.  Years later, I recognized the Doctor from a Reader’s Digest list of best sci-fi films . . . except it was the Fourth Doctor.  How in the world did I recognize them as the same person?  Recognize a picture of a guy in a magazine from a different guy in a film I watched years previously?

Rose City Comic Con, 2016.  Black hat
band and collar, auburn hair, black pants,
boots.

Denver Comic Con, 2018.
Gold hat band and scarf, black skirt
and pumps, black hair.  Same lipstick, same
hat with a different band, similar gloves.
(Also: This photo explains so much
about how Carmen gets around in
time and space  . . .)

I’m not a huge cosplayer, but I do like to dress up for Comic Con.  In 2016, I dressed as Carmen Sandiego.  Then this year, my planned costume (the titular character from Alice: Madness Returns) fell through, so I decided to redo Carmen.  Redo . . . but not repeat.

The interesting thing is that I was equally recognized as Carmen in both outfits.  I had dozens of people call after me and quite a few ask for my photo.

The question is: why would this be the case?  Just because different people were familiar with different versions?  I think it's more than that.

(Tip: It’s important to be aware not just of your character’s canon lore, but also the fanon surrounding it.  While I was at it, I memorized some of Carmen’s lines from the various games.  When people called after me, I responded, “Good detecting, detective!” or “You’ll never catch me, gumshoe!” etc.  It was fun, and people seemed to love it.)

In fanon, Carmen has a thing with Where's Waldo.  So I found a few . . . When taking
this photo, quite a few passersby also snapped shots. 
(This is also a demonstration of why you should learn to pose better—
which I did in in most photos but clearly not here!  I'm not posed,
and so I look much less like her than I do otherwise.  Fascinating, no?
But see below.)

 What I learned from this experience is that it’s the essentials of the character that matter.  Carmen likes to tilt her hat in photos—

I only met one other Carmen this year, although my friend said she saw three.

She wears a brimmed red hat and a red trench coat.  That’s literally all you need.  The red lipstick, dyed hair, gloves, color choice, shoe style—all inessential ingredients.

But how you put them together can make the difference between an okay costume and a good costume.  Ask yourself: would Carmen wear this?  She wears and oversized trench coat, so should I?  Well, what would Carmen do?  She is a very stylish lady.  Do you look stylish in that trench coat?  Are you standing stylishly?  Walking with confidence and good posture?

(Tip: if you want people to take pictures of you at Comic Con, look approachable.  I have a bit of RBF, but as long as I kept a slight smile on my face, people stopped me, sang at me, called out to me . . . and generally smiled back.)

This is where we come down to characters.  If you took away the trappings of yours, the nonessentials . . . would you be able to recognize your character?  Can you tell which character is speaking without a dialogue tag?  (J.K. Rowling is the master of unique-sounding characters.  That something I need to work on.)  If I had my eyes closed in a room full of Marvel movie characters whose voices went through distorters, I could tell you which one was Deadpool’s by the way he talked.  Maybe also Iron Man’s.  In the first movie, I could tell you Thor—but he’s now altered beyond recognition.  I couldn’t tell you who the vast majority of others were.  And that’s not even getting to the side characters and the TV shows.

This isn’t an answer, just something to muse on.

What’s essential to a character?  What’s unique?  What can you take away but still have the same person?

And why did one person mistake me for Agent Carter?  The hat?  I think it was the hat.

(In 2016, I went with an Agent Carter, and she got called Carmen more than Carter. . . .)

Concatenation

I played World of Warcraft, off and on, for about a year back around 2006.  I quit because it was expensive, addictive, and not even fun.  Around 2008 or 2009, I became interested in watching machinima—videos made using games, especially but not exclusively World of Warcraft.  I watched a lot of Oxhorn.  I still follow Cranius, who makes videos with Legs.

Probably the most impressive machinima I saw turned out not to be a machinima at all, but rendered animation.  You can watch it here:
The Craft of War: BLIND from percula on Vimeo.

The song is jpop singer Namie Amuro’s “Hide and Seek.”  I have a friend, whom I’ll call Ruby, who is a huge Namie Amuro fan, but I was just uninterested. My elder sister is a huge fan of the Japanese rock group L’arc en Ciel, which I never liked and probably biased me against Namie Amuro. 

Then I saw this video again and again, and the song really grew on me.  I wanted to hear more by the artist, but the few clips I looked up sounded nothing like “Hide and Seek,” and the story might have ended there, except that I became roommates with Ruby.  We lived together almost three years, and in that time, I watching all of Namie Amuro’s music videos and concert DVDs and acquired about eight of her albums and was generally converted into a fan.

Although most of her music still sounds nothing like “Hide and Seek.”  In fact, I get the impression (from her concert DVDs) that she doesn’t even like the song.  Oh, well.

So what was the point of all this?

Namie Amuro recently turned 40 and, after a 25-year music career, decided to retire.  I guess dancing energetically for three hours straight in high heels while singing flawlessly is pretty tough on a body, and one might want to do something different.

Anyway, I received an email from Ruby that had been sent at about 2am saying that Namie Amuro’s ~Finally~ concert was sold out in Japan, but that there were plenty of tickets left in Taipei, Taiwan, in about a month, and would I like to go?

Which is how and why I was in Taiwan for a week.

And it was amazing.

Pushing Past Personal Limits

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a post called Writing Advice, in which I listed the (few) things I believe are necessary for writing well.  I still stand by that post, although I think I’d like to add one item to it:

Writers, get more exercise.

If you’re anything like me, you have a tendency to sit for ages in front of the computer or with a notebook, which is great if you want to look like Jabba the Hutt but not so great if you want actual blood flow to your brain.  So you just sit there, getting stupider, when twenty minutes of exercise would cut right through your writer’s block and overall make you a happier, healthier person.

You’ll also learn a lot about writing action sequences and their after effects.  Have you ever worked out until you wanted to puke and faint?

I did, last week, because I did a high-intensity Zumba . . . my first really serious exercise in seven months.  15 minutes in, I honesty wanted to puke and faint.  I had to put my head between my knees for 30 seconds.  Then I kept going, and the endorphins kicked in.  After 45 minutes of Zumba, I felt like I could dance forever—and love it.

(Boy, was I sore the next day.)

And that’s something a lot of writers don’t bother with: action sequences leave you sore and aching (and often bruised and cut and broken and headachy and weak), and this effects not just what you can do physically, but what you can do mentally.  That hour of Zumba pretty much knocked out my brain for the rest of the day.  But after a week of getting lots of exercise, when I went back . . . I didn’t feel like puking or fainting.  I just felt fantastic.  And it totally worked out my soreness from the strength-training yoga two days earlier.

So exercise not only improves your brain and body, it also teaches you what certain types of exertion feel like.

But that’s not what I sat down to write about—it’s just what reminded me of it.

In my life, two instances stick out to me where I (out of character) exerted myself far beyond what I might have believed possible.  These aren’t necessarily the most exertion I’ve ever gotten—just the ones that I’m amazed at myself about.  Because I didn’t have to do them, and (beforehand), I couldn’t imagine wanting to try.

The first happened when I was maybe eleven years old.  I was a competitive swimmer.  One Saturday, during our dry land training, one of our coaches decided to run a contest: whoever could do the wall sit, with good form, for the longest would get a free PowerAde.

After 15 minutes, she begged us to stop, and promised that the six or seven of us left—er—sitting would all get a PowerAde.

I literally couldn’t walk after that. 

I have never, before or since, done the wall sit for more than a minute.  I’ve never enjoyed the wall sit.  But I did it.  And I got a PowerAde.

Yay?

The thing is, in the end, it wasn’t about the PowerAde.  It wasn’t even about my fellow competitors.  I just kept going because I was keeping going.  I think I would have been there for twice as long, if she hadn’t stopped us.  What madness is this?

The other time was last July 4^th.  I’d been doing Zumba for a couple of months by then, and I was friends with the woman who owned the dance studio.  She asked us to Zumba for the Fourth of July parade through town: 3.5 miles at noon in 95° weather.

I hate heat.  I’m not huge on physical exertion.  I wasn’t in that great of shape.

Our instructors dropped out halfway through.

I danced the whole way.  I was the only one who danced the whole way, and one of only two dancing at the end (my sister danced most of the way, but came over faint near the beginning and had to stop).  I danced through the puke stage, through the elation stage.  I danced through the fatigue stage and through the collapse stage.  I danced until my body’s air conditioning kicked in and I had chills running down my limbs.  I danced beyond all sense, beyond all endurance, and I smiled the whole time.

Why?  Madness?  Masochism?  No: because the people at the end of the parade deserved to see dancing as much as the people at the beginning.

How strange and uncharacteristic those two events—that wall sit and parade Zumba—were for me.  I never would have believed them of myself, but they’re true.  And now I know a little more about myself, and about what will drive me to push myself beyond endurance.

What would push your protagonist to that level?

Story Hook

Went to a writing workshop yesterday, which included a section on hooks. As an exercise, we were told to write a hook, "enough that a reader could get at least a sense of what kind of story it is. A romance? An epic fantasy? A horror story? A story about your cat? An epic horror story about your cat?"

So naturally, I wrote this. And when he asked for volunteers to read aloud, I couldn't resist  . . .

The eyes watched me.

The rest of the cat stalked down in the valley, disemboweling cattle and tormenting sheep, but the rest of the cat didn't matter. It wasn't dangerous. Only the eyes could hurt me now, because the eyes were the windows to the soul, and I was already dead.

I wrote another prompt too, for the fun of it, for a short humorous story I've been meaning for years to write -- "Financial Wizard."  It's about time to do that.

Bribing Cops

 

Three books I love.  One satirical literary fantasy, one Gothic romance horror, one epic high fantasy.  What do they have in common, aside from being amazing?  They’ve all been translated from another language—in these cases, German, French, and Russian.  And I’m currently rereading The Count of Monte Cristo, which is what prompted this post.

About two years ago, I went on a modern books-in-translation binge, especially Russian books.  Since 2016, I’ve read at least twelve books in Russian translation (the best of which is definitely the aforementioned Chronicles of Siala, beginning with Shadow Prowler by Alexey Pehov, translated by Andrew Bromfield).

One of the most fascinating things about this is one starts to see trends.  Most of the books I’ve read are either British or American (with the occasional Australian/Canadian/Irish/ etc. author thrown in).  Every nationality and culture has its own unique flavor, but all of these, ultimately, came out of the British empire, and so aren’t that different.  I’ve had a little more diversity through editing—I’ve edited for quite a few native Chinese speakers, whether they now live in China, Singapore, the U.S. or elsewhere—but my only real encounter with Russian culture was the semester of Russian I took my first year of college.  (And Russian Sherlock Holmes, of course).  Then I later had more exposure through a friend of mine who is a professional chess player and teacher (and with whom I wrote Game of Kings.)  But learning about a culture in class or hearing funny chess stories is much different than engaging with literature.

Here’s an example:

In every Russian book I read, police officers and guards could be bribed.  Almost all of them, almost always.  Didn’t matter if the books were high fantasy, sci-fi, or low fantasy, you could bribe law enforcement.  In none of these books was this made a big deal of; it was simply a fact of life.

Compare this to British/American stories.  When you find any bribable cop, he’s the exception, and scandalous.

That’s one of the fascinating things, to me, about reading books from less familiar cultures, especially in translation.  Not only will a good translator give you a taste of the language, the writer will give you a taste of something foreign—not through explaining it to you as in a class, but through trends of basic assumptions.

(Well, that and the fact that you have a higher probability of finding higher quality books in translation, since otherwise no one would have bothered to translate them.)

And through those basic assumptions, you begin to see your own assumptions—which may be more or less interesting.