(More) Mastering Story Setting

 The last post was about the essentials of setting, but this one covers some of the skills worth mastering because they can set your work apart.

For instance, there’s a lot of energy that comes from changing settings as the story progresses. This is part of the fun of Midnight Run, Lord of the Rings, and other road/quest stories. Even when there is a return to a setting (e.g., with returning home Almost Famous), the adventures can make it feel different. It really isn’t the same place.

That’s a clue. Even if you need to reuse settings, there is a value to making them feel different each time. The inclusion of a new character can do this. Or changes brought by time. (Think of Tara in Gone With the Wind, which practically goes through its own character arc.) I often noticed changes in the decor of sets in Big Bang Theory (though Sheldon’s place on the sofa only changed once as I recall). To push this a bit further, the setting can reflect the internal state of a character, the peril or the change in status. (I love stories where the escalation in danger is reflected in revisiting a setting. It makes it more acute.)

Sitcoms, of course, tend to have a few unchanging settings. The same is true for some series dramas (like Hill Street Blues) that rarely break out of a few established locations. Often, this is because of cost, but it also may be to set reliable expectations (who might be present, what actions might occur) and audience comfort levels. In The Dick Van Dyke Show, the home included family and neighbors (and only occasionally people from work), the office did something similar. (Did Mel Cooley ever set foot in the Petrie home?) If you were in Alan Brady’s office, he was almost always there (and rarely elsewhere).

But comfort can be taken too far. I hate it when the same people and conversations occur in different locations and the reason is just visual relief. For most Seinfeld episodes, Jerry’s apartment and the diner are interchangeable. Friends suffers from a similar malady.

One of the things a like about Pleasantville is how it subverts sitcom settings. A lot of standard, familiar places shift and get reworked as the story proceeds. Think of the art in the diner. Or my favorite is “Honey, I’m home!” where the character doesn't get its standard responses.

It degrades setting to never refresh it. It takes a tool out of the storyteller’s hands.

Mastery of Story Setting 4: Return to your setting with something fresh.
Practice: The first step is to watch for effective ways stories with limited setting renew them. Then either look at a story that could do this better or your own work and see if there are good options for making each visit fresh. Will it be changed in an essential way by including a different person? A person who has changed (status, experience, needs, health) between visits? Changes to the setting’s condition or artifacts included?

We’ve all seen films with title cards that present setting material. Often, it’s time and place (London 1887), but it can be just time (Three Years Later). Audience are trained to read these, and, if brief) they tend not to intrude on the immersive experience. They offer the great advantages of economy and clarity. Maps are also used to show location. (Check out Casablanca  and Raiders of the Lost Ark.) Geographic travel can also be shown with visual travelogues. What can be done with regard to time? A classic is dissolving from one time on an analog clock to a later time. Or the pages of a calendar can be torn off or blown by an unseen wind to move the to future. I think action provides the most elegant approach.

2001: A Space Odyssey begins a sequence with a title card (The Dawn of Man) and ends with action (match cut of a falling bone becoming a satellite). How’s that for elegance? Flowers sprouting or dying have been shown. Weather (snow to spring) can cue audiences. Best of all is using an action to convey a change in time. Putting up Christmas decorations (or, for a more melancholy mood taking them down) can be visually interesting, evocative and connected with a character. How can you beat that?

Sometimes simple is best. A title card does not distract. But applying imagination to the job of establishing a new time can move beyond the utilitarian to provide a deeper sense of mood and character.

Mastery of Story Setting 5: Evoke the passage of time.
Practice: The best place to study how the passage of time is presented in films is to watch biographies that depict years (Walk the Line, Coal Miner’s Daughter) or epic films (Gladiator, Doctor Zhivago). Look for good examples to emulate. Could any of these have been done more elegantly? Then, look at your own work and, even if you love what you have, come up with a few alternative ways that are clear and contribute to the story.

In a film script, all the setting material is present in the scene header. And I’ve seen many novels (especially from the 1800s) that provide place and time in detail in a block of text (or even in pages of set-up.) For a film, this is usually mitigated in a shooting script where camera angles, titles, and character comments meter out the information in a sequence that doesn’t bring the story to a complete stop (and may even build tension).

Many contemporary books do something similar, taking advantage of the limited point of view of a character to sequence attention in a realistic manner without creating opportunities for readers to skip pages or put the book down. (I have a friend who takes advantage of contemporary approaches to hook the reader, then provides an 1800s approach in chapter 2 to add richness — very clever.)

The idea is to integrate setting (both time and place) into the rest of the story elements so attention is held and the pace doesn’t suffer. A less elegant alternative is to severely limit setting (and other narration). When I teach, I encourage students to highlight every bit of narration in the first chapter (or first 30 pages) and get rid of anything that isn’t absolutely essential. It makes it better, but integration can be both immersive and fast paced. It’s also very hard to do well.

Mastery of Story Setting 6: Integrate setting into the rest.
Practice: My biggest recommendation is to find an author you love who does this sort of integration and highlight every reference to setting (time and place) in the first 5-10 pages. Really fine writers do this well (which is not to say there aren’t engaging writers who don’t do it at all). The process of discovery can make their lessons real and more accessible. Seen in isolation, the techniques reveal themselves. 

Then, if you dare, try to do it in your own work. Ideally, it becomes a tune that gets stuck in your head, making the rhythms easy to emulate. I recommend writing five fiction pages on a new story, not trying to make an old work match this rhythm. It may be tough at first. Ten tries may still feel inferior to the work of your favorite author. But, once you own this approach, you can make it your own when the story call for it.

I’m done with settings, but I’ll have more fiction techniques to master next time.