Half the fun of stories is getting immersed in them. But when we say we are “lost in a story,” it doesn’t mean we are disoriented. In fact, living in a well-crafted story makes the imagined world the only reality we know (for a time).
The catch is, unlike the real world, story worlds can fall to pieces in a moment. It’s up to writers to make them vivid, consistent, and memorable. This is done with descriptions, cues, and suggested space for our imaginations. Without them, we truly are lost… and thrown out of the story world.
Let’s look at these in terms of locations, characters, situations, and time.
Locations - Sometimes places are never built (scenes the seem to take place in a white, windowless room), and sometimes they are too busy (providing so many details they become confusing. Most good locations begin with selective description. This is obviously true for fantasies. Where anything is possible, descriptions provide a window into newly discovered places. But even a familiar place, a place we’ve seen a hundred times in movies, pictures, and TV commercials like the Eiffel Tower, deserve to be presented in a complete enough way. There are many ways to do this. Heinlein famously suggested a new world with the words, “the door dilated.” But, if the muse doesn’t strike, I suggest following Max Adams’s advice (in her wonderful course on Visual Writing), presenting (in this order) space, light, and texture.
Ideally, locations are as much a part of the story as the characters. They reflect mood. They create challenges. They hint at social structure and hierarchy. Grey Gardens would be diminished without the mansion’s decay and the raccoons in the walls.
I have a fondness for locations that change in important ways each time they come up. Shown in different seasons or undergoing renovation, missing an important object. I love it when they are dynamic, filled with mischievous cats (or raccoons) or ringing phones or lights that flicker. One of my favorite story locations in the one in His Girl Friday. It supports choreographed chaos that highlights the story’s theme.
Characters - The classic way to help keep characters straight is through tics and other identifiers. Dickens’s Uriah Heep (who is so ‘umble) wrings his hands. Potter, the villain in It’s a Wonderful Life, is pushed around in his wheelchair. All of the Marx Brothers (well, at least Groucho, Chico, Harpo) have signature clothes, ways of speaking (or not, in Harpo’s case) and musical specialties.
Metaphors work, too. Both Potter and Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, are described as spiders. Juliet is the sun. And, as Cole Porter (an American treasure) said,
You're the top! You're the Colosseum,
You're the top! You're the Louvre Museum,
You're a melody from a symphony by Strauss,
You're a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet,
You're Mickey Mouse.
For me, dialogue is the great and memorable tell for characters. While every story has functional lines, I read every line a character has in isolation to make sure it sounds like them and it’s something they’d say. Character, education, perspective, and voice should be there often enough so that each would describe, say the Eiffel Tower, in ways so distinctive, you could tell characters apart. I interview my characters so I know them so well, readers will recognize them right away.
As with locations, descriptions play a part. Choosing one physical feature to obsess over in different ways is better than cataloging. And I use a hint someone gave me when I lamented that I could not remember what my late aunt looked like. I could tell stories about her, but I could not picture her. He said, imagine her in motion. So I thought of her planting zinnias and her face appeared immediately. I try to give readers at least one image in motion to hang onto.
Situations - This may feel too obvious to a writer. How can readers forget that Izzie has a secret and all hell will break loose if it’s revealed? But it’s your job to remind them so they don’t forget. Characters reacting emotionally to a situation can help. I love to cook, but I’ll notice and sympathize with a character who grouses about being sent into the kitchen. When the spaghetti escapes the colander and ends up on the floor, I’ll be appalled. If the character comes back with a bandage because the knife slipped, I’ll remember. If, later on, the character is dragooned into creating a dinner for his boss, that will resonate.
I notice. I react. Characters react. Stakes are increased. And the situation becomes a compass for the story.
Time - I just read a story where the ages of characters, the time invested in their enterprise, and diminishing fortunes were all critical. It also had flashbacks, and I got totally disoriented about when things were happening. How long after? How long before?
I had a similar lapse myself. Pitching a script, I didn’t get the year (1860s, not 1960s) across, and the producer was disoriented. So much so, that he got distracted and missed a lot of the story.
People need markers for time. Year. Season. Morning. Evening. Once upon a time. Duration matters. Six days in prison or six weeks? When someone showed me a story about a man who’s main lament about incarceration was missing the cherry blossoms, character, empathy, and the passage of time were achieved in a single line.
Whether you are orienting readers to locations, characters, situations, or time you can suggest, using indirect elements, like the cherry blossoms, to make a marker memorable. You can have them reflect the mood or the tone. You can use contrasts, whether it’s a bull in a china shop or wealth and poverty or differences in ages or odd couples (Oscar & Felix, Mutt & Jeff, Laurel & Hardy).
A warning: Once you have readers oriented, they hang onto bits you’ve offered with both hands. They embed themselves deeply into the narrative as each is reinforced. Which means, if you slip up and put into something that doesn’t fit the story world they’ve accepted, it will toss them out as surely as if they had missed information. Anything that could be inconsistent needs to be fixed. Your protagonist cannot show up with green eyes after we know they are cornflower blue.
If you can do more than orient, that’s the way to go. Link markers with something meaningful. Use them to remind readers. Show what has changed. Plant information that’s critical.
And when it’s all done, see how it fits together to reinforce theme, set the tone, provide unity, and, most of all, maintain clarity.
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