Relationships & Partners and Writing Skills Tips. (A Writing Advice Guide Book

Lecture 18: Evoking Setting & Place In Fiction

Even if we hadn't already been told that this is a haunted house, it would be impossible for anybody to read this description and not understand immediately that there is something wrong with this house—that there is something bad waiting inside.

Notice that Hawkes uses the word silence six times in this description.
Although normally the repetition of a word that many times in so short a passage would be anathema to writers, here, it has the effect of making the silence ominous. Note, too, that silence is paired with active verbs falls, deepens, murmur[s] changing it from an absence of sound to an active presence in the house.

Setting To Evoke Character

In addition, setting can be used to tell readers about the characters in a story. For example, a description of a room or a house is often used to tell us something about the person who lives there.

One of the major plotlines in George Eliot's Middlemarch is the ill-advised marriage between Dorothea Brooke, an intense young woman in her early 20s, and Edward Casaubon, a dry and humorless scholar who is 30 years her senior. Early in the book, after their surprise engagement, Dorothea goes to visit Mr. Casaubon's home:

The building, of greenish stone, was in the old English style, not ugly, but small-windowed and melancholy-looking .... In this latter end of autumn ... the house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr. Casaubon, when he presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown into relief by that background. ( passage found on pages 73-74 in book mentioned up above. —Lumna10)

Nearly everything that Eliot says about the house that it is "not ugly, but small-windowed and melancholy" and that it has an air of "autumnal decline" could also be said about Casaubon himself. The last clause of the passage is one of the great backhanded insults in English literature: the fact that there is nothing about Casaubon himself that could be
"thrown into relief' by his joyless home.
—James Hynes

Setting To Evoke Time & Movement,
(Most people don't think of setting as needing movement that's job of writing scene by scene not the general setting of a story. —Lumna10.)
Seting can also be used to evoke the passage of time and the movement of characters through a landscape. Tolkien is especially skillful at evoking the geography of Middle Earth-in part, simply because he delights in evoking the natural world but also because these passages literally slow the narrative down, which has the effect of evoking the slow passage of the characters, moving on foot through a vast and often spectacular landscape.

A passage in The Two Towers in which
Frodo and Sam pass through the land of Ithilien evokes both the vastness of the landscape through which they are moving and their own sense of wonder at it. The fact that the reader is required to slow down during this passage and to literally stop and smell the flowers also evokes the slowness of their journey.

Another example: In a chase scene, Rosemary Sutcliff skillfully evokes both motion and the landscape of the Scottish highlands with such phrases as "skirting a reed-fringed upland pool" and "swerving from a patch of bog."

Among other techniques, the passage effectively shifts focus from the long distance to the close-up: We first see the mountains as "a long curve that was lost in the distance," but in the next sentence, we get particular types of trees "fir and cedar and cypress." Finally, we see individual harbingers of spring: fronds piercing moss, green-fingered larches, and flowers opening in the turf.

Of course, setting doesn't have to slow down the narrative; it can also evoke speed and danger. In a chase scene from Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth, we delight in the vivid evocation of the landscape in its own right-luminous green bogs, bronze tides of dying heather-but we also note that Sutcliff skillfully interweaves flashes of landscape description with breathless action.

A Continuum of Setting

The many ways in which setting can be evoked fall between two ends of a continuum: At one end, setting is evoked by stopping the narrative in its tracks and describing a place or a time period. At the other end, setting is evoked only minimally.

In general-though not always—the first method is used in narratives similar to Bleak House or Troubles, where the setting is important to the story, while at the other extreme, when the setting isn't that important, writers don't bother with it as much.

In between, there are many variations, including evoking setting as you go, inserting a few telling details along the way without stopping the action. As always, most novels and short stories fall somewhere in between, combining the various methods.

In narratives that include standalone descriptions of setting, how the writer uses them depends on the point of view of the novel, whether it's the omniscient third person, limited third person, or first person.
The omniscient third person is almost cinematic. The opening of Bleak House, for example, is like a crane shot in a movie, starting high up-"smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle"- and slowly descending to street level-"dogs, undistinguishable in mire." This passage gives the mind's eye something to look at, and it introduces a central metaphor for the plot.

When a standalone description of setting is told from the limited third-person or first-person point of view, it also evokes character. How the character sees the setting-what details he or she picks out as important-tells us something about the person through whose eyes we, the readers, are seeing them.

When setting is described from the first-person point of view, it can become even more multilayered. For example, setting is important to the novels of Raymond Chandler, but it's also important that the setting is seen through the eyes and mind of Chandler's protagonist, the private detective Philip Marlowe. Marlowe's descriptions tell us a great deal about himself.

Writers who only scarcely evoke setting often use a kind of shorthand, relying on the fact that certain places, street names, or even brand names are familiar to the reader and will be evocative of time and place. The crime thrillers of George Pelecanos, for example, are specifically set in Washington, DC, and Pelecanos skillfully mixes real street and place names in Washington with brief bits of description.

Whether you choose to lavish your reader with a richly detailed description or simply say that your detective walked into a Starbucks, remember that in most cases, how you use setting depends on the overall purpose of your narrative. Scene by scene, you want to lavish detailed descriptions on settings that recur or are especially important, but you need only a line or two to evoke settings that don't matter quite as much or that appear only once.

Writing Exercise Prompt 1.
Try describing the same setting from the point of view of two different characters who want different things. For example, consider Sarah and Brad, the unhappily married couple in our narrative from the first lecture. As you may recall, they're at a baseball game; try to describe the ballpark from Sarah's point of view, bearing in mind that she's about to ask for a divorce, and then from Brad's, bearing in mind that he has no idea what she's about to ask him.

Writing Exercise Prompt 2.
You might also explore the importance of a particular setting to a narrative by setting a scene from a famous novel or story in a radically different place or time from the original version. Can you rewrite a scene from, say, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that is set someplace other than the Mississippi? Could one of the scenes from The Great Gatsby take place at any other place or time than Long Island in the Jazz Age?
—James Hynes.
(Again lots of stuff nobody popular now actually deals with. Setting is very capable of taking the backseat in a story's pages it blends in so much sometimes it gets altogether ignored, Skylights. Enjoy reading a very disorganized professional professor's handiwork. I still can't believe James Hynes' own gumption to let this book publish with how messy it still is. —Lumna10.)