To continue trying to explain my writing process, I’m going to write about setting. First, to kind of kick it off, I’m going to talk about a video game I watched my partner play.
At the beginning of The Unfinished Swan the screen is completely white. You’re given no direction in the game. The directional pad seemingly does nothing. It’s not until you find that you can throw ink balloons with one of the buttons that your surroundings start to be revealed, allowing you to traverse the game world. So why am I talking about this?
This just might be my experience in theatre talking, but I believe that setting is second in importance to a story only to character. It’s the defined space that characters live in that the story happens.
The definition of that space includes the rules of the world. In real world stories like what I write most of the time, this includes rules that are taken for granted because we all live in a defined space called planet earth, with rules like gravity and the rest of physics, of time passing, sunrises and -sets, of weather.
However, if you’re creating your own world, you also need to create your own rules. Some rules, like gravity, you may not invest a lot time in. But for example, how ghosts and the afterlife worked were important setting details in Clean Freak which I spent a lot of time thinking about and notebook pages defining.
Then, there are the five senses. Your character can experience the world they are in, but they aren’t the only vehicle for it. I think one of the ways that some writers describe their settings that gets tiresome for me is something like the following:
“Sean looked up and saw the blue sky arcing overhead, with white, wispy clouds smattered across it. Looking back down to earth, he saw that zombies had started clawing their way up out of the earth.”
It should be obvious, but a writing instructor once said to us, “The camera isn’t shown in a movie, so why are you narrating a character serving as the camera to capture the setting?” As a sidenote, this is part of the reason why I generally don’t care for first person novels: the “I” character is generally the only vehicle for telling the story, including describing the setting, so you get my aforementioned example.
In a script, the setting is written as stage direction at the start of the scene, so that’s why, when I describe the setting, I write it as close to the beginning of the scene as possible. Not that I infodump everything at the beginning. More like, I sketch in the limits of the space at the beginning, and then, as the character(s) progress through the scene, more of the setting is revealed as they interact with it.
Setting description also serves as fantastic transitions between scenes. Nothing says “new scene” quite like describing a new place. This should also work both ways. A lot of Clean Freak took place in Clarence’s apartment, which had several rooms. As he’s moving between them, their description serves as the transition, rather than needing to rely on the repetitious construction of “he went.”
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Again, this isn’t the end all, be all of setting, but just some things I think about as I write my stories. What do you think makes a good setting?
The Chimerical Dark 