Last night I dreamed I was sitting in front of my keyboard again. Turns out I was.
Now that we've talked about characters and voice, it's time to talk about the next basic components of a story: context. Whether your story is taking readers to Manderley or Middle Earth, establishing setting not only gives your characters somewhere to stand, it also gives your readers something to hold onto. Long before they've read enough of your tale to understand either the nature of the central conflict or the depth of the characters, your readers will understand the book by getting their feet on the ground you provide.
Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather streets turned to red slop; grass grew on sidewalks, the courthouse sagged on the square. Somehow it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft tea cakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.
People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy, and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told there was nothing to fear but fear itself.
No matter how far north you are, no matter how cold the winter, you can feel the oven heat and stifling humidity coming from those paragraphs. It's not just setting as place; it's setting as time, setting as sensation, setting as attitude. When Atticus Finch makes his appearance, crossing that square to enter the hunkering old courthouse, you understand what he's up against as much by those live oaks as the people who huddle in their shade.
You often see people talk about "hooks" in writing; about delivering some clever and/or intriguing bit of text that makes the reader hunger to know what comes next. And yeah, it's great if you can find it. But nothing will deflate the power of your text faster than failing to give the reader a sense of place. Tossing your reader into the story with no sense of who, what, when, where is like pitching them into mid-ocean on a coal black night. Since you know who and what are going to take some time to explain, have a little mercy and toss your readers a life preserver of where - when.
Even if your story is set in modern day and in what you think of as the most common location, take the time to sketch some anchoring details. The cracked orange vinyl booths of a truck stop diner where they serve chicken-fried steak every night, that tall wire-legged stool pulled up to the gray marble counter at the old south side deli, the way that salt stains a winter parking lot, the repetitive banging of a rope slapping against a flagpole -- the familiarity of these elements doesn't mean they should be treated with contempt. It turns them into treasures.
Those writing stories set in more exotic settings, especially those that never actually existed, have a tougher job. You can't deliver "fear but fear itself" and get that instant click of America, depression era, with all the associations that brings. You're not just painting a scene, you're world building. Like it or not, you have to build your world one castle, starship, and bawdy tavern at a time. Of course, for good or bad readers will bring their own ideas about Europe in the Middle Age or orbital stations from 2001, but if you want to build a world that holds up for 100k words, get out the saw and hammer. Skimp, and your world comes off as Tolkien Lite (less filling, more orcs). Worse, your world can come off as inconsistent, and that, Buddro, is death.
Sure, your setting may include starships that violate relativity or fairies that violate every scientific law this side of Pliny the Elder. Do a halfway decent job, and readers will accept that, and really you don't have to go halfway because they'll rush to meet you. However, don’t think for a minute that this excuses you from making the world realistic and consistent. In fact, since you’re already asking the reader to buy into something they know from the get go is fantastic, your bar for keeping everything straight and obeying the rules you lay down is higher, not lower.
Readers love fantastic, but they will rarely accept books where the context is inconsistent. It can be done, for example in books of magical realism that lean toward the literary side and are purposely playing with this idea. Mostly it just represents sloppy work.
Let me show you some work that’s not sloppy.
The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.
The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what might have been parsecs in all directions. White; blinding; waterless; without feature save for the faintly cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil grass which brought sweet-dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the crust of alkali had been a highway and coaches had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.
That there, ladies and gentlemen, is one hell of an opening. The first sentence gives you the main character, the primary villain, and the conflict of the novel. The next paragraph sets the place down with a mixture of concision and poetry. These two paragraphs define the book. The rest of the book delivers on that promise. That’s all you can wish for in a novel.
If you’ve never read it, this is the opening to Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. If you have read it, you might notice that this isn’t the text as it currently stands. King came back after completing the first few books of the long series and revised this first volume, which was mostly written while King was still in college. However, I much prefer the original take. Much prefer. For example, the use of “parsecs” in the second sentence gives you a hint of exactly what you’re about to encounter, a mash-up of elements from westerns, fantasy, and science fiction all pulled tightly together in one dry rawhide string. The revised version changes this same line to “eternity,” and in doing so saps a good deal of the paragraph’s energy.
And that’s a lesson for us all. Even Stephen King sometimes revisits a paragraph too many times. So don’t be guilty of that tonight. Stop looking at the words you’ve already written. Go make new ones.
Go make a world.
This week my trio of characters have arrived, by separate routes, at a little religious compound located north of the highway running west from Durango, Colorado toward Mesa Verde. Now that these weary travelers have had a chance to change their clothes and grab a bite, they're starting to get a picture of just who has brought them together at this place shoved up against the mountains, and just what it is they're about to attempt.
And we finally learn what Dwayne Terry was up to back there in the prologue that caused this fit of activity.
So far, only two of my characters have actually met each other, and I'm getting a bit worried about the number of names and ideas being crammed into a small space. We've watched a film of an idea put forward in 1962 by Bell Aerosystems engineer John M. Cord and pyschologist Leonard Seale. We've looked at paperwork on the 1990 version of "Mars Direct" from Robert Zubrin and David Baker... but we haven't quite spilled the beans on where we're going or how we're planning to get there.
That's coming up soon, and hopefully next week I'll drop in an extended preview that captures all the jaw-dropping insanity behind the core conflict of this book.