Fun with Fiction: Setting the Scene

It's week three of our little fiction experiment, and I have nothing quite yet to show you. I'm working on my scene, though, and I hope to put it up tomorrow. But I do have a new prompt here for anyone who's interested. (If you haven't been playing along, past posts have explored creating memorable characters and writing scenes with conflict. If you have written a scene around one of your characters in the past week, leave a link in the comments.)

As with characters, setting descriptions can be blah or pow! The key thing to keep in mind is that places -- just like people -- are not understood simply by how they look. It's easy to understand that a person has a complex interior, and that a good character description will capture not just appearances but also personality and traits that make an individual. Places, though this may seem less obvious, are the same way. Sure, a postcard photo captures what a place looks like, and may even make you want to go there -- but it rarely can capture the essence of a place.

What makes a particular place special? In part, it has to do with details about the place, but largely, it has to do with how people perceive it. Is it a place people eagerly come to, or one they dread? Is it a place that is uplifting, oppressive, inspiring, intimidating, mundane? Why? Some of that may be inherent, but some also has to do with perspective: one person's exhilarating may be another's intimidating.

Here is the famous opening to Charles Dickens's Bleak House, with its fabulous description of London at street level in the 1850s.

Chapter 1 — In Chancery
LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

I like this description so much in part because the tortured sentences of the first paragraph read at the same slow agonizing pace as one would have trudging through the mud of these streets. I also love that he uses sentence fragments so effectively. There is not a single complete sentence in these two paragraphs; instead, each fragment captures one blip of an image, a glimpse one might catch of a person or a thing before the fog shuts it out from view again. There is a sense here that one is traveling around the murky city, isolated from the rest of humanity by the difficulty of interminable mud and the sight-dimming fog. And the repetition of the word "fog" brilliantly amplifies that by punctuating every image and reminding us of its constant presence in the city.

Ultimately in the novel, this description becomes a metaphor for Dickens's discussion of the British court system, which is also mired in mud and clouded with fog. But for now, we get a vivid description of the physically depressing state of London and the sense of trudging through mire that sets the tone for the entire novel. (No, the book doesn't get much more cheerful. It is, after all, called Bleak House.)

So, how does a writer create a great scene description like this? First by picking a spot and then by doing some hard thinking about what the most salient characteristics of the spot are. You'll notice, for example, that Dickens has left architectural detail completely out of his description, in favor of focusing on how people move through the streets.

So here's the next writing prompt, if you're interested:

Where is your story happening? Choose at least one location (could be a city, a building, a public place, a house, you name it) that will be integral to your story. Make a list of ten things that are central to understanding that place. Some ideas:

weather, plants, topography
smells
things hanging on the walls
architecture
colors
textures
who else is there?
why are those other people there?
mood
patterns of speech
food
what's missing from the scene, causing a gap?
history
hopes for the future

Now, write a paragraph or two describing the place, working in at least two or three of these details, and perhaps elaborating on them. You don't have to share the whole list along with your place description (you might want to preserve some of your details to add richness throughout the story).

Also keep in mind that if you are setting your story in a foreign place (whether it's a spot you've never been or a time before you are born), a little research goes a long way towards providing authenticity. Use Google images to look for photos of the place. Use newspaper archives to find out what was in the news there/then. And so on.

Come back next Monday, and leave a link to your post, so we can all travel around with you.

Happy Writing!

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