Three Roles of Setting in a Novel
10 ESSENTIALS OF A DYNAMITE STORY
#2 SETTING
Why is setting so important in a novel?
Because it defines your characters.
Or exemplifies your characters.
Sometimes, actually becomes a character.
Setting both affects characters and is the effect of characters. (Yup, I know the difference between affect and effect. But lie/lay/lain … not so much. That’s why nobody ever goes to bed in my novels. Now’s not the place for a grammar lesson, though, so we’ll just blow by that and steer right into an example.)
I once ran a newspaper in a county that had five elementary schools and for a particular story, I visited the principals of all of them on one day.
In the first school, the principal’s office featured walls in bold, primary colors bedecked with “sweet art”—cherubic children offering apples to equally cherubic teachers, cuddly puppies, adorable kittens and mottos in cross-stitch. If you can read this, thank a teacher. Teachers water little acorns that grow into big oak trees. To find a seat, it was necessary to negotiate a path through a forest of hangle-dangle mobiles draped from the ceiling—butterflies, hummingbirds, bees—and toy fighter planes. (That was a disconnect.) Legions of Precious Moments figurines battled for prime real estate on the desktop.
Contrast that with the second principal’s office. Neat. Tidy. Orderly. Shelves with books arranged in alphabetical order by author’s last name.
Desk bare except for a Shafer pen-and-pencil set still in the box, a telephone, and In/Out trays—both empty. Behind her desk was a single black-and-white Ansel Adams’ picture. Otherwise, the walls were unadorned, painted the gray of tarnished silver.
Another principal actually had a deer’s head on one wall—a doe that bore, in my opinion, an uncanny resemblance to Bambi’s mother. One’s office was awash in a sea of kid art—Thanksgiving turkeys made out of kids’ handprints, orange construction-paper jack-o-lanterns, and Santa Claus faces made from the lids of peanut butter jars, cotton balls and red felt. The final office struck me as more befitting an absent-minded professor than an elementary school principal. A desk piled high with papers, books strewn all over the chairs and floor. I stood for the interview because the only available seat was a taken by a cookie sheet on which either the Alamo or the Taj Mahal had been constructed out of sugar cubes.
Obvious principle (not principal) here: people create the environments they live in. Our offices and homes and work spaces make statements about who we are.
The setting of your novel should tell the reader something about the character of your character.
Or perhaps the setting shapes the character of your character.
Consider this description from Black Sunshine.
As the empty coal truck bumped farther into the paint-splattered mountains, each twist and turn opened up a view more hauntingly familiar than the last.
They passed Pine Mountain Taxidermy Shop—“You rack it, we’ll pack it.” The farm-house/office of Lester Tungate’s Used Cars flew past the truck window. Five vehicles, half a dozen bird baths and a flock of concrete ducks sat in the front yard there awaiting adoption. A hand-painted sign nailed to a nearby fence post offered HAND-PAINTED SIGNS for sale. The Convenience Store just down the road promoted Kentucky lottery tickets—“Somebody’s got to win; might as well be you!”—as well as the Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurant in Hazard—“Eat supper with the Colonel tonight.”
The sign out front of the Four Square Full Gospel Pentecostal—pronounced Penny-costal—Church proclaimed: “You not believing in hell don’t put the fire out!”
Trailer houses, alone or in small herds, were affixed to the mountainsides with round, white stick-pins. Will had heard they’d declared the satellite dish the official flower of West Virginia and it was plain the seeds had blown across the state line.
The sides of the valley rose so sharply on either side in some places there was room only for the creek, the road, the railroad tracks and the shaft of sunlight that shown down between the ridges.
Five hours of sun.
Will had grown to manhood in more shadow than light, in a hollow so deep the mountains only granted it direct sunlight five hours a day.
The setting so shaped the characters in this novel that the story could not have taken place anywhere else on the planet.
And finally, sometimes the setting actually becomes a character in your novel. No detailed example is necessary here. Consider the sea in The Old Man and The Sea or The Life of Pi, the island in Swiss Family Robinson, or the fog in Stephen King’s 1980 novella The Mist.
Does setting play an important role in your novels? How? Or can you think of novels where setting is an especially telling element? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.
Next week, we’ll talk about hats, white ones, black ones and shades of gray.
