Sucker Literary Blog Tour! Guest Post from Josh Prokopy: On Setting
One of the great things about fiction set in another place or culture is that it gives you the chance to dive into that culture through the medium of story, to learn something about an unfamiliar place and gain a new perspective on the world.
Sucker Literary, March 2013.
I spent two and a half years living in Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia, and that experience has informed much of my writing. My story for Sucker centered on an exchange student named Marcus. I had a blast writing that story and describing his host family’s cinderblock outhouse and cramped little shop, the battered pick-up truck that served as a school bus, and the thick red mud of the rainy season. It took me back to my own days in Thailand, and gave me the chance to bring a small slice of that world to life for my readers.
But bringing a strange and exotic setting to life takes work. You can’t just say that your main character sidled up the counter at a McDonald’s and expect everyone know what you mean. You’ve got to describe the tile floor, the uniforms, the pictures of Ronald McDonald, and the smell of greasy burgers. And you’ve got to do it with confidence and clarity. Because if you don’t believe what you’re describing, no one else will either.
That holds true whether the setting is a real place or one that comes straight out of your imagination, but when it’s real you have to take things a step further to ensure that the image you’re creating is not only believable, but accurate. So back to our example of the McDonald’s. Pretend for a moment you’ve never set foot inside a fast food restaurant before. All you have to go on are second hand reports and pictures off the internet. That might be enough to provide a good visual description, but for a setting to really pop you’ve got to weave in some of the other senses – the noise of the kitchen, the taste and aroma of the fries, or the feel of a hard plastic chair. And that kind of sensory detail can be hard to get off the internet. You have to take what little you can find and combine it with relevant experiences from your own life. Because even if you’ve never been inside a McDonald’s, you’ve probably heard the noise and clatter of a restaurant kitchen, smelled greasy food, or sat on something hard.
I ran into this problem with one of the books I’m working on. It’s an action novel set in the mountains of northern Thailand. My main character, Caleb, travels to a small tribal village where he eats in smoke filled huts, sleeps on a bamboo mat, and sloshes through rice paddies. I’ve done all that, and was able to draw on my own experience to make it ring true.
But Caleb also spends a good chunk of the story out in the woods, on the run from a tribal militia. These were intense scenes, full of action, fear, and desperation. But for some reason they came out feeling flat. Stepping back, I realized that the problem lay in my setting. Unlike the villages and rice paddies, I’d never spent any real time in the forests of northern Thailand. I couldn’t picture it clearly, and my descriptions were vague and lifeless.
I spent hours on the internet – looking at photos on Google, surfing YouTube for trekking videos, checking any number of sites for information on trees, plants, and wildlife. But the few YouTube videos I found weren’t particularly clear on where they’d been taken, and most of the information on plants and trees was in scientific studies filled with Latin names.
Sucker Literary, March 2012.
Still, I managed to piece together enough basic information to know that the forest would be dominated by deciduous trees with few branches or leaves low down on the trunk. There would be vines and woody creepers, and the vegetation on the forest floor would probably include ferns and rhododendrons. It wasn’t a complete picture by any means, but it gave me a reasonably concrete image to latch on to. And with that image I found the confidence to write the following description:
The vegetation grew in a thick tangle of ferns, rhododendrons, and leafy shrubs. Tall trees shot into the air, dripping with desiccated woody vines that crisscrossed the canopy like telephone wires before trailing back down to the ground. Unlike trees back home, their narrow trunks were nearly devoid of branches until, high up near the top, they suddenly mushroomed out in a cloud of long, heavy leaves.
One of the great things about fiction set in another place or culture is that it gives you the chance to dive into that culture through the medium of story, to learn something about an unfamiliar place and gain a new perspective on the world.
I spent two and a half years living in Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia, and that experience has informed much of my writing. My story for Sucker centered on an exchange student named Marcus. I had a blast writing that story and describing his host family’s cinderblock outhouse and cramped little shop, the battered pick-up truck that served as a school bus, and the thick red mud of the rainy season. It took me back to my own days in Thailand, and gave me the chance to bring a small slice of that world to life for my readers.
But bringing a strange and exotic setting to life takes work. You can’t just say that your main character sidled up the counter at a McDonald’s and expect everyone know what you mean. You’ve got to describe the tile floor, the uniforms, the pictures of Ronald McDonald, and the smell of greasy burgers. And you’ve got to do it with confidence and clarity. Because if you don’t believe what you’re describing, no one else will either.
That holds true whether the setting is a real place or one that comes straight out of your imagination, but when it’s real you have to take things a step further to ensure that the image you’re creating is not only believable, but accurate. So back to our example of the McDonald’s. Pretend for a moment you’ve never set foot inside a fast food restaurant before. All you have to go on are second hand reports and pictures off the internet. That might be enough to provide a good visual description, but for a setting to really pop you’ve got to weave in some of the other senses – the noise of the kitchen, the taste and aroma of the fries, or the feel of a hard plastic chair. And that kind of sensory detail can be hard to get off the internet. You have to take what little you can find and combine it with relevant experiences from your own life. Because even if you’ve never been inside a McDonald’s, you’ve probably heard the noise and clatter of a restaurant kitchen, smelled greasy food, or sat on something hard.
I ran into this problem with one of the books I’m working on. It’s an action novel set in the mountains of northern Thailand. My main character, Caleb, travels to a small tribal village where he eats in smoke filled huts, sleeps on a bamboo mat, and sloshes through rice paddies. I’ve done all that, and was able to draw on my own experience to make it ring true.
But Caleb also spends a good chunk of the story out in the woods, on the run from a tribal militia. These were intense scenes, full of action, fear, and desperation. But for some reason they came out feeling flat. Stepping back, I realized that the problem lay in my setting. Unlike the villages and rice paddies, I’d never spent any real time in the forests of northern Thailand. I couldn’t picture it clearly, and my descriptions were vague and lifeless.
I spent hours on the internet – looking at photos on Google, surfing YouTube for trekking videos, checking any number of sites for information on trees, plants, and wildlife. But the few YouTube videos I found weren’t particularly clear on where they’d been taken, and most of the information on plants and trees was in scientific studies filled with Latin names.
Still, I managed to piece together enough basic information to know that the forest would be dominated by deciduous trees with few branches or leaves low down on the trunk. There would be vines and woody creepers, and the vegetation on the forest floor would probably include ferns and rhododendrons. It wasn’t a complete picture by any means, but it gave me a reasonably concrete image to latch on to. And with that image I found the confidence to write the following description:
The vegetation grew in a thick tangle of ferns, rhododendrons, and leafy shrubs. Tall trees shot into the air, dripping with desiccated woody vines that crisscrossed the canopy like telephone wires before trailing back down to the ground. Unlike trees back home, their narrow trunks were nearly devoid of branches until, high up near the top, they suddenly mushroomed out in a cloud of long, heavy leaves.
That’s a crisp visual description, but it wasn’t enough. To make my forest really jump off the page, I had to weave in additional layers of description drawing on some of the other senses. First off was sound. I found a website that played recordings of some of the noises you might hear in a Thai forest, and used it to write descriptions like the following:
Around me the forest was just waking up, and the chirp of crickets had given way to the overlapping trill and warble of a hundred different kinds of birds. Who-wup, who-wup, tup, tup tup, kack. The myriad sounds wrapped around one another, mixing with the crunch of feet on the wet leaves and the echoing cough of a distant deer.
To round out the image I wove in a layer of touch. Since touch isn’t something you can learn about online, I had to look for sensory details I was familiar with – details that would be as true for the forests of northern Thailand as for the Midwestern forests where I go hiking. What I settled on was rain:
Above us, the sky opened up and rain spattered down through the trees. I felt the cool drops on my skin as they dripped from the canopy and puddled on the leaf strewn ground… Then the rain slowed to a soft patter, and from all around came the steady drip drop of water. Beneath the leaves, the rich red dirt had turned to mud, and as my shoulder brushed against the long spiky fronds of a banana tree, a small torrent of trapped water cascaded onto my head.
Visual images, sound, touch, smell, taste – each of them plays an important role in bringing your setting to life. Whether that setting is real or comes straight out of your imagination you’ve got see it and feel it before you can describe it to your readers. That sometimes takes research, but it also requires a willingness to look into your own life, to draw on your own experiences in order to build a rich and believable world for your readers.
Josh Prokopy is a stay-at-home dad and former social worker who’s still fairly new to the writing biz. One of his stories, “The Dream Guide,” appeared in the March/April 2012 issue of Cicada, and another, “Burmese Tears,” won the 2011 Luminis Prize. He runs a website for reviewing YA and Middle Grade action/adventure novels (www.yaactionadventurenovels.com) and is working on two books in that same genre. He lives in Indiana and, when not writing, likes to spend his time reading, watching movies, hanging out with his family, and studying tae-kwon-do.
Josh Prokopy is also the author of “The Exchange Student” in Sucker Literary, Issue #1 –Marcus is fresh off the plane and feels lost and out of place. Everything about life in Thailand is different. He lives in a remote village where he’s forced to go to the bathroom on a squat toilet, eat rice gruel with chilies for breakfast, and travel to school in the back of an old pick-up truck. He can’t understand what anyone is saying, and he’s ready to pass out from the heat. All he wants to do is go home. Then he meets Dao. Her ready friendship calms his swirling heart and enables him to discover that, for all the strange new experiences Thailand has to offer, life there is not nearly so different as he’d first believed.
