Elizabeth George: Setting in Action

In Write Away, Elizabeth George discusses how she uses setting in her fiction.

SETTING

For George, the setting is like a living thing. It can tell a lot about a character, and it can evoke an emotional reaction in the reader. The purpose of setting includes creating atmosphere and mood. It can also contrast with what’s going on in the scene, such as when something bad happens in a peaceful setting. The writer should treat the landscape with the same importance as she treats the character.

ON LOCATION

George likes to write about places she knows, often going to where a story will take place. She notes everything from the flora and fauna to the buildings to the type of sky. She takes photos as well. However, if she needs to, she creates a setting, usually an amalgamation of different places she already knows. She wants the setting to be as real as possible for the reader. The greater reality it has for the writer, the greater reality it will have for the reader.

CHARACTER’S ENVIRONMENT

There’s also the setting that’s the environment the character inhabits—his home, bedroom, automobile, and so forth. These things reveal a lot about a character without the need for extensive explanation.

LANDSCAPE

OUTER LANDSCAPE

Each character has an outer landscape—his looks, skin, hair, eyes, posture, voice, the clothes he wears, and so forth.

INNER LANDSCAPE

Each character has an inner landscape—his thoughts, beliefs, objectives, interior monologue, and so on.

CONCRETE DETAILS

Effective settings require concrete details. Details are an excellent way of showing what a setting is like.

DESCRIPTION IN MOTION

Perhaps the most effective kind of description is that which blends in with the narrative without interrupting the flow of the story.

 

Elizabeth George wants her fiction to be as real for the reader as possible. The setting in all its forms, described in telling details, helps achieve that goal. She wants to own her setting and, if she does own it, it helps the reader to own it, too.

 

How much importance does setting have in your fiction?

How do you approach describing setting in your writing?

How much effort do you put into using concrete details in your setting?

How much effort do you put into using details to reveal facts about a character?

Lawrence Durrell: Travel Writer Extraordinaire

I've been reading from The Lawrence Durrell Travel Reader, edited by Clint Willis. The book contains selections from several of Durrell's travel books. Durrell lived quite a while in the Greek islands just before and long after World War II. And he wrote about his experiences.

Besides being interesting stories in their own right, it's Durrell's power of description that amazes. He is one hell of a writer. I'm sharing with you a few of his magnificent descriptions. This is writing at its best.

This first quote is perhaps Durrell's philosophy of travel writing.

"It is here [in the landscape of a place] that the travel-writer stakes his claim, for writers each seem to have a personal landscape of the heart which beckons them."

The author is in a ship in a storm:

"Throttled down as far as she would go the HDML skidded along the surface of the sea with the waves breaking over her in a series of stabbing white concussions. We braced our feet firmly and listened to the dull whacking of the hull against the water, and the dismal sound of crockery being smashed in the galley. From this time forward we lived on all-fours, crouching like apes whenever we wished to move about the ship."

Then,

"The dawn came up as thick as glue; westward the sky had taken on the colour of oiled steel. The storm had passed over us, leaving behind it only a heavy sea propped up in an endless succession of watery slabs."

Here is a description of Kalymnos:

"Never has one seen anything like it--the harbour revolving slowly round one as one comes in. Plane after stiff cubistic plane of pure colour. The mind runs up and down the web of vocabulary looking for a word which will do justice to it. In vain."

Here is a description of Leros:

"The harbour is choked with sunk craft, and the little town has been very badly bombed. A miasmic gloom hangs over everything. God help those born here, one mutters, those who live here, and those who come here to die."

And Leros again:

"The evening comes down, smudged with rain, from a sky of dirty wool. We stand at the great bay window and watch the skirls and eddies roar into the landlocked harbour and dance like maniacs in the riggings of the caieques."

Finally, perhaps ironically, he writes about his years in Corcyra:

"How can these few hastily written words ever recreate more than a fraction of it?"

Yet that's what travel writers do, try to express the totality of their experience in a few words. Durrell comes close to doing so.

Killing Time Productively

"Killing time" is an awful waste, especially for those of us who are passionate about our art, in my case, writing. The last thing I want to do is waste time. Time is a precious commodity (Is it a commodity? It certainly can't be bought and sold. It can't be saved up or stored for the future; oh, my, if we could do that.... I suppose Einstein might have something to say about that, but he's not here. At least, I can't stretch or contract time. It is a constant; it's always in the background, and sometimes in the foreground, of my life).

How to best use time? Yet, I can't work every second of every day. I must give myself to other activities at least some of the time--actually, most of the time. Overall, I give very little time to actually writing. And the past couple of years, it's been a struggle to get any writing done. Sometimes, it's a battle within myself as well as a battle with the "elements of life."

Yesterday I was at my opthamologist's office and had to kill some time. I didn't know how long I'd be waiting for my appointment, but it seemed to be taking awhile. I wished I had brought my notebook, or a novel, or some of my manuscript with me to work on while I waited, but I hadn't. I did have a pen with me, but no paper. I wanted to do something. Then I saw a painting on the wall, one of a European town I think. I got the bright idea of describing the picture I saw in words. I picked up a medical leaflet like you find in doctors' offices and wrote on it.

So here is what I came up with:

I walked down the brown cobbled street that glistened after the 3 p.m. rain shower. The awnings along the storefronts cast downward shadows that cut the glare. The tall narrow buildings overlooked the river with shining windows decorated with brown and yellow curtains. The alleyways between the buildings were blocked by whitewashed brick walls with locked wooden doors. I wondered what kinds of people lived behind those closed doors, occupied the narrow buildings. What did they see when they looked out the windows at the street and river below? Did they see what I saw? Did they see the crisp quaintness of their little town, or had that faded from view and now all they saw was a familiar sameness that didn't register--that passed through their minds like wind through a window?

The one thing I learned from this excercise was that I couldn't just describe what I saw. I had to interpret it. I had to give it meaning, or see the meaning within it, but the meaning I saw was what it meant to me.

Was this a useful way to kill time? I think so. I surprised myself by seeing the beauty right before my eyes.

Descriptions from "The Man With the Golden Gun" by Ian Fleming

In my quest to see more of Ian Fleming's work, I read his novel The Man With The Golden Gun. Besides being filled with a lot of witicisms, the book was a fairly interesting read. There were a few coincidences to move things along. The Bond of this book isn't much like the bond of the movies. This Bond has feelings and fears and the book is a book, not a rewrite of a movie script.

Here are a few of the more remarkable descriptions in the book that I liked.

The prairie fire of the sunset raged briefly in the west and the molten sea cooled off into moonlit gun-metal.

Instead of the severe shirt and skirt of the days at Headquarters, she was wearing a single string of pearls and a one-piece short-skirted frock in the colour of a pink gin with a lot of bitters in it--the orangey-pink of the inside of a conch shell.

Two birds fly into a cafe.
They strutted up and down imperiously, eyeing Bond without fear from bold, golden eyes and went through a piercing repertoire of tinny whistles and trills, some of which required them to ruffle themselves up to almost twice their normal size.

Scaramanga shoots the birds:
The explosions from the Colt .45 were deafening. The two birds disintegrated against the violet back-drop of the dusk, the scraps of feather and pink flesh blasting out of the yellow light of the cafe into the limbo of the deserted street like shrapnel.

Bond is wounded and scrambling through a mangrove swamp.
Bond dropped to one knee, his senses questing like the antennae of an insect.

I hope you find these quots as interesting as I do. What do you think? Is this better than average writing? Do you think Fleming should be considered a master storyteller?

"Write Like the Masters" by William Cane (4) Ian Fleming

Cane chose Ian Fleming as a master writer for a variety of reasons. The main reason I like Fleming is for his use of details. Besides creating suspense and excitement, Fleming uses "sumptuous details." To see for myself, I read Fleming's short story "Octopussy." (Don't you wish you could come up with titles like that? I wish I could.) Of course, it's a James Bond story--and Bond is one of my favorite characters from the movies, and maybe now from literature--but the story has little to do with James Bond. He's a minor character in the story.

Even though it's a short story, "Octopussy" is full of Fleming's attention to details. Some of his detailed descriptions are fairly long; e.g., he uses about 200 words to describe the deadly scorpion fish (a major player in the story). Fleming mentions that scorpion fish are the source of "the rascasse that is the foundation of bouillabaisse." When Smythe (the main character) eats some sausage in the mountains, Fleming writes "Oberhauser's (another character in the story) sausage was a real mountaineer's meal--tough, well-fatted and strongly garlicked."

Fleming's use of details isn't limited to food-related subjects. When Smythe looks at the case containing gold stolen from Germany during WWII, Fleming writes "There were the same markings on each--the swastika in a circle below an eagle, and the date, 1943--the mint marks of the Reichsbank."

When Smythe and Oberhauser reach their destination in the mountains, Fleming writes "Directly above them, perhaps a hundred feet up under the lee of the shoulder, were the weather-beaten boards of the hut." What struck me about the sentence was 'under the lee of the shoulder' and 'weather-beaten boards,' two wonderful details I would have not thought of.

The last description I'll mention that sturck me as something I would have missed is when, after Smythe shoots a man in the mountains, Fleming writes "The deep boom of the two shots that had been batting to and fro amoung the mountains died away." I thought the double-entrendre on 'died' was clever.

One thing Cane doesn't mention that I found interesting is Fleming's use of character names. Of course, we all know James Bond. But the names of the other characters in this story are interesting as well: Dexter Smythe, Hannes Oberhauser, and the Foo brothers.

What does it mean to me as a writer? It makes me want to try harder with details. It means more research and greater visualization of scenes and finding the words that make it the best description I can make it. And maybe a greater consideration of characters' names.

What do you think of these examples of description from "Octopussy"? Do they strike you as better than average? Also, do you find the characters' names more interesting than the usual?

Write Like the Masters, by William Cane (2)

After reading Write Like the Masters, by William Cane, I selected the writers whom I felt most related to my own way of writing: Honore de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, William Somerset Maugham, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Margarate Mitchell, Ian Fleming, and Philip K. Dick. Cane nicely explains each writer's major stylistic elements, his or her specialness. There were many other authors he discusses, so there is a lot that I did not care for for one reason or another, though someday they might appeal to me.

As an aid to seeing the big picture, I created a mind map of my favorite authors' techniques.

I can also summarize in a paragraph, especially without mentioning the particular author the technique came from, what I believe the mind map says:

As writers of fiction, we should strive for strong characters (especially conflicting characters, perhaps based on architypes) who are faced with life-defining, catastrophic events in which strong emotions (positive and negative) are highlighted (tagged) through the conflict, making the reader laugh, cry, and wait for resolution to these conflicts, all of which contain some elements of mystery, surprising the reader, and in which the character changes through an epiphany (ah-ha moment) that is foreshadowed in the fast/slow, rising/falling pace of the action, using sumptuous or strong details of description with a big background (Civil War, WW II, the Great Depression, etc.) and a strong element of romance (with obstacles to that romance) that flows in a pattern of the characters preparing for romance, participating in banter (romantic play) that is followed by the first kiss, preferrably told through the third person limited point of view of the protagonist.

Did I get it all in? Obviously, this is not a blueprint for writing. It is an aid to writing. I doubt that I or anyone else would have all these elements in the same novel, though I'm sure it's possible. But when you're thinking about and writing your story, these are elements that may enter into the story, that may increase your ideas and strengthen your story.