The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Setting

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Setting

I remember a graduate class where the professor seemed pretty much stuck on the idea that character and plot were one in the same. We talked about it for seven thousand hours, going over seven thousand lines of Henry James whereby that professor proved, undeniably, that Henry James could make both plot and character equally dull and therefore indistinguishable from one another.

I'm really sorry, but I can't stand Henry James.

I'm not really sure why I took so much American Lit in grad school since that seems to be all we did. I actually do think there's a big difference between plot and character. What interested me way more, and what we almost never talked about, was the importance of setting.

Someone I read in grad school, when I was supposed to be reading Henry, was Eudora Welty. I saw her name on a bookstore shelf and I loved it.

Go ahead, say it: Eudora Welty.

It sounds like a children's book protagonist who is orphaned then left a fortune.I loved her name so much that I opened the book and saw it was about writing so I bought it. And she said this about setting:

"Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?..."

When I sit down to write, I see a person, then I see where that person is standing or sitting or looking out a window. I have absolutely no sense of that person until I see where they are physically. It kind of fills in: rainy, city, Saturday afternoon, boy on bus, looking out sooty window. That kind of thinking. I put the character in the setting, then their personality sort of emerges.

I think I'd like to go back to graduate school now, as the teacher this time, and talk for a really long time about how setting is really a character in the story, right along with the characters who talk and interact and change or remain static.

I always wonder how other writers start their stories. I definitely think place before person. If someone said, "Quick! Write about a wedding!" I wouldn't think about the couple. I would think about where: if it was the Presbyterian chapel in Swedenboro, Minnesota (if there is such a place) it would be an entirely different couple than the couple waiting on the steps of the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. The Minnesota couple would have begun saving for their first home and decided to use only green cleaning methods; the Las Vegas couple might be able to use the same public restroom.

I think everyone who writes works from a different circuit board. I'm just wondering what comes first for writers out there: the character or the place?

11 comments:

Glynis Peters said...: For NaNo I had a Victorian farm, a pregnant woman and a field in my mind. The pregnant woman was from a story I tried in first person, and never got past one paragraph.

My Ripper, My Love novel, the twist in the story came first. The girl came second and the setting was already there. :)

For my children's book, I was eating a chewy bar. The name Chewy Chester popped into my head, and a little boy was created. No morning sickness, nothing...LOL; Wednesday, 17 November, 2010
Marcia said...: Yes, setting is SO important. Without it, your reader doesn't get a mental picture, and without that, there's trouble. In a good, tight organic story it's hard to disassemble the elements of fiction. Since place goes so far in defining character, I do think they have to both be there at the start.; Wednesday, 17 November, 2010
Marcia said...: Oh -- and greetings from South Africa. :); Wednesday, 17 November, 2010
Mary Witzl said...: I think setting is absolutely vital even though I personally think of characters first. I feel different in different places, and so does everybody I know. You may take yourself with you when you travel, but a different location can make a huge difference in your life.

And BOY, do I hate Henry James! The three days it took me to slog through Daisy Miller are three days I'll never have back.; Thursday, 18 November, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: Right, Glynis - you get a picture of the character standing or just being somewhere - like a pregnant woman in a field on a Victorian farm.

I'm not sure, but I think that image might win a prize of some kind just for sheer uniqueness! : ); Thursday, 18 November, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: Right, I think that's it Marcia - it is hard to disassemble the elements of fictions. It's that "smush factor" when they all blend together to create this one great story.

South Africa? Seriously?

That's an interesting perspective from you, Mary, since you have actually lived in more places than anyone I know.

And yes, Henry owes me quite a bit of time as well. What do people see in him? He's so dull.; Thursday, 18 November, 2010
Anonymous said...: mostly henry james is a lesser jane austin, seems to me. but... what about The Golden Bowl? or What Maisie Knew?; Wednesday, 24 November, 2010
Anonymous said...: They come together for me. Oops that sounds like romance!!! what I mean is I get a visual image of a scene that has the character and the setting together.

Do you have Light beneath ferns on ebook. I can't find one and would really like to read it. You can let me know at tahlia@activ8.net.au

I'm not sure if I've asked you this or not, but have you had a chance to check out ch 1 of lethal Inheritance on my blog yet?; Friday, 26 November, 2010
Anonymous said...: The setting is always on my mind and gives a distinct flavor to my writing. If I changed the setting, too many elements of the manuscript would change or would need to be changed.; Sunday, 28 November, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: Maybe, Anon, they are good novels, but they way James is handled in most American grad schools makes me want to run from reading anything else by him. We had to trace his use of the color blue - metaphorically. I doubt I'll ever recover from that...

Hi Tahlia - I'm pretty sure Light Beneath Ferns is on Amazon as an ebook - if by ebook you mean Kindle. Not sure about Australian Amazon though.

I will check out your blog soon and thanks for stopping by.

I agree, Medeia. To me, the setting is definitely a character in the story, and one that sort of holds it all together. The story would collapse without it.; Sunday, 28 November, 2010
Anonymous said...: I agree about schools abusing poor Henry. Not sure what that's about. But if you tried him on your own you might enjoy him. Overcoming bad memories of my own, I had to be convinced when I was in a book club -- and I was glad afterward. Henry James is no slouch, however he uses the color blue.; Monday, 29 November, 2010

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

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Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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