Setting: Psychological Environment

Given the preponderance of plot in much writing done today, setting often gets shortchanged. It’s not number one on many people’s list of features in a work of fiction. Plot, of course comes first. Many are aware of the need for character development and for good dialogue, but setting often gets little attention. Yet it is an important element, one that must not be neglected, and one that skillful writers exploit to their advantage.

Setting is the background to a story, where the story takes places. It is both the locale—the place where the action transpires, as in London, Paris, Bakersfield, New York City, New Haven; it is also the location:  a bar, a golf course, a haunted house, a suburban house that is anything but haunted, the countryside. But it is much more. Setting creates effect. It gives the mood and atmosphere to a story.

Mood and atmosphere is vital, and it’s a good idea to determine it early on. One of my all-time favorite passages that sets the mood is the beginning of Edgar Alan Poe’s classic story, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” I will quote the opening section here in full:  During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

Is this going to be a happy story? I don’t think so. Poe sets the mood up right away. It is going to be a gloomy story, an oppressive story, and a story of melancholy. And if you’ve read the tale of a mad brother who buries his sister alive, you know that Poe did what he wanted to do. He produced a narrative that equals his opening sentence, and then some.

Poe gives the story a psychological environment, which is another term literary critics use for setting. I like it. The setting creates this kind of feeling. It puts us in a certain mental and emotional disposition. Skillful writers know how to create this psychological environment and set it in such a way that it contributes to the story.

Another example is one of my very favorite stories, “Janus,” by Ann Beattie. It is the story of a realtor. The story is filled with empty houses, empty rooms, and the quiet of someone preparing a home for viewing by potential purchasers. This sets the mood of distant loneliness in Andrea, the realtor’s, life. She is married but not entirely happy. She had an affair some time ago that faded away. She is still married but seems alienated from her husband. And she is obsessed with a bowl.

The bowl was something her old lover bought for her at an antique sale, and Andrea always uses it when she shows a home. It is one of the “devices” she uses to make a home look more attractive when it is being shown. People sometimes want to buy the bowl. Once or twice she leaves it in a house and panics until she can recover it. Somehow it is symbolic—perhaps the empty bowl represents her empty life. It sits in the vacant, unlived-in houses that are the setting of much of the story.

Janus is the Roman god of the New Year, and he has two faces, one looking back and one looking forward. But he is also the god of doorways, of entrances, of passages. Going through doors is important in a home tour. Bettie uses setting—in this case, empty houses, numerous rooms, doors to pass through, quiet, vacancy—to set the psychological atmosphere of this story about a woman who lives in an emptiness she does not understand.

These are two examples of skillful use of setting. Many writers today seem to think that setting is a distraction, that we can simply say a person is in a house, on a spaceship, or in an airplane and this will suffice. Failing to exploit the element of setting, however—failing to create mood and atmosphere, to establish a psychological environment—will impoverish a story and cause it to tend toward superficiality. Set the mood. Create the atmosphere. This will take the story into full expressiveness.

Writing Clichés, Part 2: Show, Don’t Tell

Everyone has heard it. If you’ve been to a writer’s

conference or participate in a writer’s group,

you’ve heard it multiple times. The utterance is, to writers, as strongly held a truth as the Christian belief that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, the Buddhist belief that Gautama Siddhartha became the Enlightened One, or the Muslim belief that Mohammad is God’s Prophet. Show, Don’t Tell. Even as I type out these words, this adage is being spoken somewhere in the world where writes gather. It is ubiquitous. It’s everywhere—at least everywhere writers congregate.

Like most advice that becomes proverbial, it is founded on good, solid practice. Young writers are taught not to say, “She was a very beautiful woman,” or “He was an extremely handsome man.” This is telling. Rather, they are to describe the people:  what color eyes and hair do they have, what can you say about their faces, their posture and bodies, their overall appearance. What is it that makes either one of the characters handsome or beautiful?

The same would be true of action-related scenes. “The wood was dangerous.” Again, this is telling—making a statement of fact. Better to say, “Wolves roamed the woods as well as bears and predatory cats. The uneven ground could cause one to slip, turn an ankle, and be immobilized; in which case, the predators would move in. Deep pits one could hardly see dotted the floor of the place. Poisonous snakes and spiders, rabid bats, disease-carrying insects abounded there.”

Showing is much better than telling. But like many principles in the writing world, it starts out as a helpful tool and then ends up being at best an annoying formula and at worst a misleading info-bit that closes down writing rather than opening it up. 

A few months ago in my writer’s group I read a story containing dialogue. It went something like this:

                        “Did you know about it before it happened?”

                        “I didn’t.”

                        “What do you think he will do next?”

                        I said I didn’t know.

Immediately came the perfunctory comment: “I said I didn’t know” was telling, not showing. After all, it’s always better to show, not tell. I had put that particular line in for stylistic reasons. Dialogue, like anything else, can get tiresome and needs to be broken up. Why not throw in a little telling now and then to do that? I think it works and didn’t change the lines. Sometimes you tell, sometimes you show.

A couple of the best opening lines I know are telling lines. George Orwell begins his novel 1984 with

Winston Smith and Big Brother

the line, “It was bright, cold day in April, and all the clocks were striking thirteen.” It would have been much less effective for Orwell to describe the clocks going off, the raw April weather, and the sunlight giving no warmth. Telling was just right for setting the mood. The beginning of Moby Dick by Herman Melville reads, “Call me Ishmael.”  It is imperative, of course, but it is a kind of telling, not a description. Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale begins with what I think is one of the wittiest and most clever sentences in English novel writing:  “I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him up the moment you come in, as it’s important, the matter is more often important to him than to you.” Brilliant. And it sets the tone of the whole novel. But it is all telling, not showing.

All three of the above authors were masters at description and character development. They knew how to show. But they also knew how to tell—how to give vital information, use information, and know when things needed to be directly communicated rather than got at by use of description, dialogue, or interaction of character.

My second favorite novel (after Wuthering Heights) is John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The first postmodern novel written in English, it is a gripping, vivid story of a man and woman who transgress Victorian standards of sexuality and class to engage in love. And it is almost entirely telling.

Fowles’ narrator assumes a Victorian voice and speaks directly to the reader. There are marvelous descriptive scenes (the scene in The Undercliff, if you’ve read the book, is unequaled as description).

There is fabulous dialogue. Yet much of the time the narrator lectures the readers and waxes eloquent about all things Victorian. The novel has been a perpetual best-seller since it was first published in 1969. It is reprinted ever year and considered a work of great literary value. Telling, if done correctly, can accomplish a great deal.

Certainly young writers must be taught not to make the error of Bulwer-Lytton and begin a book by saying, “It was a dark and stormy night.” Describe the wind blowing, the clouds rolling through the sky, black and bare trees swaying, and torrents of water falling on cobblestones. But telling can be used strategically. As we grow in our abilities as writers, we should not leave the possibility of something well told out of our writing.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and responses on these ideas. Please

leave a reply. What do you think about showing and telling?

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Writing Clichés, Part I: The Ubiquity of Plot

Some years ago, I co-authored a musical. It was based on Charles Dickens’ story, “The Cricket on the Hearth,” one of his Christmas tales. I did the libretto (the script and song lyrics) and a colleague wrote the music. We invited a critic from the local newspaper to the opening night and, the next day, he gave us a favorable review. Like most reviewers, he seemed to feel he had to make one negative remark and said, “The opening song of the second act did nothing to advance the plot.”

The opening song of the second act was “Just To Be On Stage,” a song one of the main characters sings about how much he loves being an actor. It was a funny song in which the actor paused and quoted lines from Shakespeare. In all deference to the reviewer, I will admit it did nothing or not a lot to “advance the plot”—but why did it have to? That everything you write has to advance the plot is writing cliché number one.

 It’s easy to understand how such things get started. No one wants to read a meandering book full of digressions and pointless action. A book has to have direction. A novel is most often organized around the principle of plot. Edgar Allan Poe, in his discourse that defined the modern short story, said nothing must distract from the action that carries the story along (that is, the plot). But, as often happens in religion, what was designed to be a guideline for making life better eventually became a burdensome rule that people are forced to follow. Plot is ubiquitous—it is everywhere and, supposedly, is the driving force in a novel. So everything in the piece of fiction, it follows, must support, advance, or aid the development of plot in some way.

This has led to some misdirection.

Very often, in writer’s groups and in what I come across when I read to see what’s being written today, I encounter books that are simply plots. It’s supposedly good to be “plot-driven,” but very often this emphasis on plot robs the book of richness. There is no character development, no skillful use of setting, no creation of mood of atmosphere, no symbolism, and no unique narrative voice. The story is a sequence of events, which, for me at least, quickly becomes boring because the elements mentioned above do not accompany it.

Some famous books do not have plots. Willa Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop, written in 1927 and widely read and taught today, does not have a plot. It is a series of vignettes on the life of a Catholic priest living in Mexico during the last part of the nineteenth century. The sequence of years in his life give the book form, but really it has no overriding conflict. Yet it is a rich, vivid text. One of my favorite novels, The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, is thin on plot. The main character sees a mysterious woman standing on a pier and becomes curious about her. Eventually, they fall in love and his world of Victorian propriety comes crashing down around him. But still, the narration is more important than the simple plot. My all-time favorite novel, Wuthering Heights, does have a plot with the formula of Want/Obstacle/Action, but the characters and what they are like are much more important than the very simple plot of the book.

Clichés, of course, arise for a reason. Beginning writers need to learn how to stick with the story so they do not wander and bore

Meryl Streep as The French Lieutenant's Woman

the reader. The reader wants to know what happens next. But plot is not the be-all and end-all of a book. And books that are only a sequence of events and fail to bring in the other elements of writing—character, narrative, symbolism, setting, theme—tend to be dull and, yes, boring, after a while.

So remember there are many other things in a book beside the plot. What happens is important, but it must not be the only thing in a novel. It can be a strong element—it should be a strong element—must be a strong element; but it is certainly not everything. If it is everything, the novel will be boring and incomplete.

More clichés to come!

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