Hello again, my very talented writers of tumblr! I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed reading your work. I’ve seen such stellar craft happening, and I’m eager to see where you’ll take this next prompt.
In week 1, we focused on a single object. In week 2, we attended to the objects in our environment. This week, we’re considering the environment as a whole—setting.
One of the reasons I’ve chosen this order specifically, small to large, is because setting can become overwhelming. But last week we already practiced it in our real environments by observing our surroundings, and putting those details into our work. Setting is not as huge and amorphous as it may seem—when it comes down to it, setting is the interaction between character and place. Notice I didn’t say that setting is the place itself, and that’s because a place is meaningless without grounding it in the personal stakes of a character. It’s like walking around a grocery store and not putting anything in your cart. A setting only exists to hold its contents.
Setting can refer to the largest and smallest of places: universe, galaxy, planet, continent, country, city, home, bedroom, pillow fort. Setting can also refer to time: millennium, century, decade, year, month, week, day, hour, minute, second.
In writing, not all of these things have to be defined, nor should they. The difficulty in setting is the negotiation between our lived reality—in which we have all of this information at all times—and the restrictive nature of writing, in which we not only control all these variables, but we also have to organize and convey them. In reality, events can occur simultaneously. You can drop a plate at the same time you get a text message. But in writing, even if those things happen at the same time in the lived reality of your character, you have to convey the plate dropping and then the phone vibrating in consecutive sentences, linked usually by the word “simultaneously.” Your reader then retroactively crafts those moments happening at once in their memory, but there is a brief moment between those two details where the reader knows the plate has dropped but not that the phone will vibrate. Just as a film is restricted to the width of a camera’s lens, writing is restricted to the sentence. As immersive as writing can be, it is still always a constructed thing.
When it comes to setting, you not only have control over all these details, you also have to figure out the order of information those details are conveyed. Which brings me to…
Decision Fatigue
One of the reasons people think fanfiction is “easier” than original fiction is because there are fewer decisions to make. You have an established universe to play in and so you don’t have to pull up a name generator to figure out the name of your protagonist, or however you make those choices. But that’s not true—fanfiction requires a different type of decision-making and therefore a different (but equally difficult) skill set of creative thinking. The analogy I like to use is a playground versus a beach. On a playground, the equipment is already there, but you can use it however you want. On a beach, you have to decide what to bring with you. One is not inherently better than the other. It’s all play.
I say this because I’ve coached a lot of writers who are transitioning from fanfiction to original fiction. It can be jarring to go from the playground to a beach. And so I see a lot of writers succumb to decision fatigue—the exhaustion of creativity. You have to decide what kind of car your character drives, how old they are, where they live, what they do for a living, their relationships, the conflicts of those relationships, their educational background, and so on. Creativity is making decisions. And that’s why it’s hard.
Relevance
I would argue that setting is the most difficult series of decisions to make. Our entry into a new piece is generally a character, a premise, or an image. Or, as we say on Tumblr, we put a guy in situations. That guy’s environment will affect him and his situations, because that environment will either help or hinder him in some way. A meet-cute, for example, is nearly always related to setting.
I remember doing my first generative workshop on setting. It sent me into a spiral I couldn’t climb out of for four years. The spiral was this:
All narratives, even narrative poems (as opposed to lyrical), exist in a time and place, and the author has control of those factors. The more specific those details are, the stronger the story becomes. The specificity of those details is rendered in imagery. Ergo, I have to develop my imagery.
And now I’m going to tell you the result of that line of thinking so you don’t fall into the same trap: I wrote a totally unpublishable novel. It was too long and not very interesting, and both of those things happened because I was more dedicated to developing my setting than my story.
Although that was great practice, it kind of sucked to spend an entire year working on something only to put it in a drawer and never look at it again. What pulled me out of the spiral was dedicating myself to narration—I decided I was only obligated to describe that which my narrator observed. And because I didn’t want to bother with setting anymore, I made a character who was totally oblivious.
(We’ll be looking at narration next week.)
I began to view the setting through a character rather than around a character. My narrator was narrow-focused and obsessive, so I was only obligated to write that which came into the one-lane bridge of her attention. In other words, I only wrote what was relevant to her. And the only thing that was relevant to her was the object of her fixation.
The big caveat here is that a story isn’t always obligated to its narrator. That’s a choice I’ve made for my own work, because I’m interested in narrators and the development of voice. My prose will never be beautiful or floral. I’ll never have the patience to lovingly describe what it’s like to live in Ohio. I’ll probably only ever write a character who has driven past the HELL IS REAL sign a dozen times and who maybe has strong opinions on corn. It’s the best way I can find to help me avoid the decision fatigue of building an entire world.
Prompt time!
For this week’s activity, I’d like you to think of a place you really love. This can be your home town or the house where you grew up or wherever has brought you joy. (Remember: love inspires.)
Next, I’d like you to write 3 facts of public information and 3 facts of private information about that place.
Public information is anything that can be found, either by researching the place or visiting it. This could be factual—population, square footage, location. It could also involve community knowledge, like legends, cultures, or customs. It can also include major historical events. If you were to show this place to a total stranger, what would you tell them about it? This part may require some research.
Private information is what can’t be known by anyone but you (and maybe the people who were there with you). This includes memories you have of the place, secrets, unknown histories; anything that can’t be understood unless you have intimate knowledge of the place or lived there during a particular moment.
For example, when I taught in the South, I had a lot of students who had lived through Hurricane Katrina. They were all young children at the time. When I had them do this activity, many of them chose to list facts that anyone could find about New Orleans in August of 2005—that there were over 1300 casualties, that Katrina was a Category 5 hurricane. They also shared things that no one else could know, about their families housing total strangers whose homes were destroyed, about living for days or even weeks without electricity. About why their parents chose to stay rather than leave, or leave rather than stay. About loved ones who had died.
Once you have your 6 things, I’d like you to write a piece based on them. Here are some ways you can approach it:
- If you want to write nonfiction, tell the story of one of your private pieces of information.
- If you want to write fiction, write a story using at least one of the public pieces of information. For example, you can tell the story of a legend, or make a legend up. Or you could do something similar to what we did last week, where you take those three pieces of information and weave them in.
- If you want to write a poem, try to capture the sense of place by using one or more pieces of information, either private or public.
- If you want to write something experimental, write a story about a piece of private information from the perspective of the place itself.
You don’t have to share your 6 things (unless you want to). While you’re writing, note the details that emerge naturally while drafting, what becomes relevant to the story versus what doesn’t. Like our previous prompts, allow yourself to lean into associative thinking and make connections with your memories.
Questions? Ask ‘em here before EOD Tuesday so @bettsfic can answer them on Wednesday. And remember to tag your work #tumblr writing workshop with betts if you want her to read your work and possibly feature it on Friday!
And, for those just joining us: @bettsfic is running a writing workshop on @books this month. Want to know more? Start here.
