Writing Craft, Pt. 3 - Setting

I've made it a point over the years to write by certain personal guidelines:

1.) I never write anything personal.
2.) I rarely, if ever, highlight any kind of technology in my stories.
3.) I leave my setting vague unless the setting is necessary for the story to unfold.

I learned guideline number one the hard way and won't be falling back on it anytime soon. I've had professors tell me they want more of my personal background on the page. I tell them it's there, just not the way they want. I made mistakes, I moved on. It's unlikely you will ever hear about me writing a memoir of my life. Ever.

The second guideline falls into my overall aesthetic of writing. I find that the stories I read that highlight or rely upon current technological advances tend to feel less "universal" or "timeless" as the years go on. In fact, some of them feel absurdly dated and laughable. A story should work no matter which end of a millennium it pops up. This timelessness is what I try to achieve with all of my pieces. I can think of nothing worse than writing something that gets overlooked because the topic was a fad for a few years and its time has passed. Don't mistake this aesthetic as leading to boring writing.

Thirdly, depending upon the story I'm writing, the setting can be an afterthought. If the story is believable and true and emotional, then the setting, honestly, is irrelevant only in that it's where you, the writer, want the story to take place. My thesis about an art theft makes more logical sense being set in a museum. My magical realism novel, "Rise," could be set anywhere with jungles and rivers and heat, but I chose a South American locale as the basis for the setting. The point is this - setting is important once you figure out what your story is REALLY about and once you figure out what's at stake for your characters. Unless the fate of your story absolutely has to rest on the setting, it can be ignored for a bit. I love good landscape descriptions, but I continue reading a book because of how the characters interact and very rarely because of the scenery around them.

I'm reading the first couple of chapters of a friend's manuscript at the moment. Like my own "Rise," it's a magical realism piece. Where I fall flat on my own scenic descriptions, she is flourishing on the page. I can see and smell nearly everything to the point of almost tasting it on my tongue; she takes the proper amount of time setting a scene, something that I have always had problems with for one reason or another. Setting is important for just this reason. You want the reader to be COMPLETELY immersed in the world that you've created, even if it is a fictional one.

One of the biggest critiques of my thesis during grad school was the lack of scene setting that I'd done. As bizarre as it may sound, the writer needs to be at one with both the characters and the scene. With the characters, writers need to know everything about the people on the page. Birth, death, past, important moments that shaped them, physical tics, speech patterns, etc. With scene, the writer needs to be just as close, as if they're standing right in the middle of everything while describing it to the blind (the reader). The more detail one can produce, the more lush and real the scene becomes.

There is the issue of over-describing. When this happens, the prose slows down and the story comes to a halt; the momentum disappears and it's hard to pick it back up again. Rather than describe an entire scene all at once, I've found it easier to break up the descriptions between bits of dialogue or plot exposition. This keeps the momentum moving and the reader doesn't become mired in landscape moments that may have little to do with the overall arc of the story.