Wednesday 14 March 2012

The importance of settings

Caen
This week I have been talking to my students about the importance of settings when writing and the role they can take. I often find myself writing on assignments that there is 'no sense of place', that I have no idea where this particular story is happening. I am in no doubt that the writer of the piece knows exactly what the place looks like but has just failed to get it down on the page or even forgotten as the story is so real in their heads. They forget the reader is not privy to the inner workings of their brain.

I have been guilty of it too. I know I have previously told you that I write cold and edit/rewrite hot, where I go back and paint the picture, fill in the details or add the embroidery, however you want to describe it. I also know I am a very visual writer. The story plays out like a film in my head and this is the challenge to get that film down on the page so that the reader can see it to.

Setting can be vital. It can support or impinge on your character. It can help to manipulate the mood, reveal a character or move the action along. It can even set the period that your story is set in. Setting can include not just place, but architecture, artefacts, technology, books, food, clothes etc, etc, the list is endless. When writing it is always a good idea to be specific. If you are talking about seeing flowers, say which flowers. If you are talking about clothes, be detailed. All of these add a further dimension to your work, they can bring it life and lift it off the page. And this is not just applicable to the realist novel, even in your fantasy worlds there has to be a setting, a sense of place.

The picture above is of a square in Caen. I went to Caen the year before last as that is where my novel, Ham & Jam, is set. I needed to experience it in order to be able to bring some verisimilitude to my writing. I wanted to be able to see it, smell it, touch it, taste it and hear it. I write for young adults and they may not notice that I have got minor details right about Caen, but I will know. Researching your setting is as important as researching your characters I believe. I love doing both.

We are always told that as writers we should carry notebooks round to record snippets of conversations we hear, ideas that come to mind or characters we see. In mine I also draw things I see, by the way I can't draw to safe my life, but I can create enough of a picture to remind me what I was looking at. For example, there is a very bad drawing of a tree in my current book. It was a tree I saw on a train journey. I was travelling from Edinburgh to Inverness to go on an Arvon course. A spectacular journey which I highly recommend. On the way amidst a mass of pine trees was a clearing and in the centre, totally on its own, was a twisted and gnarled dead tree. How did it get there? How did it die? One day it will appear in one of my stories because that is what I like to do, make collections of characters and settings that I know eventually will appear in my work.

How do you research your settings? Does your story play like a film in your head as you write? Enjoy creating your sense of place in the meantime.

Here is Van Morrison singing 'Keep It Simple' because that is what we all need to do.

9 comments:

  1. Marcus Sedgwick in his keynote talk at the 2010 SCBWI conference spoke about the importance of place, not just as a setting, but actually as a character, personifying it. He also spoke about place helping one to create characters, as he did in White Crow. He handles setting incredibly richly in his novels, so much so that place becomes more than real, it is alive. The Book of Dead Days is a good example.

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    1. I am terrible at writing in the setting when I'm working on a ms ... until I realized that setting is just another character - character is all about relationships and once I figure out my character's relationship to the setting, I am on my way.

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  2. Thank you Nicky, I knew there was something else I wanted to mention and that is the fact that setting can be a character as I remember hearing Marcus Sedgwick talking about it too when he came to do a talk at the uni. Thank you for reminding me, you are a star.

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  3. Settings is the flavour of the week. I'm teaching my students settings next week, Debz Hobbs-Wyatt as visiting speaker is talking about them, she has blogged about them recently, too. Rosemary Gemell has aslo recently blogged.
    Graham Swift does it for me in Waterland. Interestingly, although he visited he didn't live there for a sustained period. I don't know the Fens well but had a strong sense of them after reading this novel.
    How do we create a great setting? Writing with the senses? How did Swift do it?

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  4. I use the senses a lot when creating settings plus I use specifics. As you say it must be settings week!! Lucy Christopher in Stolen creates some amazing desert settings.

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    1. In fact one cool way to work on setting is to stop describing it and start giving it emotions (and giving the characters an emotional response to it).

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  5. Oooh Candy I love that idea, am going to play with it. Thank you!!

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  6. Caen looks gorgeous! I love researching settings, and I visit them where at all possible. But, having said that, while I clearly see the setting in my head, I'm not so great at getting it onto the page. When I write, I tend to think in dialogue, so I'm training myself to really think about the sense of place and the character of the setting. Thanks for flagging this up!

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  7. My pleasure Sue! I had a lovely time in Caen and it made a huge difference to my writing (and still is in the rewrites) having been there. It also meant I could see/experience things I couldn't have got from google maps. For example I was able to follow a few school parties to see how they behaved.

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