In this course aspiring writers will be introduced to the techniques that masters of fiction use to ground a story in a concrete world. From the most realist settings to the most fantastical, writers will learn how to describe the physical world in sharp, sensory detail. We will also learn how to build credibility through research, and to use creative meditation exercises to deepen our own understanding of our story worlds, so that our readers can see all that we imagine.
Nothing Can Happen Nowhere
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From the course by Wesleyan University
Creative Writing: The Craft of Setting and Description
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From the lesson
Persuasive Settings: Why Description Matters
Writing a great short story is like conveying a dream. As we will see from studying one famous master, a "persuasive" setting is necessary in order to build mood, character, and even plot.
Meet the Instructors
Amity GaigeVisiting Scholar in Creative Writing
What an incredible story.
Before we discuss it, I'd like to remind us of the definition of a setting.
Setting is the time, place, and situation in which a story occurs.
A setting might be exotic.
A desert, a war, or the like.
But really, every story has a setting, whether or not you emphasize it.
A living room is a setting, an airport, the woods.
In fact it's impossible to write a story without a setting.
As the writer Elizabeth Bowen said, nothing can happen nowhere.
The locale of the happening always colours the happening and
often to a degree, shapes it.
What she means is even if you don't consciously choose a setting
your story has one.
I want to persuade you that becoming aware of your setting and
describing it fully and vividly will help you create richer fiction.
I'm going to read this opening scene from the story.
Perhaps as I read it you can close your eyes.
Better to notice the way your mind summons a visual picture,
which is really a collaboration between your imagination and Lawrence's.
The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking,
stumbling down from Selston with seven full wagons.
It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but
the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still
flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter.
A woman, walking up the railway line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge,
held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing.
The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement,
as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and
the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered
oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips
beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney.
Those are a series of beautiful words.
Some are common and some are not.
You can open your eyes now.
But none are outrageously difficult.
In fact, they are lovely to say in the order in which Lawrence places them.
Will you say the final sentence aloud with me?
The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with a slow inevitable movement,
as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and
the hedge; then they curved the away toward the coppice where the withered oak
leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside
the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney.
What a pleasure, both the musicality of saying that, and
the pleasure of saying it takes shape in your mind.
One thing we notice is that there are many words for flora and fauna.
Gorse, hedge, coppice, oak leaves, scarlet hips, spinney.
Of course if you're like me,
you didn't understand the exact meaning of every word.
Maybe like me,
you didn't know that a spinney refers to a small area of bushes and tress.
The uses of this word is British.
So don't feel bad if you aren't British and you didn't know that.
In fact let's say you aren't familiar with many of the words.
You can still enjoy the sounds of them and the feelings that they cause in you.
The dirty secret to understanding great literature is that's not received or
understood solely on an intellectual basis.
You do not need to fully understand every word.
Your senses will absorb and understand it with you or without you.
So just relax and open up and
enjoy the way that the heavy black train comes into view in your mind's eye.
Startling a colt out of the weeds and
see the colt running along side the train, outdistancing the train at a canter.
Lawrence doesn't say that the train is fast or slow, but
only that a young horse can outdistance it.
With this paragraph not only is place and time established but
meaning is being made.
There's a woman there she's insignificantly trapped between the bushes
and the jolting train cars.
She's not Elizabeth Bates or protagonist, but she's another woman.
And this story's about women having to suffer and be stoic.
When we first see Elizabeth, she's coming out of a felt covered foul house.
What does this suggest?
She's been working, she's taking care of the foul,
the chickens, she's always working.
Lawrence has imagined what Elizabeth has been doing
along before the story even started, working.
The Odour of Chrysanthemums is really one long scene which Elizabeth is waiting for
her husband to come home.
At first, she waits with the children in the kitchen where dinner has
been laid out.
The kitchen was small and
full of firelight; red coals piled glowing up the chimney mouth.
This fire, which maybe Lawrence described merely for
the sake of setting scene, starts to serve many functions.
It serves to characterize the people in the story as they have different
reactions to the fire.
The little girl thinks its beautiful, full of little caves.
The little boy grumbles that its not big enough, and
that his sister has let it die down.
And once again we get a gender dynamic that matters to the story.
The boy demands thankless domestic service of his sister.
We're five pages into the story when suddenly Elizabeth stands to reach
a lamp and we see that she is rounding with maternity.
Did Lawrence even plan that?
Did Lawrence know that his protagonist was pregnant?
Maybe he did and maybe he did not.
Or maybe he only discovered it himself when he made her stand and
perform an awkward task made harder by her roundness.
In this gesture, her small daughter also sees something she hadn't seen before,
there are flowers in her mother's apron, chrysanthemums.
If Lawrence hadn't described this setting in detail, we would not have the fire,
the flowers, the characters,
their relationships, the pregnancy, which makes everything so much more poignant.
We would not have the heart of the story nor would we have the title.
The scene goes on covering a couple of hours.
Lawrence gives us nearly a real-time experience of feeling the long wait for
the husband to come home.
Tension grows.
Her tension becomes our tension.
We wait with her.
We're helpless.
When her mother-in-law comes, she takes a good page or so
of rambling before she coughs up the news.
There's been an accident.
Finally, Elizabeth supplies the question we understand she's been wanting to
ask the whole time.
Is he dead she asked, and at the words her heart swung violently,
though she felt a slight flush of shame at the ultimate extravagance of the question.
Extravagance, what a reversal of the normal use of the word?
Only a woman whose every hour is about work or
duty would consider that a question like that is extravagant, or melodramatic.
Sadly, he is dead.
Because she's a woman, and a woman of her time and place,
she can't afford to morn or to display emotion.
Instead she begins to prepare the house to have the body of her husband delivered and
displayed.
She lights a candle, she goes into the tiny room.
Lawrence takes his time to show us the dream, what's in his head.
It's a tiny room.
This time the fire shows up again but now it's out and the air is cold.
As Lawrence described the setting, he placed two vases there, atop
a piece of furniture we presume, filled with, you guessed it, chrysanthemums.
When they reappear they magnetically attract new meaning.
They're flowers that remind her of him.
They are flowers of mourning.
The men from the mine carry in her husband's body and
as they do so one of them knocks over a vase.
The nearly offhanded moment in which Elizabeth sweeps up
the vase while the men wait in silence, is one of my favorites in all of literature.
Here's something I'd like for you to think about.
Have you ever felt trapped by a space, even a nice space?
Your home, or a hotel room?
Why were you stuck inside this space?
What do you remember about this time?
What did you feel or do?
Good.
I like that you have spent some time thinking about a small,
close space as a setting,
because it's a great illustration of how a setting is also a situation.
A setting is not an unpopulated space.
Characters exist within it, and are influenced by it.
It's weather, it's limits.
If a character is trapped in a small place, or for that matter
she's trapped in an open field, she must necessarily interact with the setting.
She must eventually move.
That is story.
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