In her book, THE LAST DRAFT, Sandra Scofield offers this revision advice:
…think of how you can intensify setting: an ice storm, a rash of crimes, a broken electrical grid, an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, soaring land prices. Small pressures matter, too: a leaking faucet, a fender bender, too many gray days, a sick pet…
As an exercise, consider what would happen if you set your story in an entirely different place or time. Consider something outlandish, like a frozen outpost or a foreign city. Then come closer to the home of the novel, but change the neighborhood, the season, the year. How would that change what happens?
If it wouldn’t matter much, you aren’t using setting.
This invited me to look at my work through a different peephole. If changing something like the place, time, season or year doesn’t change the story, then the setting doesn’t matter. I immediately set out trying to conjure in my mind the books / stories I’ve read with the strongest sense of setting. Here are the two that came to mind most readily.
One of the two examples is actually an essay. You obviously can’t change any of those aforementioned aspects — place, time, season or year — in an essay, or else it wouldn’t be an essay. It’d be fiction. Or just a lie. But I’m going to include it here because I think it’s interesting to note that a work of nonfiction can still offer a really powerful setting, if the right details are amplified.
Example 1
COLD SASSY TREE by Olive Ann Burns
This is an older book. Published in 1984. It was well-loved by both my grandparents and my parents (I can still hear my mom reading this book out loud to my dad on a road trip) and I love that my copy, the one I’m looking at now, has a small sticker in the front, a bookplate of sorts, with my grandfather’s name and address.
One of the reasons it was so cherished is because the book has a charming setting. Cold Sassy, Georgia —1906. Burns doesn’t plunk the narrative down in the middle of the tiny town, describe it, and then walk away. It’s not a one-and-done. She develops the setting layer by layer by layer, pulling various vibrant threads through every chapter, using countless devices from the temperament of the characters to the observations of the narrator, to the anecdotal details of the town and people in it, to enliven and tighten the weft.
It’s almost impossible to choose just one passage to share. The magic of Olive Ann Burns’s writing is in the book as a whole — all the parts working together. But here’s one little section I found. Not only does it lend to the overall setting of Cold Sassy and what was happening in the town at the time but it also does quite a bit of work for the characterization of the young narrator’s Granny and Grandpa, as well as showing us the setting of their home and relationship.
To my thinking, it was refined that [Granny] didn’t fuss at Grandpa about not having the house wired for electricity. When Mr. Sheffield, the mill-owner, bought a Delco generator for the mill and contracted with the town to install twenty street lights and run wires to all the houses and stores on both sides of the railroad tracks, practically everyone got electricity except Grandpa and the mill workers and the colored folks in Pigfoot Bottoms. But you didn’t hear Granny complain about having to trim wicks, clean smoked-up lamp chimneys, and fool with kerosene when other ladies could just pull a ceiling cord to get light.
Grandpa wouldn’t pay to hook into the new water main and sewer system either. Said he didn’t mind going to Egypt, which was what everybody in town called privies. He never seemed to notice that Granny was still drawing well water and emptying slop jars after other women were turning faucets and pulling tank chains.
Example 2
IT RAINED IN OHIO ON THE NIGHT ALLEN IVERSON HIT MICHAEL JORDAN WITH A CROSSOVER by Hanif Abdurraqib, found in his collection of essays titled THEY CAN’T KILL US UNTIL THEY KILL US.
The section I’m going to share here comes at the very end of the essay. The beginning and middle include an introduction of Iverson and Jordan and what they each meant to Abdurraqib’s neighborhood cohort in the mid 90s, offer backstory leading up to the actual crossover and help the reader understand why it matters in the first place. At the end of the piece, our narrator pulls the reader close; to the uneven, puddle-strewn court at Scottwood Elementary School. It’s a long excerpt but I like it too much to break it apart. Let it carry you there. Let it carry you to that playground where Eastside Columbus basketball royalty once held court; where teenaged Abdurraqib played solo, imagining he was Allen Iverson.
If you believe that it rained in Ohio on the night Allen Iverson hit Michael Jordan with a mean crossover, you will also believe that I know this by the sound that lingered in the air after my small cheering, the way rain can sometimes sound like an echo of applause if it hits a roof hard enough. You will also believe that I know this by the way an unexpected puddle can slow down a basketball’s dribble on blacktop, especially if the basketball is losing some of its traction, some of the grip that it had in its younger days. You will also believe that in my neighborhood even in basketball’s golden days, none of the players would take to the courts on the day after rain, because it was too risky: the court at Scottwood Elementary, known for legendary full court games filled with Eastside Columbus basketball royalty, was already uneven, and the slickness of even a little rain made the court treacherous, something that many players, also stars for their high school teams, couldn’t risk. You will believe that I once wore baggy jeans that dragged the ground until the bottoms of them split into small white flags of surrender and you will also believe that I dreamed of having enough money to buy my way into the kind of infamy that came with surviving any kind of proximity to poverty. You will believe, then, that I remember all of this by the way the ball felt in my hands as I stood on the court alone the next day, pulling the wet ball from one hand to the next and feeling the water spin off of it. You will believe that I only imagined the defender I was breezing past, and pushing my way to the foul line. And even as I missed shot after shot, I still cheered. Alone in the wet aftermath of a night where I first saw the player I imagined myself becoming. A shot, finally finding the bottom of the net, and my hand, still extended, to an audience of no one.
Obviously Abdurraqib couldn’t change the setting. He couldn’t have put himself in California or Indiana the day after Allen Iverson hit Michael Jordan with a crossover. But he still had a lot of choices. He didn’t have to include the details he included. He didn’t have to tell us about going to the court. He made specific choices about what to include and what to leave out in order to offer his reader this vivid, yearning, wistful moment in time. And he accomplished it, in large part, with that exquisite setting.
Scofield says that the most obvious problem she sees in apprentice novels is “a failure of imagination: too many things take place in too few settings.” Of all the things a writer might fail at, imagination, it seems to me, should be at the very bottom of the list. So here’s to us, as we excavate our visions, inventions, insights and flights of fancy. Til next week, friends.
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