Article written by Rory Hawkins.
‘A house is not a home.’ Think on that. A physical place doesn’t necessarily mean one thing, and it never seems the same from more than one perspective. Say you’ve had a comfortable childhood, ups and downs but a healthy relationship with your family – in writing, you’re more likely to portray family (the emotional ‘home’) in an overall positive light. The opposite is just as valid.
Today’s mainstream readership values personally involved language, writing that wants to take you as close to the action as possible. We’d rather be in characters’ shoes than watching from afar. But being so close, we need to know where their personality comes from.
If you’re a budding writer (or even just extremely well-read), you’ll know the dangers of “self-inserting”, writing a character as a reflection of yourself rather than being their own separate person. It’s easy to write a black-and-white hero if we’re staunch in our moral beliefs – they just might not be the most interesting person.
But going one further: don’t we just write exaggerations of our own scenarios? Thinking of people as part of a whole, our environment affects the way we write. Like a family home, how we feel about the physical and emotional aspects of a setting are reflected in the way we choose to write about it. This way, we give the setting our own perspective and its own collected personality.
I know, it’s obvious. We all have biases. Stuff does or does not happen to you, this imprints, and you continue to imprint it on the world around you. Basic psychology. So, knowing this, let’s apply it to the stories we write, read and tell one another.
So, how can a setting be characterised? The first step is direct description, personification the simplest. By describing the physical with humanizing actions, it’s easier to elicit a certain reaction from your readers. “The tall grass sang in the open air, wind dancing among blade and stem.” Human actions are attributed to inanimate objects so tone, and their relation to it, can be built up.
In reading, you’ll find personification in plenty use for aspects of nature. Perhaps it’s the degree of separation we draw between it and us? It’s easier to be angrier at your asshole neighbor who throws garbage in your yard than a tree wilting leaves onto the same spot. The former’s a human force – we attribute motivation behind their actions, something we can empathise with.
But direct description isn’t the only way to go. Just like how we create our own impression of a physical place, characters need to do so as well. In reacting to a setting, characters reinforce our idea of what it represents in the narrative, making their own contribution.
Markus Zusak’s The Messenger is a great example of this. Rather than rely on flowery description of his setting, Zusak sets us down in suburban Australia – where exactly, Zusak’s never explicit but, then, that’s part of the idea. The first thing he does is introduce the main cast, really stressing characterisation to build up what kind of place his protagonist, Ed, is at both physically and emotionally.
From his close friends to the people he meets over the plot’s course, we get a clear mental picture of Ed’s hometown, built up from the perspectives of the people who live there. Particularly with Ed’s friend group, who they are and how’ve grown up, speaks more to what kind of place this is better than idle descriptions.
The novel’s overall ‘message’ rejects everyday apathy – but what does that implication mean to the setting prior to plot changes? Ed’s home, the modern Australian suburb, plain yet familiar on the surface, doesn’t have much warmth between its inhabitants. Without a sense of community, it’s only ever a place to leave.
Building up a setting’s personality this way takes plenty of differing perspectives, but pays off when trying to give a setting its very own persona. Applying it this way clearly marks it with your own ideas – a physical place transformed by emotions.
Narratives with horror elements use this a lot, and they’re much easier to pick out. Many use themes of alienation and otherness (the implication of unseen controlling forces) to make characters feel isolated or vulnerable. Rather than always give a physical face to this unease, setting offers something more inhuman, unknowable and so all the more dangerous. You’re probably already thinking of the next example: Steven King’s The Shining.
In The Shining, King takes a physical place, the Overlook Hotel, and shows how it can be transformed, both by individual perspective (the Torrance family’s own differing views) and by an overarching supernatural other. To little Danny Torrance, the hotel’s a place for exploration and mystery – but, for his mother, it’s only a place of growing unease.
Splitting how the setting interacts with different characters cements what you’re trying to do with it. Characters interact with one another, and in different ways, so the setting has to follow the same rules. Punctuating the world with our idea of what a place could be like can’t always follow the same line of thinking.
The opposite to transforming somewhere with what it could represent, is creating. A more intimate approach is to create somewhere imagined that embodies your underlying theme. Another of King’s novels, Misery, is a lot more explicit about this idea – emotional environment turned into an imagined physical.
Misery’s protagonist, Paul Sheldon, is a recovering alcoholic and writer trying to break out of gothic short-fiction – a clear mirror to King’s own career and personal troubles. This idea of being trapped by one’s own habits are brought to the extreme when Sheldon is held captive by his ‘number one fan’, a disturbed serial murderer.
Going back to the beginning, the first ideas around a place or scenario we think of are going to be involved with what we know, what’s closest to us. It’s only fair that we use that as a starting point when exploring anything more in our writing.
It’s only fair to acknowledge where that thinking comes from, so you can workshop your writing ideas further and discover for yourself how your world has impacted your writing.
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