Setting is important and should be as carefully crafted as
character and plot. And as with both of these you don’t have to give every
detail but you have to know all of the detail. A reader should be able to ask
you any question about all of these and you should be able to answer, even if
you’re talking about details you haven’t revealed. Even more importantly, you
should be able to ask your reader the same questions and they should come up
with more or less the same answers.
Yes, spooky. Don’t ask me how it works but it does. There is
also something uncanny about the way we manage to select the right details that
convey the whole. I think it’s something to do with the subconscious though I’m
not sure. PhD topic, anyone?
One exception might be plot in young adult novels where a
writer may claim some ignorance allowing the reader to decide. Even then, though, the writer must be well aware
of the same number of possibilities.
Before I wrote the Peace
Child trilogy I spent months and months working out the details of Kaleem’s
world. What did people eat and wear? How were they educated? How did they
travel? What were their values? How was their society ordered? As this was
dealing with earth fifteen centuries into the future, what might be logical
developments based on what is happening today?
A mixture of reasoning and imagination comes into play here.
I made notes on my thinking about this setting whilst in
cafes, pausing during a long car journey, on short train journeys and in hotel
rooms. I did my thinking whilst ironing, walking or on long drives.
I thought I had this world all sussed out. However, as I
started writing I discovered I needed to work out some more details.
Always the question is: what would it be like if this world
was thus and how will these characters, given their personalities, react in
these circumstances which inevitably include the setting?
Historical fiction
Here we have a mixture of verifiable facts, primary
resources (diaries, letters, photos, film – particularly amateur), repeated
experience and again the imagination to work with. Given that the women wore
calf-length dresses by then, bobbed their hair, and, if in Germany, were
struggling with mass inflation and the beginnings of a depression, what would
it have been like? These are issues I’m dealing in Clara’s Story, the fictionalised biography of Clara Lehrs,
Holocaust victim. For sister novel, The
House on Schellberg Street, a story about Holocaust survivors and German
innocence, I’ve taken train journeys, looked at documents and letters written
at the time, studied amateur footage in Auschwitz, read eyewitness accounts of
the Kindertransport and attended several 1940s’ events. A central true story
that never had an explanation is uncovered here - just how did Clara Lehrs
manage to keep up to sixty children with Downs Syndrome and severe learning
difficulties hidden during World War II when even she herself, Jewish by
nationality but not be religion, was forced out of Schellberg Street, first to
a ghetto in the Black Forest, then to Theriesenstadt and finally to Treblinka
where she was murdered? Here I use “what if” to work out what may have
happened.
Fantasy
This might appear to be the freest form. The river can run
backwards. There is neither future nor past to be accounted for. Anything goes.
Except: it must be logical and consistent. Everything needs to be worked out,
just as in science fiction. We must relate all of that actually to our world or
neither we nor our readers can understand. What is the equivalent of what we do
here?
Real life
We might think that if we set our story in society as we
know it in the 21st Century the setting is less of a challenge. However, we need to remember that the
particular combination of motivations, personalities and constraints imposed by
the setting is unique in every story. The writer needs to establish those just
as carefully here as in the other stories. Both reader and writer should be
able to answer the questions mentioned above.
Aren’t we advised to write what we know?
Arguably if we only ever did that we would never write
science fiction, fantasy or historical fiction. In fact, it might not be
possible to write any fiction at all. We’re not describing what has actually
happened. We are inventing a story. Yet
we do actually do that from our own experiences. We tend to see our characters
as pretty much like us and ask ourselves what we would do in the circumstances
into which we put them. Part of the circumstances can be a lack – such as the
lack of emotion in Star Trek’s Spock. We base the new worlds on the worlds
we know and assume we need to replicate human experience. And often we create
for ourselves experiences we know we need to have in order to understand our
stories and render them authentic for our readers.
How do we show our readers all of that?
The temptation is to use a lot of exposition and I’ve seen
several new writers do that. This is where some trust in creative process needs
to come in and with that an acknowledgement that reading is in fact a part of
creative process.
But we do need to show and not tell. Let it be matter of
fact. It is just part of what is. If we
write with the knowledge that all of the care in our research has given us
somehow the message comes across as if the little that we write carries the DNA
of the whole. I don’t know how it works but it does.
If you want to see a master at work, look at the novels of
Oisin McGann. In particular,
The Gods and
Their Machines.
