Writing Forum

A macabre story, eh?

There are a few things you can do to use your setting as a "character." I put "character" in quotation marks because you are not actually making a character of your setting in the traditional sense of the word ("Hi, my name is Bob, and I'm a socially conflicted grocery store"), but you're using it as a device to either enhance the reader's experience of a scene, to highlight or feature a personality trait of an actual character, or to show the character's emotions in a less than conventional way.

Using the setting as a device to enhance the reader's experience of a scene is what most writers do with the world they create. It's why we create worlds different from our own. This is a way for the writer to show the reader what it is like to live in a particular invented place. The elements may be harsh and therefore the characters have had to adapt. War, religion, resources, climate especially -- these are things that will dictate how your characters will act/react. Sometimes, the environment can be the character's only nemesis. You may have just one "human" (or whatever) character in your story and the climate is the only antagonist.

The way to use the setting to highlight something in your character is the classic use of a "foil." Rather than Dr. Watson constantly asking Sherlock Holmes questions so that the writer (Master Arthur Conan Doyle) could show the reader Sherlock's level of intelligence and reasoning, your setting can act as the foil. The setting can provide clues, hardships that need to be figured out, or even reward. What would the movie Castaway have been without the desert island setting? In that story, the setting is a character.

What I mean by the ability of a setting to show the character's emotions is the classic theatric device called "pathetic fallacy." This device's purpose is to have the weather or atmosphere or setting reflect the character's emotions. By this I mean, if you are trying to show your character as being sad -- his wife left him, his dog died, he lost his job, he's standing on the porch of the house that was once a happy home but is now just a reminder of all that he lost...and then it begins to pour rain. Pathetic fallacy is used all the time on screen and in live theatre. It is a device that can work well in prose writing too if done properly. This one is really easy to screw up though so be very careful if you decide to use it.

There are other things you can try too like personification, where you have the wind blow over the top of an empty glass bottle and the resulting whistle just happens to sound exactly like an answer to your character's question. And some settings are just more creepy than others -- an abandoned hotel or hospital, a little girl's frilly bedroom with all kinds of glassy-eyed dollies looking right at the character, or an oddly placed item, like a machete in the lacy crib.

Creating and properly employing a great setting can be your greatest ally in prose writing. Watch for some of these things in the books you're reading or the movies you're watching. They are all over the place. The main thing though is that the setting must cause something to happen in your character -- cause him to react in a certain way -- else you've failed to use the setting properly. That leads to flabby writing.

Does that help at all?


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