Thoughts of a Mad Man

White Room: Where to display your setting (reflection paper)

I always thought that I wrote my stories like radio shows---with no setting---because of the structure. The POV sees or hears something that means something to him, which causes him to do something: a causes b causes c, and nothing should get in the middle.


When it does interfere, the POV can have her life turned upside down and the reader will think nothing's happening. If anything were happening, why are we getting lost in the description of ear points and wagon wheels?


And yet, the reality is it's hard because it's stuff I don't care about, the POV doesn't care about, and the readers won't care about---except if they notice that I haven't told. People always want to know a secret, no matter how trivial.


So, the key is to give them enough and to do so in the flow of the cause and effect cycle (e.g. Swain's MRU, which is See stuff, think stuff, do stuff, then see stuff again.)


So where do we look?


First, look for vague verbs and nouns. Did you have baggage or a pile of suitcases? Did you clean or did you slather over it with a mop?


Second, add concrete detail with adjectives and yes, adverbs. (Adverbs are the road to hell--but there is an offramp. They can be consolidated later, e.g. when 'mop wetly' becomes slather.) The key in this step is to be more concrete--more of the five-plus senses.


For example, do we have 'six ragged suitcases stacked by the door' or 'a mess of shining suitcases piled in the back corner of the dusty closet.'





So those are the first line, the freebies. Take them for all that they were worth, because they're safe.


Next we have what the POV notices and cares about. Anything that changes the behavior of the POV.


Are the drapes clean and fresh as he pulls them aside, or are they old, tattered and dusty? Won't that change how he touches them?


hen there's pathetic fallacy, so called because you're arranging the area so that it matches how the POV feels. As if our world were run by Law of Attraction.


It's not a fallacy; what it is, is the brain in work. If you're depressed you can go into the most cheerful room and all you'll see is a lot of fake, empty and hollow stuff. Even if there's only one gloomy thing, that's what you'll see--and that's what the narrator should describe.