by David Housewright
Despite what you might have been told in grade school, people are not the same everywhere. They are different, and where they are from and how they live are part of what makes them different.
This is why setting is so essential to a book or story.
An important goal of any writer is to achieve reader identification. We want readers to see themselves in the lead character, to share the leader’s thoughts and emotions. Certainly, this sort of identification has a great deal to do with whether or not we find a work of fiction involving enough to stay with it and what we’ll think about it once we’ve finished reading. The more we feel that the lead character is a person like us, that he thinks and reacts like we do, the more involved we will be in his story. This is a fairly obvious point. I submit, however, that the ability to see oneself in a fictional character is only one aspect of reader identification. The other part is the ability to see ourselves living in the character’s world.
Smart use of setting transports the reader into these worlds and gives us a sense of who the characters are and why they behave the way they do.
People in Texas not only speak differently than the folks in Minnesota, they have a different worldview based on location, climate, history, politics, even sports (in Texas football is king; Minnesota is the state of hockey). And these differences will affect how characters behave and how a story will unfold. At least they should.
Many writers don’t care about setting. Or perhaps I should say setting isn’t particularly important to the stories they tell. Most of Ross Macdonald’s novels take place in Southern California. So do Sue Grafton’s. Yet you could move them to another locale without losing much. Some writers actually invent the cities and towns their books take place in, as Ed McBain did with his 87th Precinct and the Matthew Hope novels.
On the other hand, James Lee Burke’s novels can only take place in New Orleans. The same is true of Carl Hiaasen’s in Florida, James Crumley’s in Montana and Idaho, William Kent Krueger’s in northern Minnesota, Dennis Lehane’s in Boston, and Laura Lippman’s in Baltimore. The settings these authors choose do more than merely set the stage for their stories. They influence everything that takes place in them.
Settings don’t need to be based on geography, either. It could be economics: the denizens of Kenwood have little in common with the good folks who live on the North Side of Minneapolis. Or politics: in Saint Paul, the fairly conservative East Siders have a poor opinion of the liberals who live in the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood.
So, how do you capture setting? It starts with research. Learn the history of a location. (Everything has a backstory. Everything!) Most importantly, you must go to the places you’re writing about.
I went recently to Chicago to sign some books. The first thing I noticed was the car horns. They are relentless and if you watch Chicago drivers, you’ll see why.
I discovered that the Chicago River isn’t green because they dye it on St. Patrick’s Day; it’s green because of over 150 years of continuous pollution (although the EPA did recently upgrade the river from “toxic” to “hazardously polluted”). In the early 1900s, to avoid polluting its water supply—specifically Lake Michigan—the city dredged the Chicago River enough to reverse its course so that its sewage emptied into the Des Plaines and Illinois Rivers—and ultimately the Mississippi—which made everyone happy except the people living along the Des Plaines, Illinois, and Mississippi Rivers.
I learned that if you want to go to Cellular Field to watch the White Sox, you take the “red line” to 35th Street and that Sox fans don’t mind if you wear Twins apparel, but God help you if they catch you in a Cubs jersey.
There are more mansions on Sheridan Road than on Lake Shore Drive, and the first Ferris wheel (it appeared at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893) had gondolas the size of railroad cars and each was equipped with a full bar.
Granted, none of this information is particularly important, but you have a better sense of the city and the people who live there now than you did 20 seconds ago, I bet.
I’m not talking about merely sprinkling your work with landmarks and having characters walking down familiar streets or past famous buildings. If you want to make the most use of setting, you have to immerse yourself in the area and the customs of the people. (Think Margaret Mead and her study of Samoans.) Reading Wikipedia isn’t going to cut it.
If you can’t actually travel to the location—I once did a chapter on Paris in 1934—you had better learn to research from afar, studying all the documents you can lay your hands on (photographs are good, diaries and letters are better, and you just can’t beat talking to people who have actually been there).
Which isn’t to suggest that everything you set in your story must exist. I add inventions all the time—whatever I need to tell my story. But if you do use real streets, real buildings, real whatever, you must subscribe to the three A’s: accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. You are not writing fiction. You are writing real stories about real people in the throes of real emotions. It becomes “fiction” when readers come across something that makes them stop and say, “That’s not right.”
Just remember the old saying: if you were from where they are from and you were taught what they were taught, you would believe what they believe. That is the ultimate goal of setting: making the reader believe.
David Housewright has earned the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America as well as two Minnesota Book Awards for his crime fiction. Highway 61 is currently available in hardcover. Housewright’s 12th book, Curse of the Jade Lily, will be released in April 2012. He occasionally teaches a novel-writing course at the Loft.
