A Writer's Guide to Active Setting Read Online Free Page A

enough to inhabit the character’s world while keeping the main focus on what’s happening in the story.
    NOTE: You need to sprinkle in clues for the reader to develop a correct Setting image. If you go back and clarify the Setting later, this can pull a reader out of your story because his Setting images did not match yours.
    When you move your character from one location in your story to another, it’s easy to forget that the reader has never been to this new location and needs to be quickly anchored.
    The following is an example of orienting the reader via Setting when moving a POV character from one location to another. Add more than a hint of Setting only when that new location has an impact on the story.
    In this example, the POV character is showing up to a job interview she didn’t apply for, but needs. A beginning writer might write something like this:
    EXAMPLE DRAFT: I went to the address I was given. The place looked okay so I went in for the interview.
    What do you see? A strip mall? A single-story building? What’s meant by
okay
? See how much you as the reader have to create because the Setting details are so vague? If this interview and place did not matter to the larger story, you could get away with vagueness. But in this story, the location will become a constant through several books in the series, so the reader needs more information.
    Look closely at what the author focuses the reader on while describing this area of New York City.
    The office—or whatever it was—didn’t exactly inspire confidence. The address was a mostly kept-up building off Amsterdam Avenue, seven stories high and nine windows across. Brick and gray stone: that looked like the norm in this neighborhood. We weren’t running with a high-income crowd here. Still, I had seen and smelled worse, and the neighborhood looked pretty friendly—lots of bodegas and coffee shops, and the kids hanging around looked as if they’d stopped there to hang on the way home from school, not been there all day waiting for their parole officer to roll by.
    —Laura Anne Gilman,
Hard Magic
    Now let’s look closer:
    The office—or whatever it was—didn’t exactly inspire confidence. [
Wariness is expressed here. The reader gets an emotional feel for the area via the POV character’s impressions. The reader hasn’t seen anything yet, but the emotional feel has been established via internal dialogue.
] The address was a mostly kept-up building off Amsterdam Avenue. [
For those who know New York City, this specific street name can say a lot. But those who don’t will skim over the specific name without context, or assume the POV character is seeing an economic state of this particular area of town.
] seven stories high and nine windows across. [
Now the reader has a distinct visual and physical image.
] Brick and gray stone: that looked like the norm in this neighborhood. [
The reader is beginning to be reassured, subtly, that the POV character can enter this building. That this space is the norm means it doesn’t stand out as better or worse, and the POV character would not be foolish to enter.
] We weren’t running with a high-income crowd here. Still, I had seen and smelled worse, [
Sensory detail (covered in more depth later in this book)—the reader doesn’t get a specific smell, but is subtly reminded that most of us are very aware that the smell of a building or neighborhood can also tell us what kind of world the character has entered.
] and the neighborhood looked pretty friendly—lots of bodegas and coffee shops, and the kids hanging around looked as if they’d stopped there to hang on the way home from school, not been there all day waiting for their parole officer to roll by. [
Here the reader has been refocused from the wariness at the beginning of the paragraph to a sense of comfort—the buildings have not changed, but what the POV character focuses the reader on—kids hanging out after school—creates a different emotion