A Cheap Trip Home

If you come from a big town in a big country (let’s say New York or London), you could spend your entire life reading nothing but books set in your own home town. I’m sure you don’t, but you could.

Certainly, if you come from America, you could spend your entire life reading American books and watching American TV, and although there are regional differences within America, those differences probably don’t constitute any sort of barrier.

Then there are those of us who come from very small countries. Those of us from New Zealand are rarely able to sink into a novel written in exactly our own culture. Instead, we develop the ability to deduce meanings from context. Sometimes I wonder how much harder we work. Sometimes I wonder how well I do.

Oh, there are a number of locally produced novels in my own home town of Christchurch, but not a lifetime’s worth. Only a subset of those are set in contemporary Christchurch, and only a smaller subset are grounded firmly in any particular setting. (I have blogged before about Literary Xenophobia.)

That’s why it is such a joy to read a book set locally. Kate de Goldi’s The 10pm Question is set in Christchurch; not only that, it’s set firmly in North West Christchurch, and I don’t think I’ve ever read anything — ever — in which the main character follows the same route to school that I once followed to school. (Albeit 15 years ago. Albeit, I think de Goldi’s fictional school is made up.)

It was so nice to open the first page and read about a cat eating ‘Go Cat’ rather than ‘Azmira’, or some other foreign brand I’ve had to guess many times from context. Likewise, Frankie Parsons is eating Just Right for breakfast, and I know exactly what Just Right tastes like, because I have eaten it too. I have never eaten Quaker Oats or Go Lean Crunch; and Cheerios are small red-skinned sausages as far as I’m concerned.

Kate de Goldi’s characters speak like people I know. They use the same phrases. I can really imagine the intonation, not just guess at it from what I’ve seen on TV.

When the Christchurch city library crops up, I know exactly what it’s like to sink into a beanbag in the children’s section because I’ve been there myself:

That was the great thing about the library. It was both teeming with people and very private. Everyone was either busy selecting books or returning them or was sprawled in a beanbag, lost in their own reading world.

I’ve been to Sparks in the Park and I remember certain Christchurch personalities:

Transistor man was IH and listened all day to a large old-fashioned transistor radio held on his shoulder.

In fact, it’s as if I’m a character in the book:

He knew the name of every person they passed by and seemed always to have some connection with them, no matter how minute. He knew someone they played Touch with, or who went out with their cousin, or flatted with their sister or had just dumped their brother.

I know the landmarks, sometimes very well:

Between the College of Ed and the Postal Services Centre they went to Havana and sat outside the heater lamps, waiting for hot chocolate.

I don’t know Havana, but Christchurch weather is less suited to al fresco dining than to sitting hunched outside around heater lamps. I know that culture very well.

I know people who grow trees of ‘black boy peaches’. I come from a family who keeps ‘earthquake water bottles and the bird flu bags of rice and pasta’. I know this book. That’s why I enjoyed it so much more than usual. I didn’t have to do any work.

So last week, just as I was absorbed in a Christchurch-centred book, revelling in its familiarity, it was the opposite of serendipity (zemblanity?) to learn that so much of my beautiful home town will never be quite the same again.

On Dreamscapes

In my mother’s dream, she was at work but it wasn’t work; they were all sitting on a boat. She doesn’t work on a boat. She works in an office, mostly.

“How do you know you were at work?” I asked, reasonably. “You’ve never worked on a boat so what made you think you could possibly be at work?”

“Well, everyone from work was there.”

“You might’ve been on a work excursion, for all you knew.”

“I just knew I was at work.”

I don’t doubt it. That’s the way with dreams. You can imagine the most ridiculous scenario, but the dream makes sense at the time. You can be up a tree but in your grandmother’s kitchen; underwater but in bed; in your car but it’s a porsche; using a public toilet in China, but the toilet has no door. (True story, that one.)

Yet somehow we know where we are. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous the scenario; the dreamscape that our brain imagines is remarkably stubborn, and resistant to change, no matter how unlikely.

For me, fictional settings work like dreams.

I recently picked up a Famous Five book: one I’d first read aged six. The book astounded me with its outdated concepts, but also in its ability to take me back to the same landscape I’d created 25 years ago. The Billycock Hill I imagined then was the very same Billycock Hill I imagined later.

Yet like many authors, Enid Blyton offers just a few brushstrokes of setting. I’d completely imagined most of it. I imagined it wrong. At age six, I’d never been to England. I imagined the Famous Five riding their modern bicycles down wide, open roads such as those in New Zealand. Now I know that the roads were more likely to be narrow and winding, and that their fences were not made of number 8 wire. The roofs would have been thatched, not made of corrugated iron. Yet I fail to re-imagine the scenes I conjured up at the age of six.

Think of the book you’re reading at the moment.

Where did you get the setting from? Does it come from a place you’ve visited? Perhaps it’s a house you lived in once, or an amalgamation. Perhaps you have no idea where it came from, because you’ve never set foot in such a place. Perhaps you’re reading science fiction or fantasy, in which case the author may have given you more details than otherwise needed.

That said, I doubt the author gave you a floorplan.

And if I asked you to draw a floorplan right now, you probably couldn’t do it easily – how do the rooms connect up? But I bet this doesn’t bother you. If you’re like me, you have a general sense of a fictional house/town/country, and you don’t worry about how the characters get from the living room to the bathroom, from house to work; they just do. (Likewise, when we visit people’s houses, we aren’t always given access to the entire home. It doesn’t bother us that we don’t know what lies beyond the living room. We trust the rest of the house exists.)

What about when you’re writing?

To what extent does an author imagine the world of their own story? Is it necessarily more complete than that of each reader? And is every reader the same in this regard? What I’d give to take a look into other people’s imaginings of my favourite books. Just how different are they?

For me, writing is very much like reading. I don’t feel I have complete control over my setting. This can frustrate me at times. My characters do and say exactly as I tell them, but the setting remains remarkably stubborn.

I have a story in my head right now, and I don’t intend to write it. (I don’t bother writing all of them – not all stories in my head need writing down.) That’s by the by. What annoys me about this story is the ridiculous floor plan. The house is large, yet the kitchen is tiny. The front door comes off the kitchen. The bedrooms are bigger than the living area, and the balcony looks out over a Mediterranean vista even though it’s set in North England. Try as I might, I can’t get this ridiculous house out of my head.

In contrast, if I watch a screen adaptation of a book, the screen version tends to replace whatever I’d imagined before. I couldn’t tell you how I imagined Hogwarts – now I imagine the movie version. And if you’ve ever had a guided tour of Oxford University, where some of it was filmed, you might be suffering from a kind of head screw, where everything in real life seems far smaller than appears on film. It’s bizarre!

I think this must be why some people resist watching movie adaptations of their favourite work. We must be careful about what we let into our heads.

Slightly Related Link: Sleep Amnesia – Why Do We Forget Our Dreams?

Conveying Setting in Fiction

Use the Landscape. Always tell us where we are. And don’t just tell us where something is, make it pay off. Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character. Look at the openings of Fitzgerald stories, and Graham Greene, they’re great at this.

JANET FITCH

Lesson #456 from my writing group:

Critter: “Where the hell is this story set? As far as I can tell, this could be set in any number of English speaking countries.”

Me: (to myself) “Fool. I gave you enough clues. IT’S SET IN NEW ZEALAND. Where else do people wear ‘jandals’?”

But of course, my readers can’t be expected to know this about footwear (versus flip-flops and thongs) unless they’re either a New Zealander (chances quite slim), or unless they’ve been deep in conversation with a New Zealander, specifically about thongs.

One mistake I have made in the past, when inflicting early drafts upon others via internet, is expecting readers to deduce from random clues where my stories are set.

I’ve learnt not to do that. It pisses people off. Some readers don’t care where they are. Others have to know. So there are two types of people, and it extends beyond the printed page: On holiday, some people get obsessed with maps, have you noticed? Others (like me) are more than happy to get on a coach and get taken for a ride, without caring particularly which town we’re passing through.

Bill Bryson writes humorously about the former group of people when he suggests all Midwestern Americans are obsessed with their maps and directions. He writes:

Directions are very important to them. They have an innate need to be oriented, even in their anecdotes. ANy story related by a Midwesterner will wander off at some point into a thicket of interior monologue along the lines of ‘We were stying at a hotel that was eight blocks norht-east of the state capitol building. Come to think of it, it was north-west. And I think it was probably more like nine blocks. And this woman without any clothes on, naked as the day she was born except for a coonskin cap, came running at us from the south-west… or was it the south-east?’ If there are two Midwesterners present and they both witnessed the incident, you can just about write off the anecdote arguing points of the compass and will never get back to the original story. You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because they will be standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a windblown map and arguing over which way is west.

- Bill Bryson, from The Lost Continent

With such readers in mind, when it comes to Geographic Setting-up in Fiction, better for a writer to just come out and say it. But how? Do you just get it out of the way before going any further?

Dave Eggers does just that in his short story Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly. He does it very well. These are the first two sentences:

She lies, she lies, Rita lies on the bed, looking up, in the room that is so loud so early in Tanzania. She is in Moshi.’

- from The Best of McSweeneys, Vol One.

Next time I write a story set in New Zealand,  I’ll just go ahead and open like that, because unless my story is submitted to a New Zealand competition or something local, my readers are international, and international readers don’t expect a story to be set in New Zealand. Americans (apparently) think of England, because I’ve used British spelling. Brits wonder why I’m writing about ‘dollars’ because I say ‘petrol station’, not ‘gas’. It’s all very confusing. Some readers assume I’m completely messed in the head because, to an outsider, New Zealand English sounds like a cross between Britishisms and Americanisms.

Of course, New Zealand English is a distinct type in its own right, drawing from other cultures as we see fit. ‘Dollars’ is no more American than ‘dog’.

But whatever made me think that I could get away with not being upfront about my setting? That’s complicated.

1. American writers don’t need to do it. Unless the story is particularly Southern, or particularly regional in flavour – unless the story is about the setting, it’s taken as a given that a story is set in America and can we please get on with it now.

2. Because the Brits don’t need to do it. Same deal.

3. Because I plain forget that, to non-locals, I do have an ‘accent’, even when I write.

4. Because I’ve actually lived in 3 different English speaking countries, and each time I sit down to write I must decide, ‘Which brand of English should I use today?’ This is a huge pain in the butt and I wish I didn’t have to do it, but most writers have lived in more than one country, it seems. This thing isn’t specific to me.

Anyway, thanks Dave. I’m following your lead.

Describe A Kitchen: Photo Stimulus

Close your eyes and imagine a kitchen. Any kitchen. Now open. Which kitchen sprang first to mind?

That’s your kitchen. You’ll be writing two or three paragraphs about that kitchen.

pic by Amanda Woodward

Whose eyes do you see through? The kitchen above looks like it’s from the view of a child. Perhaps you imagine one kitchen in particular: grandmother’s, your own house, your cousin’s kitchen, your neighbours. Perhaps you pulled it out of nowhere. That’s good too.

pic by Mark Wiewel

Whatever you imagine in your kitchen, exaggerate it a little. Flowers on the wall? Now what’ve you got?

pic by skarpetka86

If you were painting this kitchen on canvas, would you use warm hues or cool? What’s the weather like outside the window? Are you cold? Or is it a mid-summer’s day?

pic by Tom Watson

This kitchen looks as if someone’s just moving in or just moved out. What has just happened in your kitchen? What is about to happen? And most importantly, what’s happening now?

Is there anyone else in that kitchen? What are they saying to each other, if anything? Perhaps there’s just a cat. Or the dog, or a line of ants marching across the floor to an open jar of jam left on the bench.

pic by Christopher Barson

Is this a well-used kitchen, or the kitchen of someone who looks as if they’re always out to dinner?

pic by J Konig

If there are magnets and notes on the fridge, what do they say?

pic by BulletMiller

Untidy kitchens are more interesting. Pick a few details and describe. Just a few, mind. You’re not writing a photograph.

pic by cafemama

What would this kitchen smell like? What about your kitchen? What was the last thing eaten here? Can you still smell cooking aromas lingering? Maybe you smell smoke, or grass clippings from outside, or cleaning products.

pic by cafemama

Let your mind camera zoom in to the smallest detail. What can you see now that you didn’t see before? If you can’t remember details, make them up.

pic by sigma

This used to be someone’s kitchen. What happened? Where are the people now?

***

[I] Note how personalised and peopled the material world is at a level almost beneath scrutiny. I’m thinking of the cutlery in the drawer or the crockery I every morning empty from the dishwasher. Some wooden spoons, for instance, I like, think of as friendly; others are impersonal or without character. Some bowls are favourites; others I have no feeling for at all. There is a friendly fork, a bad knife and a blue and white plate that is thicker than the others and which I think of as taking the kick if I discriminate against it by using it less

- Alan Bennett, 2001 diary entry, 8 January

Describe a Setting: Photo Stimulus

pic by Stuck In Customs

pic by anthony chammond

pic by morBCN

pic by Phillipp Klinger

pic by Altus

pic by Laura K Gibb

These photos are from Flickr Creative Commons. Click on the photos to go to the original links. But actually, the less you know about these pictures before you start writing about them, the easier it will be to make the whole thing up. So don’t click until after you’ve written. Each of these photos has real stories attached.

Painting A Setting In Few Words

THE HOME OF A NEWBORN BABY

The door opened on the scene of misery and confusion in which it seemed that all Beth’s days were passed. Wet laundry — diapers and smelly baby woollens — was hanging from some ceiling racks, bottles in a sterilizer bubbled and rattled on the stove. The windows were steamed up, and soggy cloths or soiled stuffed toys were thrown on the chairs. The big baby was hanging on to the rungs of the playpen and letting out an accusing howl — Beth had obviously just set him in there — and the smaller baby was in the high chair, with some mushy pumpkin-colored food spread like a rash across his mouth and chin.

- Alice Munro, from Wenlock Edge

A SCHOOL

The school was a low concrete building surrounded by asphalt that had seesaws, swing sets and other iron instruments of play welded onto it. The halls were wide and monstrously echoed the shouts of children.

- Mary Gaitskill, from Two Girls, Fat and Thin

The longest corridor at the Institute bordered the gymnasium for its entire length. The corridor was glassed on one side with long curtained windows and recessed doors, and on the other side the wall was uninterrupted save for the heavy double doors into the gymnasium that swung out halfway down. On this long wall were fixed a number of costumes preserved adn flattened against the high brick, their empty arms spread wide, like ghosts pinned by a sudden and petrifying shaft of light.

- Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal

It’s hard to portray the layout of a building and make it sound comprehensible, let alone interesting. I love the simile at the end. It’s as if the entire paragraph leads us towards that very image.

Describe A Classroom: Photo Stimulus

Jonathan Pobre

Maybe you’re in a classroom right now. If so, you can write about that. If not, you can imagine any sort of classroom you like. It may be one classroom in particular, or it may be an amalgamation of several, or of all the classrooms you’ve ever set foot in. Or you might make it up completely.

Write what you see and imagine, not what you know.

Blackboards are really quite green, aren’t they? I wonder who scribbled on the board in the photo above. Do you think it was the teacher? What happened? This is a creative writing about setting, but I want you to imagine what happened in that classroom just before you wrote about it. This will affect the atmosphere in the room.

pic by monkeyc.net

First, imagine the outside of the building. Is it a modern building or old? What’s it made of? Is it well-maintained, or in a state of disrepair? Whatever you imagine, exaggerate a little. If there’s a flight of steps leading up to the classroom, you might instead write of a long, winding staircase. Because that’s how it sometimes feels, if you don’t want to go to class.

pic by Extra Ketchup

Now we’re inside the classroom. In your mind, is it full of people, or are you alone? If you’re alone, why? Maybe you’ve been kept back after class. Perhaps you just imagine a teacher in there, preparing a lesson, or a magic potion to cast over his students tomorrow.

What’s on the walls? If you’re writing a fantasy scene, it’s sometimes better to ground the fantasy in reality by describing what might well be on the walls of a real classroom.

pic by Liz

What’s the mood? This classroom looks like a cheerful place with a fun teacher.

pic by Night Owl City

This looks like a dreaded exam room.

pic by Dystopos

So does this one. Sometimes it’s more fun to write about an unpleasant place than a happy one. Look at the details. What do you notice after a few minutes that you did not immediately see?

The windows cast squares of white upon the wall.

The linoleum tiles are lifting in places, perhaps where the cleaner spilled a bucket of water. (You can imagine whatever you like. The more you imagine the more interesting this will read to others, who will never imagine exactly the same thing as you do.)

Ask why. Why are all these chairs pushed to the back, and why are the red ones clustered together? Who sits in the red chairs, do you think?

pic by cwtreloar

What happened to the children who used to study here?

pic by Pink Sherbet Photography

Notice the smallest detail. If you’re in a classroom right now, this will be easy. Perhaps there’s a lump of chewing gum stuck to the underside of your desk. (No, don’t check.) Or perhaps there are stains on the carpet.

pic by Aaron Knox

See how this teacher doesn’t wipe previous sums from the board before starting on another. It looks a little as if he can’t remember his equations, so he tapes them above the board as reference. Notice the way the light bounces off his head. What is the most distinguishing thing about the teacher in your classroom? (Tip: don’t choose the teacher who’s going to be grading this particular paper.)

Now, your eyes are only of so much use.

How does your classroom smell? I can smell wet wool, because it’s been raining and every student wears a green, woollen jersey. The girls wear oatmeal woollen tights.

I smell orange peels and peanut butter, because it’s after lunch and 28 students just ate their lunches in here. No doubt some of them stuffed their waste between the bar heaters and the wall.

What can you hear? Even a quiet classroom is seldom without noise. If it is, you might hear the sound of biro on paper. I hear the rain outside, and students from an adjacent classroom about to visit the library. I hear someone at the back of the room tapping a ruler on the desk, absentmindedly but annoying.

Now write.

Start with the largest detail, and zoom like a camera down to the most minuscule. Make stuff up. Let your mind make diversions. Imagine what has happened, what will happen, what maybe happened and what probably didn’t happen but is interesting anyway.

Write for ten minutes. Then see where you are. You may be surprised.