SESSION IX Orienting Readers with Setting

Today I want to teach you that we need to be sure that we turn on the lights in our stories, to show the place and the time, so that our readers don’t have that disoriented feeling, asking, “Wait, where is this? What’s going on?”

Sometimes when we are writing a scene we get so caught up in our dialogue that we forget everything else. Let me give you an example. Ryan a high-school writer, wrote this. I didn’t know what to do. I looked at her. “Hey, are you mad at me?” I asked. “No. Are you mad at me?” she asked. I took a deep breath. “No. I don’t think so,” I said. “Great, then let’s race,” she said. Some things work in this scene. Characters are talking. We can tell how they are feeling. But the characters are floating. The story produces the same feeling I had when I woke up in the middle of the night and I didn’t know where I was. We can’t tell where the characters are, and we’re not sure what they are doing.

To make sure the lights are on for our readers, we need to always include two things: actions and setting. Watch how Ryan’s draft became much more clear when he added action and setting. Ryan didn’t actually know what the characters were doing. When he wrote the draft, his characters were just talking. So he decided to revise his draft so his characters were walking home from school. He decided it’d be a gray, rainy day. That way, one of the characters could do stuff with an umbrella and the other character could step in puddles. Ryan expected the actions could be fillers, really, to hold up the talk, but the actions ended up revealing the real story in an important way.

“Are you mad at me?” I asked as we walked down the sidewalk together. “No. Are you mad at me?” Zoe responded. A car whizzed passed us, kicking up water from the rain filled gutters as it went. I thought about what Zoe was asking, and shifted the umbrella so that it protected her as well as me. With my other hand, I tugged on my backpack straps. My bag was heavy from all the homework our teachers had given us. “No. I’m not mad,” I said. She smiled at me from beneath her yellow rain hood. “Good. Then let’s race!” She took off ahead of me, splashing through every puddle on the sidewalk. The rain streamed down on her. I pulled in my umbrella and took off after her.

Writers do you see how the characters are not in the dark anymore Writers do you see how the characters are not in the dark anymore? We can really picture them. We can see what they’re doing and where they are. And you know what? When Ryan wrote this, his only plan was to have the two of them walking home together. He only made it be a rainy day because he figured he could describe the rain. Then, as he wrote the scene, adding in the actions, stuff started happening between the characters that Ryan never planned for at all-it just happened on the page! It surprised Ryan that his main character decided to move the umbrella over to shield Zoe, and he was totally surprised when her “Let’s race” response left him standing like a fool with that open umbrella! All of this drama came out in the story simply because Ryan realized that he needed to get his characters out of the dark, and to rewrite the story, showing the characters as they moved and interacted with the setting.

Gabrielle’s story I’ve been writing some more of it- and as we read, let’s ask ourselves, “Will this make sense to my readers? Is this clear? If we come to a place in the story where the words seem to come out of the dark, a place where we suspect that readers might feel disoriented, you and your partner will have a chance to write in the air, sprinkling references to the setting and to small actions that characters do in that setting, into our next version.

“Cake. ” My mom called from the kitchen “Cake!” My mom called from the kitchen. All of us race to the table, which my mom had decorated entirely in yellow. “Everything looks so cool,” Marta said as she reached for a thick slice of the yellow cake with chocolate frosting. I couldn’t help grinning. I had been right to choose yellow. It was a cool colour. Since I didn’t really have a favourite colour, it didn’t really matter anyway. I had barley swallowed the last bit of my cake when the other girls started to jump out of their seats to toss their party plates in the trash. “Let’s go, first one there gets dibs on spots,” Trish called out as she ran.

Could you picture what was going on. Did you see the place Could you picture what was going on? Did you see the place? So let’s read on. “Here’s my place,” said Beccah “I’ll be near,” I said. “We can talk. But let’s move closer to the closet.” “No, this is nice.” “Weelll…” “Can we fit in?” three others said. “I’ll move over,” I answered.

Writers, please don’t simply comment on how you’d go about rewriting this to add setting and actions-share the new story. Share new version. Act out new version.

Improv new scene End the scene in the way that is informed by the acting.

Writers you have done some amazing revision Writers you have done some amazing revision. You reread this part of our draft and realized that readers might feel disoriented, as if the scene were taking place in the dark. So you sprinkled in a little information about the characters exact actions in the setting, and as you did this, you-like Ryan- ended up surprising yourselves and finding that things are happening between the characters that we didn’t even realize when we planned the story. That is writers do. Our revisions start out as corrections and they end up as creations.

Writers, today you will continue to draft and revise your stories, shifting between the two processes. And when you revise, you’ll reread for all the goals that have become important to you. You’ll make sure your characters feel real. You’ll keep and eye on the deeper meaning of your story. You’ll make sure you don’t leave your readers in the dark. If there is a section of your story that seems disorienting, you can revise it like you’ve done today, adding more setting and actions to the scene. Please be sure that if you expect to correct your draft, you do so knowing that revisions that begin as corrections often take on a life of their own and become creations. Let your characters do things to and with each other that you’d never expected they’d do. Run along behind them.