Setting the Scene

 Happy June! Happy Summer!

Time for a bit of "writing craft talk."

Specifically, setting the scene.

I have written here before about using "Setting as Character," and I'll be dealing with setting again today, just a different aspect of setting.

Specifically "establishing setting," or, put more prosaically, "setting the scene." And I'll be sharing examples of authors doing so effectively in a whole host of ways.

First things first; it's important to separate short stories from novels, as, due to differences in length, short stories tend to drop their characters right into the scene fairly quickly, where novels have more space with which to work. Let's start with short stories.

Short Stories

The following scenes are written by authors who also wrote (and have been celebrated for) novels. We will revisit their scene setting in the section on novels:

Friday night is fight night at the Steiner Street house. This particular one was my first idle evening in several weeks. I had gone up to the rink, fitted myself to a hard wooden chair not too far from the ring, and settled down to watch the boys throw gloves at one another. The show was about a quarter done when I picked out this pair of odd and somehow familiar ears two rows ahead of me.

–Dashiell Hammett, "The Whosis Kid"

   *    *    *

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry

Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

It had been open about a week and it wasn't doing any business. The kid behind the bar was in his early twenties and looked as if he had never had a drink in his life.

There was only one other customer, a souse on a bar stool with his back to the door. He had a pile of dimes stacked neatly in front of him, about two dollars' worth. He was drinking straight rye in small glasses and he was all by himself in a world of his own."

–Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind"

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The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this
side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.

"Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway

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Three authors celebrated for both their short stories and their novels. The interesting thing? As you’ll see when we pull examples from their long form work, the approaches of these three celebrated early 20th century authors don’t vary markedly from their approaches in their short stories.

Put simply: “Drop ‘em on in it, and let the reader know right away something is 'off.'”

Hemingway especially was known for the brevity (some would call it “terseness”) of his style. Any number of literary analysts have alluded to Hemingway’s early training as a journalist while working first for The Kansas City Star, and then moving to Europe, where he went to work for the Toronto Star during the 1920s as having been incredibly influential on his style.

And that’s likely true. Hemingway himself repeated stated that the only “how-to” book he ever consulted was The Kansas City Star’s “Star Copy Style Sheet.” For his part Hemingway called it: "the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing."

Hammett, too, developed his style on the job as a detective for the Pinkerton Agency-writing up things like case files and surveillance reports. Is it any wonder then, that Hammett, like Hemingway, varied his approach to scene-setting very little in between short stories and novels?

As for Chandler, learning to write fiction "on the job" was pretty much the opposite of his experience. Graduating from Dulwich College, he received a first-rate classical education, and wrote poetry that went unnoticed, before chucking it all and moving out to California and developing an accounting system for an oil company that led to several promotions before an abrupt dismissal for drunkenness.

Novellas

Novellas, once left for dead largely as a result of the advent of television scripts, which tended to be about the same word count as novellas (and infinitely better paying), have begun a long, slow comeback thanks to the ebook revolution.

You won't see them advertised as such most of the time, but take a look at the word count on some of the indie thrillers out there and we are talking long short story/novelette/novella length. Here's a scene being set pulled from the pages of an actual novellas (and it's one of mine):

“You ain’t Clute."

I turned in the speaker’s direction. “I beg your pardon, sir?”

“You ain’t Clute,” the man repeated. He sounded as if his mouth was full, in that manner distinctive to tobacco chewers.

I looked about the makeshift train platform. A rude log cabin abutted it and everywhere the green of the forest pressed in upon it. A chalked sign above the only door read “Coal Creek.” The platform itself wholly consisted of uncured logs, cut into planks so recently the soles of my shoes were already tacky with resin. Aside from the crew tending the locomotive which had carried me up the spur line from Renton, there were only three people on it: the hatless, bald, barrel-chested man asking about “Clute,” a Chinaman in suit and tie, standing diffidently a respectful distance behind the speaker, and me.

–Paper Son by Brian Thornton

Shorter in length, so still honoring the short story's economy of language, and dropping the main character right in it, while signaling to the reader that the scene described is not 'normal.' There are novellas out there (Conrad's Heart of Darkness comes to mind) that take their time building the setting. Conrad was a hell of a writer and could pull that sort of thing off, as is attested by the continuing popularity of his writing even in this day of Tik Tok-eroded attention spans.

Novels

The final turn took me around a shielding wall of popsicle cedar trees to the forecourt of the Montgomery place where a soft pattering fountain sprayed cool water in through the car window. The mansion was an L shape with the front door in the crease of the elbow. It was a nice family home if your family was everybody in Kansas. The windows were small and many and a heavy roof hung over it all like a furrowed brow. A low row of garages stood at the side. The doors were open and identical black Packards winked and gleamed in the shade, big as trains but better kept, perfectly waxed and ready to serve, glinting side by side. I parked my dusty Olds, got out and went up the steps to the front door.

-The Second Murderer by Denise Mina

As I stated above, novels are allowed to take their sweet time. And a skilled writer like Denise Mina knows how to make use of every word, to say nothing of employing sly wit (The "Kansas" line.).

Compare the above with a similar scene penned by the great Ross MacDonald, below.

   *    *    *

The cab turned off U.S. 101 in the direction of the sea. The road looped round the base of a brown hill into a canyon lined with scrub oak. 

“This is Cabrillo Canyon,” the driver said. 

There weren’t any houses in sight. “The people live in caves?” 

“Not on your life. The estates are down by the ocean.” 

A minute later I started to smell the sea. We rounded another curve and entered its zone of coolness. A sign beside the road said: “Private Property: Permission to pass over revocable at any time.” 

The scrub oak gave place to ordered palms and Monterey cypress hedges. I caught glimpses of lawns effervescent with sprinklers, deep white porches, roofs of red tile and green copper. A Rolls with a doll at the wheel went by us like a gust of wind, and I felt unreal. 

The light-blue haze in the lower canyon was like a thin smoke from slowly burning money. Even the sea looked precious through it, a solid wedge held in the canyon’s mouth, bright blue and polished like a stone. Private property: color guaranteed fast; will not shrink egos. I had never seen the Pacific look so small.

– The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald

Different rich people. Different approach to delineating the difference between their world and that of the protagonist, as stand-in for the reader. 

   *    *    *

And then you have the gritty realism of a Michael Connelly police procedural:

The patrol officers had left the front door open. They thought they were doing her a favor, airing the place out. But that was a violation of crime scene protocol regarding evidence containment. Bugs could go in and out. Touch DNA could be disturbed by a breeze through the house. Odors were particulate. Airing out a crime scene meant losing part of that crime scene. But the patrol officers didn’t know all of that. The report that Ballard had gotten from the watch lieutenant was that the body was two to three days old in a closed house with the air-conditioning off. In his words, the place was as ripe as a bag of skunks.

– Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly

  *    *    *

And the grim winter of Ann Cleeves:

Fran Hunter had a car but she didn’t like using it for short trips. She cared about global warming and wanted to do her bit. She had a bike with a seat on the back for Cassie, had brought it with her on the Northlink ferry when she moved. She prided herself on travelling light and it had been the only bulky item in her luggage. In this weather though a bike was no good. Today she wrapped Cassie up in her dungarees and coat and the wellingtons with the green frogs on the front and pulled her to school on a sledge. It was January 5th, the first day of the new school term. When they set off it was hardly light. Fran knew Mrs Henry already disapproved of her and didn’t want to be late. She didn’t need more knowing looks and raised eyebrows, the other mothers talking about her behind her back. It was hard enough for Cassie to fit in.

– Raven Black by Ann Cleeves

Fran is a preoccupied mother trying to navigate the social maze which is elementary parenting, and Cleeves manages to set the scene queickly and deftly, leaving the point of view character preoccupied by mundane thoughts, heading toward school, and...?

  *    *    *

Katherine Anne Porter was a writer of power and a master of penetrating imagery. As such (and as a rough contemporary of Conrad), she deftly does double duty with setting the scene below from her short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Not only does she take the long way toward describing where her main character actually is, but also manages to convey to the reader the unsettling fact that she is not where she ought to be from the very first sentence.

In sleep she knew she was in her bed, but not the bed she had lain down in a few hours since, and the room was not the same but it was a room she had known somewhere. Her heart was a stone lying upon her breast outside of her; her pulses lagged and paused, and she knew that something strange was going to happen, even as the early morning winds were cool through the lattice, the streaks of light were dark blue and the whole house was snoring in its sleep.

– Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter

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And let's close with another example from Chandler's work. Setting the scene at the beginning of 1939's The Big Sleep:

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.

There were French doors at the back of the hall, beyond them a wide sweep of emerald grass to a white garage, in front of which a slim dark young chauffeur in shiny black leggings was dusting a maroon Packard convertible. Beyond the garage were some decorative trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs. Beyond them a large greenhouse with a domed roof. Then more trees and beyond everything the solid, uneven, comfortable line of the foothills.

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A quick confession: I generated the images used in this post using a terrific graphics-proficient creative AI called Midjourney. And how did I do it?

I took each of the entries above and used them as the prompt for what  eventually became the image I would use to illustrate each entry.

Good writing is descriptive. Great writing puts you right there. With or without an AI assist.

And on that note, that's all for me this time. What tricks do you use in your scene setting? Feel free to add them in the comments, and let's talk all about setting the scene!

See you in two weeks!