How conscious are you of a novel’s setting? Have you ever thought about what goes into creating it and how it is used?
Good use of language, character, dialogue, plot, and most other literary tools are essential if a story or novel is to succeed. But setting can be of great or minimal consequence depending on the tale the author wishes to tell. In this respect, it is almost unique.
Very broadly speaking, setting seems to matter more to male writers. I don’t know why. A few examples off the top of my head: Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Crazy in Alabama by Mark Childress, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, even ’Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. All of these stories are beholden to time and/or place. Take the characters out of that particular milieu and the whole story falls over.
A sense of place is often (but not always) less crucial to novels that are pompously referred to as ‘chick lit’. Most of Jane Austen’s novels were set in country England but could have, with a few descriptive tweaks, been set in London. Liane Moriarty’s novels are often set in suburban Sydney, but there is no reason they couldn’t be transplanted to a city in the USA. Certainly there are exceptions – Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and My Place by Sally Morgan come to mind – but because a lot of female fiction is primarily concerned about the emotions of its characters, the places where those emotions are examined are irrelevant.
Pondering this, I got thinking about where I had set my own stories over the years. As a rule, it wasn’t something I agonised over or even contemplated much – most times the setting came pre-packaged with the plot. I knew I had a predeliction for the Australian outback and had set some stories in suburbia and in coastal towns, but I decided to go back over my published stories and novels and categorise them by setting to see if I could find any patterns or draw any conclusions. Here is the raw data:
Suburban Australia (7)
Blue Diamond Pool (2007), Ghost Kiss (2008), The Best Laid Plans (2008), A Christmas Horror (2008), Old Secrets (2009), Mere Symptoms of Living (2010), Teething Problems (scheduled for 2015)
Outback Australia (4)
Modifications (2008), Buried Potential (2008), The Pothole (2009), The Midway Hotel (2013)
Urban Australia (4)
The Beauty Without (2005), Bite Back (2008), Even Superheroes Get the Blues (2010), Threshold (2012)
Rural USA (4)
Cut ’Em Down (19th Century, wild west – 2006), Trouble with the Locals (2006), Invasion at Bald Eagle (set in 1969 – 2015), Night Feeds (implied – 2015)
Space (3)
The Hybrid Child (1997), Level Two: Time Trial (2007), Test Case (2015)
Coastal Australia (3)
Left Behind (2008), The Devils of Cain Island (2014), Unreal Estate (2015)
Urban USA (2)
Flesh Sandwiches (2012), Hollywood Hearts Ablaze (2014)
Fantasy World (1)
Displeasures of the Flesh (2008)
I was shocked to find Suburban Australia at the top of the list. I suppose I shouldn’t have been shocked, since I’ve spent my entire life in Sydney’s suburbs, but I didn’t remember setting so many stories there. The result is even more significant given that both ‘Bite Back’ and ‘Threshold’, which I put in Urban Australia, are line-ball; they could probably go into Suburban Australia as well. That would push the total to nine, a sizable majority.
Further analysis, however, reveals something interesting: none those stories have to be set in suburban Australia. They have an Australian flavour because they are set in Australia and I am Australian, but they could be put almost anywhere in the English-speaking world.
In contrast, all the stories set in Outback Australia rely on their setting for some reason, most commonly isolation. I suppose you could set them in another out-of-the-way place, but you would pretty much have to start each tale from scratch.
The Rural USA stories are even more dependent on setting. Except for ‘Trouble with the Locals’, which could probably be moved to a rural area in any country, they all have plots that are inextricably linked to time and place. Two are period pieces and one is set in an (implied) artic region where the sun doesn’t set for a month*. Can’t locate that in Sydney!
Fantasy and hard sci-fi rely on ‘world building’, so setting is of course crucial to the Space and Fantasy World stories. The Space result was the least surprising. I dabble with sci-fi, but it has always been more of a ‘booty call’ situation than a committed relationship. I included ‘The Hybrid Child’ (which appeared in a university anthology) not to beef up the Space list, but to get a broader picture of my writer’s mindset across the years. If I also included unpublished stories, Space and Fantasy would be a bit fatter – but the overall category ratios would remain the same.
The stories set in Coastal Australia really don’t need to be. ‘The Devils of Cain Island’ needs to be set on the coast, since it is about two salvage divers, but it wouldn’t have to be the Australian coast per se (and during composition I was rather vague on that score – it was just ‘some place on a coast’). The other two could be set anywhere, really, although I did tap into my memories of holidays in coastal towns for ‘Left Behind’. The vacant lot that occasioned the idea for ‘Unreal Estate’** was actually in suburbia!
That just leaves Urban USA, which is a fifty-fifty split. ‘Flesh Sandwiches’, despite its Americana sheriff, could have been set anywhere. Hollywood Hearts Ablaze, on the other hand, was conceived from the outset as a Californian story. I guess you could move it to another place where films and television shows are produced, but I suspect you would wind up with very different characters and a very different flavour.
So what does all that mean (if anything)?
The purpose of setting, for the mainstream fiction and genre writer anyway, is to provide a convincing backdrop for the story. That's why authors so often adhere to the old rule 'write what you know' when it comes to setting – it's easier to create a well imagined and described setting, which helps the reader feel ‘cosy’ and forget he or she is reading a story. Location can also (as some of my stories show) be intrinsic to the plot. In more ‘serious’ literature, however, setting is often applied to a higher purpose.
Mark Twain used the Mississippi River as a metaphor for Huck Finn’s journey towards maturity and understanding; Mark Childress juxtaposed the tableau of civil rights era Alabama with a woman carting her husband's severed head across the country and becoming a co-star on The Beverly Hillbillies to show just how crazy the former was. Because I’m largely a genre writer (and often a pulpy one at that), rare is the time my settings aspire to such lofty literary import.
The closest I’ve come is with ‘Buried Potential’, where the teenaged protagonist feels trapped on his parents’ remote outback farm. Even when he digs up a mysterious object and develops superpowers, he remains powerless in the face of his isolation. And when he does finally manage to escape his suffocating life, he becomes a villain in the process.
Over the years I had noticed that kids growing up in rural areas (or even Sydney’s outlying suburbs) often became victims of their isolation. Fewer opportunities for education and employment meant they didn’t reach their potential – hence the story’s title – and they often became delinquents, layabouts and losers. That theme was top of mind during rewrites of ‘Buried Potential’.
But such conscious use of setting to thematic purpose is rare for me. Post-analysis, I think my initial instinct was right: setting is well down the list of my concerns as an author. It tends to be a foundation stone of my stories rather than part of the architecture.
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* 'Night Feeds', to appear in Creepy Campfire Stories in October 2015.
** 'Unreal Estate' was supposed to be appear in Dark Moon Digest #20 on July 1, but there has been a delay (almost par for the course in the small press world).