Inhabiting Your Setting

 Actors sometime talk about “inhabiting” a character. As near as I can tell, they mean that they try to get inside the skin of the character and live—at least for a while—as if they are that person. They want to ‘think’ like the character so their actions will come natural.

We writers generally can’t do the same thing because we are writing “many” characters. We can’t inhabit just one or all our characters will sound and act the same. What we can do, however, is inhabit the setting our characters move through. Setting has a powerful influence on character thoughts  & actions. It affects every character.

Take the woods, for example. I grew up in the country and spent a lot of time in the forest. I’ve been there in daytime, in fog, in mornings & evenings, at night. I’ve camped out. Explored. I’ve been cold and shivering there, felt awe and fear. While writing the book Cold in the Light, which was set mostly in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, I took many long walks in the woods at night to try and get back the feel for such wild climes. I was putting my characters through that kind of experience and wanted to feel what they were supposed to be feeling. I think it worked, and parts of that book made me distinctly uncomfortable while writing them.

Anyone can experience the woods, of course. But what if the story setting doesn’t actually exist? Under the Ember Star takes place on the frigid desert world of Kelmer. I’ve never been. So how did I ‘inhabit’ that environment?  First, my wife and I took a trip several years ago to Arizona & New Mexico. Lana is a photographer and took many pictures of barren, desiccated landscapes. We toured a slot canyon that showed the power of water in a desert setting. I spent a lot of time in those places, soaking in the feel. I also read a bunch of books about living in desert environments, such as Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire.

Then I did lots of imagination work related to the story. Not just on the storyline. I imagined and worked through scenarios in my head for all kinds of settings in the book. I asked questions like, what if I had been there a few hours before an event in the book took place, or a few hours after? What would the temperature be? How much dust would be in the air? Would there be bugs? Would there be any food?  How would the plants look? I followed these questions up, if needed, by Googling photos and chronicles that might help me.

A writer’s primary job is to get the reader to ‘experience’ what the characters are experiencing. Inhabiting the setting for a story is one way to do that.

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When a Manuscript is "Done."

I guess I’ll tag this post under writing techniques because it might not be of interest to anyone else. It’s about what happens when a manuscript is “essentially” done.

For example, Wraith of Talera is finished except for one last reread. I’ll do that next week. Gonna let it sit a few days. I just finished some pretty much mechanical stuff on the manuscript this weekend and week. When a book is done I always do a “search” for particular words that I often overuse. In doing so this time I ended up taking out over 900 words that were basically useless out of almost 70,000. The words I search for in particular are, “that,” “my,” “though,” “still,” and “I.”  It’s first person. I also search for “And,” “But,” and “Yet” at the beginning of sentences, which I overdo at times. I also search for “said,” and “asked” and take out excess ones And I search for words that need to be used sparingly, such as “suddenly” and “finally.”

Although I believe this is a good thing for writers to do, there is a risk. Searching through a whole novel this way for a single word can give the impression that the word is far overused when in fact it isn’t if you consider it spread out over the entire book. For example, I use “my” a fair amount in the Talera books, but this is, in part, because they are first person books and I need to cut out some of the “I”s that can really overwhelm the reader otherwise.

Someone told me not to worry about “said” because it becomes invisible to the reader. I’ve always heard that and I think it is generally true for me. However, I’ve noticed it does not become “inaudible” to those who listen to audio books. Since the Taleran books have been produced in Audio, I also wanted to remove excess “saids” for that reason.

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Color and Mood in Writing

I'm over at Novel Spaces today with a post on color and mood in writing. I hope you can drop by.

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Kate Wilhelm, Storyteller

One of the better books I’ve read on writing in recent years has been Storyteller by Kate Wilhelm. I got mine in hardback from the SF book club. It’s copyright 2005, from Small Beer Press. She made one particular suggestion in that book that I’ve tried a couple of times and found informative.

On page 17, Wilhelm suggests taking one of your stories and going through it paragraph by paragraph. Next to each paragraph write whether it’s “setting,” “character description,” “action,” and so on. This should give you a nice visual on how you’ve constructed the story. On page 53, she gives an alternative way of doing this exercise. Take a copy of a story or book that you don’t mind marking up, get some colored pencils, then underline the material that is about character, setting, action, etc., in different colors. Wilhelm says that a good story should have a “rainbow effect” when you are done.

Certainly, too much “setting” would suggest a static story. I’m also guessing that literary stories would have a lot more “character” paragraphs in them while genre stories might be heavier on “action.” I would imagine fantasy and SF stories would have heavier amounts of “setting” than contemporary thrillers.

To take this suggestion a step further, it might be a good idea to try this exercise on writers you admire. Select particularly effective examples of writing and examine them to see how the writer put the piece together. I haven’t tried this on other writers yet, but I think I’m going to have a look at one of Dean Koontz’s older thrillers.

Rewriting the Classics

I found a great quote in On Writing Horror, in a piece by Michael Marano, although he makes clear that he got the basic idea from another writer. The quote is: "...to read a passage is to fly over it, while writing it out is to walk the same path that the writer did." Marano suggests finding passages from writers that you find particularly effective in creating horror and "type" those out yourself so as to put yourself in that writer's shoes. It wouldn't have to be horror, of course. You could retype a particularly telling bit of description, or an adept bit of characterization. I think I'm going to give this a try and see what happens. Has anyone done this?

Here's my first example, from Matthiessen's Snow Leopard:

"The old man has been ravened from within. That blind and greedy stare of his, that caved-in look, and the mouth working, reveal who now inhabits him, who now stares out. I nod to Death in passing, aware of the sound of my own feet upon my path. The ancient is lost in a shadow world, and gives no sign."

OK, a couple of quick points. For this exercise I don't think you need to worry about such things as getting the dash in "caved-in." Maybe it is even informative if you "don't" get it perfectly right but then compare your version to the other author's. I also automatically feel a push to rewrite it, to make it my own, not because I see problems with it, but just because, beautiful as it is, it's not how "I" would say it. And yet, I don't think I could improve on it.