I've been thinking about how some stories travel where the setting often can be changing and how some stories stay put in terms of setting for some 200 pages or so (at least for the most part) or maybe have a handful or so locations for a given story but not venturing beyond them. I've seen both options work well. And written stories both novels and short stories doing both. I don't think it's a story length thing. It's more to do with the framework of a given story. My murder mystery novel had setting changes quite often. My dystopian novel pretty much stays put. I write a lot of short stories too and those seem to travel more than I would assume, but I don't think I've used a single setting for a long time (not since I started writing short stories professionally and selling them to magazines and journals). I don't think there is a right or wrong approach when it comes to how often your setting shifts. Just wondering what some of you are doing with this and if you've noticed any sort pattern in your writing when it comes to how many settings you need in your stories. Thoughts?
I did write one story with a big travel section in the middle of it. Some of my favorite books include a lot of travel—Moby Dick (though really one part of the ocean is a lot like any other part) and Lord of the Rings. I really fell in love with the way travel was handled in LoTR—they're walking or riding across rugged territory, they see a city or forest or mountain range way up ahead that looks tiny and toylike, it looms larger as they approach. It grows until it's now their world and they have to pass through or around it, and then it falls away and dwindles into insignificance behind them. And as they went, everything became gradually wilder. Suddenly it occurred to me I could write something like that into the story I was working on, which was a comedic fantasy. I did a sort of spoof on Dante's Inferno. One thing I think made it interesting is that the group had to walk all the way down, ring after ring (they weren't separated by sheer cliffs like in Dante, just steep-ish hillsides), but on the way back they got to ride on a dragon that flew them majestically over it all, and below them they could see each of the various hell-torture spots they had labored through. It served as a reminder of the horrors they had passed through so up-close and personal before, now seen from a safe distance. I think it's a nice way to structure a story.
I've definitely noticed that my writing tends to be static in setting; I've written quite a few single-room stories. Some of that is simply because I tend to write short, but honestly even flash fiction can include travel if it's handled well, and even my longest pieces (both about 13,000 words) are set in single locations. I think a lot of my stories are essentially one-act plays written out in prose form, especially my older ones, which often suffered from "white room" syndrome as I was too focused on the dialogue and neglected the setting. It's probably not a coincidence that I haven't published any of them yet. I do have some stories that move around a bit, but most of them are stalled in my in-progress folder. I might revisit some of them after I finish up my current round of poetry revisions. And now that I'm thinking about this, some of my other stories might benefit from a little travel. My haunted house story, for instance, naturally focuses on the house itself, but now I'm wondering how the owners would handle some time away on vacation in the middle of the story...
I hadn't given this much thought before reading this post! My short stories typically feature no travel whatsoever (well, except for my longest effort). But my two novels are very, very big on travel. The first, the one with two narratives and two time periods, features three big journeys, plus a smaller one from a tertiary character. The second novel includes five major journeys along with setting changes. It never even occurred to me - I'm a travelin' man, it seems. It's probably worth mentioning that I am a plotter far more than a character writer, so it makes a bit of sense. Happy trails !
my main projects have quite a bit of travel in them. the one im revising now begins with the MC traveling to the mountains, observing the landscape and faltering with the terrain. She remains in the mountains until the last part where she's traveling back down to the plains. final event is her travels into the underworld and finding her way back. In another one, the main story is travel: MC sails from one location to the next, then travels over desert and through the woods. That one, though, Im debating on just how to break it up. I have the sea travel down, but once she gets in to the desert, im stuck transitioning to the next location. in the one that im querying, the setting shifts between the POV characters. one is in a cottage in the middle of the woods (her location shifts from the cottage, to the small town and back again). the other MC goes a few more places... battle fields, 2 other countries, a prison, the woods where my other character is. But those are completely different from my short stories, that see my characters remaining where they are. I think I have one story where a character recounts to the other one how she ran through the woods to get there, but the story opens up with her already there in that setting.
My answer is going to be very similar to what I said about POV jumping the other day. I think you just have to use the locations dictated by the story. In my first book, my characters almost never make it past the green house out back. 93% of the thing (I looked) takes place in and around their house in the middle of the desert with one jaunt elsewhere toward the end. My second (unfinished) novel varies greatly from one part to another. Part I takes place all over town in various houses, bars and a dance club. Part II involves a trip to Canada and back to West Texas. Part III takes place entirely within an institution. Part IV will likely stay in the institution but feature letters to the MC about events happening back in the world. Part V, I think, might include a lot of time in DC. We'll see. My current WIP takes place all over a county in West Texas in 1972, rarely mentioning the outside world, but never staying put for longer than a scene or two. So I haven't found any tendencies so far. I enjoyed the single setting in my first book. It allowed for intimacy at times and some claustrophobia at others. The mood and some of the themes shift drastically from part to part in the second, and the settings play a role in that. (If that sounds jarring, it might well be. A part of me thinks I may have lost my damned mind writing that one.) The third just works the way it works. I have to constantly jump to where the action is.
I really enjoy limited settings. If it makes sense for the story, I attempt to keep it in one spot. It helps me play with dynamics of the side characters and allows me to let the setting influence major components (social hierarchy for every character, personality traits, daily life, etc). I also like to not feel rushed with a setting, give a building personality. Maybe as I grow so will the size of my settings. I did an island city as my "limited setting" in something I wrote last year (compared to a single building, school, or etc) and I really enjoyed that.
There's nothing worse than the "white room." I feel you on that. I'm struggling a bit to try and fix this in my latest short story. It's interesting because with this story there is quite a bit more dialog than I would like, and I wonder if that's contributing to the problem. It's also a single location story. Thoughts from you or anyone on how to fix that "white room" problem?
Interesting. Why do you think your short stories tend to stick to a single setting? Is it because you're trying to keep the story more simple or you're worried about space? On average, my short stories can have quite a bit of traveling. I guess I think going somewhere makes for a good short story. LOL I usually like at least two (if not more) settings in my short stories. A single location story of any length can be sort of hard if you still want to have a developed setting and not that "white room" that @AntPoems mentioned.
You raise a good point. In a story with multiple settings, what's the best way to shift locations? Sure, there's line breaks, page breaks, and new chapters. But you still want the story to flow with smooth transitions.
On White Room Syndrome—what's the triangle I hear about? Setting, Characters, Plot I think. Most writers concentrate on two of those things and often neglect the third. In fact I remember Seven Crowns saying you really should concentrate on two and not all three, at least not to the same extent. But I don't think it's good to completely ignore the third. My gut is telling me (and this won't come as any surprise to anyone) that white room syndrome may be a symptom of not enough showing. Or maybe just a particular aspect of showing, namely describing settings. I often say you want to flow smoothly through things like dialogue, action, inner monologue, and narration, and not go too long without one of those things, but that should also include setting. Maybe go back to some older stories and just insert brief descriptions of settings to get yourself used to doing them. I think the best way to learn something is to practice it.
I'm a little late returning to this thread. Remind me what I said about POV, or if you were referring to someone else what they said. It sounds like you're a lot like me in terms of done a little of both single and multiple settings. Do you prefer one over the other? I think the challenge can often be make setting shifts happen without being jarring for the reader. Then a single setting comes with it's own set of problems. I think, with me, I can overlook the setting if the story is taking place in one room, leading to that "white room" problem.
Have you always worked with a limited setting or always liked to? How do you avoid the "white room?" what sort of aspects of your setting do you like to include to keep it interesting?
Describing can be narration, but it can also be done so it's showing. Example—Floorboards creaked as he walked through the room goes toward describing the setting but is also action and showing, as well as providing some mood and atmosphere.
I don't recall exactly, but the thread was about the merits of single POV vs. multiple POV's, and I think you came down on the side of not shifting POV. Several people did, one even going so far as to say they stop reading immediately if POV shifts, which I think is a shame. My contention in both cases, POV and setting, is that all options are valid. If the story calls for it, the setting must change. If not, then it shouldn't. That sounds like a stupidly simple point, but different structures and different plots have different requirements, and I've seen them all work. I've seen them all crash and burn, too, but whatever. There's a lot to be said for execution. In answer to your question about preference, I suppose I don't have one. I enjoyed creating an almost claustrophobic atmosphere in my first book, and I'm enjoying the freedom to jump all over town as needed in my current WIP. I just wrote a 650 word flash piece for a contest. (I know, I've said much about how I don't write shorts. It just happened, lol.) It takes place in one room, and there's no reason (or time, really) for it to go anywhere else. Conversely, I have a 3K piece that used to be a 2K piece that took place in a tiny escape capsule, but I recently expanded it with flashbacks to a couple of incidents back on Earth, so now it bounces back and forth and is much better for it, I think.
Now that I have thought about it a touch more, yes, I think it's mostly a space issue. Anything 1500-2000 words or so and below, I tend to keep in one setting. Anything more, there's probably going to be a bit of wandering. For flash stories, space is so limited that sometimes I will write only dialogue for the entire story.
I do think it's easier to forget about the setting in a single-location story if you're focused on something else. Changing locations pretty much forces you into at least a little description as part of the transition, though you can still underdo it then, too. And if this story is heavier on dialogue than your usual, it's possible that that's throwing off your feel for the flow of the narrative. Like, maybe you're intuitively sensing that the story is bogging down and needs to move faster, so you're automatically cutting back on some words, but that makes you cut too much essential description as you try to balance more dialogue than you're used to. For me, awareness of the issue was the key to improving. There have been other threads about how strongly people visualize what they read and write, and I'm definitely not much of a visualizer. I can imagine very detailed, elaborate images and scenes, but I have to consciously stop and make myself do it; it doesn't happen automatically as I read or write. I'm much more attuned to the sound and rhythm of language (I'm also a guitarist and singer with a damned good musical ear, which I assume is connected), so when I imagine a scene, it's often the dialogue that's "just there" in my mind. Once I realized that I was underdescribing my settings, I started consciously working on fixing that. One technique that helped me improve was doing a big descriptive infodump before writing a scene (or after I'd written it and realized how vague the setting was). I'd visualize the setting in as much detail as I could and write a few paragraphs of pure description, like I was panning a camera around and recording everything. Then I'd take bits of that description and plug them into the rest of the scene wherever they seemed to fit best. That helped train me to think about description along with the dialogue. Now I've gotten better at describing things while I write the scene, but I do still sometimes stop to visualize and record. Even if I don't use all of what I write, it still helps.
One thing that can help a lot with visualizing a setting is to either visit a similar place (might not be practical) or look at pictures or videos. If you can somehow experience a setting, even vicariously, immediately before writing, you've got a wealth of material to draw from. And it doesn't need to be primarily visual. You can get across a powerful sense of busy city streets for instance through traffic sounds, maybe heat and smells. What I do is when I'm out somewhere, be it waiting at a bus stop, in the woods, in the yard, or on my porch, I pay attention to what's going on around me. The sounds, smells, sensations, as well as visuals. Store it for future use. I learned to do this long ago for visual art, and trained myself to do it. That may be why I seem to have halfway decent visualizing skills (and it isn't just visual, it's all sensory details). Plus doing photography and drawing, painting etc. They all train your visual sense memory. If nothing else, find a video and immerse yourself in it. You get sound, visuals and motion. Things like sunlight glinting off widows or birds taking off from rooftops in little clusters make for great moments. You can also pick up great stuff like this when watching movies. Just get yourself used to paying attention, and tell yourself to remember the things you experience. This is what's known as stocking up your mental library of imagery, sound, and other sensations. The more well-stocked it is, the better you'll be able to flesh things out with sensory details.
When I wrote the wading in the stream scene for the most recent version of the Beastseekers, the reason there's so much detail about the woods and the stream is because before writing it I watched a video I had shot out in the woods along a stream. Just watching that video in HD and immersing myself in the sounds and images helped immensely. Plus it brought back the sense memories I had from when I actually filmed it. It brings them up and makes it feel like you've just re-experienced them. This is a way to turbo-charge your sensory writing abilities.
An aspect I neglected to mention—when you're reading, pay attention to how description is used in stories you like (or where you like the descriptions anyway). How succinct are they, how powerful, how evocative? And what makes them work (if they do)? Or if they're not working so well, why not? Look for both full descriptions, that might take a paragraph, and those little add-ons, like in an action beat, that contribute a little more sensory information to something that might have already been described, or that doesn't need a full description. I'm also always paying attention to these kinds of things when I watch movies and videos. Of course that doesn't involve the written word, but still, how much time is dedicated to letting viewers see what something looks like? Is is carefully composed in the shot, does it reveal anything that carries importance in some way to the story or to characterization? Sometimes it's the brief little shots (like a group of birds taking off from a roof, maybe off in the background) that inject some real life into something. When you learn to pay attention to things like this, then you're absorbing and processing sensory information all the time, or much of it anyway, and thinking about how to incorporate it into your work. Essentially your life becomes dedicated to your chosen art, and you're developing your skills and abilities all the time.
