Chapter 17
Creating a Sense of Place
“In many cases, when a reader puts a story aside because ‘it got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”
—Stephen King
Mystery readers are looking for great plots and interesting characters. If you include too much detailed description of places and things, the reader is likely to skip ahead, looking for action.
Still, a strong sense of place can catapult your novel from just okay to great. Readers relish revisiting the settings as well as the characters in some of today’s best-selling mystery fiction. Examples include Carl Hiaasen’s Miami, Craig Johnson’s Wyoming, and Donna Leon’s Venice.
SETTING SCENES
A vivid glimpse of setting can be used to open a scene and provide a backdrop for the characters. Imagine being there: the smell of Los Angeles after a brush fire, the sulfurous humidity of a Louisiana swamp, or the colorful crush of people at a Mexican open market. Use all of your senses to make settings come alive. Pick details that define the place and time.
Read this opening of Thomas Wheeler’s The Arcanum, and notice the techniques he uses to create a vivid setting:
London—1919
A September storm battered a sleeping London. Barrage after barrage of gusting sheets drummed on the rooftops and loosened clapboards. Raindrops like silver dollars pelted the empty roads and forced families of pigeons into huddled clumps atop the gaslights.
Then it stopped.
The trees of Kensington Gardens swayed, and the city held its breath. It waited a few dripping moments, then relaxed.
Just as suddenly, a Model-T Ford swerved past Marble Arch in Hyde Park and buzzed around Speakers’ Corner, peals of laughter following in its wake.
Inside the car, Daniel Bisbee held the steering wheel with one hand and patted Lizzie’s plump thigh with the other.
Cinematically, it’s as if a camera pans first from a distance and an omniscient narrator describes the setting. We feel the power of the rain, and then quiet descends upon London streets as the downpour stops. The camera zooms in for a close-up of the Model-T, and the laughter of its occupants breaks the silence.
Here are some of the elements that make this passage opening so effective:
- Place and time: London—1919
A simple notation of place and year at the beginning anchors the characters in place and time.
- Contrast: The storm battered a sleeping London.
The juxtaposition of the storm battering and London sleeping creates a mood for the scene.
- Sensory impressions: Barrage after barrage of gusting sheets drummed on the rooftops and loosened clapboards.
This passage exploits the auditory and visual senses.
- Comparison: Raindrops like silver dollars …
The use—but not overuse—of simile paints a vivid picture.
- Details, not generalizations: … forced families of pigeons into huddled clumps atop the gaslights.
This single image is much more effective than “It was a dark and stormy night.”
- Drama: The trees of Kensington Gardens swayed, and the city held its breath. It waited a few dripping moments, then relaxed.
Here the rain becomes almost like a character; rain stopping becomes a dramatic moment.
Notice what are not there: adjectives and adverbs. We’re taught in school that these parts of speech carry descriptive power. But do they?
Examine the passage again. Make a list of the adjectives and adverbs in the passage. I find only six: September, gusting, silver, empty, huddled, dripping, suddenly, and plump. A small amount for a highly descriptive passage.
Where does the descriptive power come from? Read the passage again, and see if you can figure it out.
I think it’s in the verbs: battered, drummed, pelted, swayed, swerved, and buzzed. Moreover, notice that nearly half of the adjectives in this passage are verbs in disguise (gusting, huddled, dripping).
When you set a scene, use sensory impressions, details, comparisons, and contrasts. Make your scene descriptions dramatic, and choose verbs for maximum impact.
Now You Try: Analyze a Dramatic Description of Setting
Analyze the passage from Tony Hellerman’s Listening Woman.
| Think about the following: | Excerpt from Listening Woman |
|---|---|
• How does the “camera” move? • What are the contrasts? • What sensory impressions does Hillerman create; what senses does he exploit? • What details does Hillerman choose to make the scene come alive? • How does Hillerman create drama without any human action or dialogue? • Find the adjectives and adverbs. Now find the verbs. Which carry the descriptive power? | The southwest wind picked up turbulence around the San Francisco peaks, howled across the emptiness of the Moenkopi plateau, and made a thousand strange sounds in the windows of the old Hopi villages of Shongopovi and Second Mesa. Two hundred vacant miles to the north and east, it sandblasted the stone sculptures of Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park and whistled eastward across the maze of canyons on the Utah-Arizona border. Over the arid immensity of the Nokaito Bench it filled the blank blue sky with a rushing sound. At the hogan of Hosteen Tso, at 3:17 P.M., it gusted and eddied, and formed a dust devil, which crossed the wagon track and raced with a swirling roar across Margaret Cigaret’s old Dodge pickup truck and past the Tso brush arbor. The three people under the arbor huddled against the driven dust. |
USING SETTING IN A MYSTERY NOVEL
Mystery writers never write setting for setting’s sake. It’s there in support of story and character.
There are a number of ways that setting functions to support story and character.
To orient the reader and situate the characters. The most basic use of setting is to answer the question Where are we now? This can be done quickly at the beginning of a scene, as in this chapter opening from Chuck Hogan’s Prince of Thieves:
Malden Center smelled like a village set on the shore of an ocean of hot coffee. With the coffee bean warehouse so close, sitting in Dunkin’ Donuts was a little redundant, like chewing nicotine gum in a tobacco field. But that’s what they were doing, Frank G. in a soft black sweatshirt, nursing a decaf, and Doug M. looking rumpled in a gray shirt with blue basketball-length sleeves, rolling a bottle of Mountain Dew between his hands.
Hogan tells us where we are (Malden Center), that it’s set on the shore, and that it smelled pungently of coffee. Then he drops his two characters (one nursing a decaf and the other rolling a bottle of Mountain Dew) into the setting. The characters are anchored and drama can begin.
To show time passing. In a scene in which a character drives to work or waits on a park bench for a skittish informant to show up, the author might use setting to show the passage of time. Here’s an example from Raymond Chandler’s The High Window:
I pulled the phone over and looked at the number on the slip and called it. They said my package could be sent right over. I said I would wait for it.
It was getting dark outside now. The rushing sound of the traffic had died a little and the air from the open window, not yet cool from the night, had that tired end-of-the-day smell of dust, automobile exhaust, sun-light rising from hot walls and sidewalks, the remote smell of food in a thousand restaurants, and perhaps, drifting down from the residential hills above Hollywood—if you had a nose like a hunting dog—a touch of that peculiar tomcat smell that eucalyptus trees give off in warm weather.
I sat there smoking. Ten minutes later the door was knocked on …
Chandler uses a paragraph of pure atmospherics to kill ten minutes between the time that Marlow calls for package delivery and when the package arrives. Talk about exploiting the senses. I grew up in Southern California, and I know exactly that eucalyptus smell he’s talking about.
To drive a suspense scene. Setting can be used to build tension in a suspense scene. In this example from William G. Tapply’s Bitch Creek, protagonist Stoney Calhoun stakes out the villain:
The sun wasn’t scheduled to rise for another hour, but already the black sky had begun to fade into a pewtery purple. Calhoun leaned forward so he could see through the bushes. He caught a shadowy movement on the far side of the parking area, then made out a dark shape easing along the edge of the opening, just inside the woods.
The reader is enjoying that pewter sky when shadowy movement and a dark shape trigger tension. Is it only a deer, or something more sinister like a skulking gunman?
To give the reader a breather. A paragraph or two of setting after a scene of high drama and action can be used to give your characters and the reader a chance to catch their breaths.
INCORPORATING SETTING DETAILS
Setting can be applied in broad brushstrokes, as in the examples above. In addition, dabs of setting can be judiciously added throughout a novel to heighten the sense of time and place.
Here are just a few examples:
- How pedestrians cross the streets: Do they wait for the green light or dart across against the red light when there’s a break in traffic?
- Clothing: l950s women wore shirtwaist dresses; in the 1970s they wore micro-minis.
- Household effects: The furniture, household appliances, and accessories reflect time and place, poverty or wealth. An egg chair belongs in a 1960s suburban family room, just as a “Hoosier” cabinet belongs in a 1940s kitchen in the Midwest.
- Vegetation: Does your character scramble down a hillside dense with bougainvillea or pockmarked with saguaro cacti?
- Dialect: When a character addresses two or more people, is it “You,” “Y’all,” or “Youze guys”?
Read this brief excerpt from Lee Child’s Killing Floor. Think about how details convey the setting:
I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee. A late breakfast, not lunch. I was wet and tired after a long walk in heavy rain. All the way from the highway to the edge of town.
The diner was small, but bright and clean. Brand-new, built to resemble a converted railroad car. Narrow, with a long lunch counter on one side and a kitchen bumped out back. Booths lining the opposite wall. A doorway where the center booth would be.
I was in a booth, at a window, reading somebody’s abandoned newspaper about the campaign for a President I didn’t vote for last time and wasn’t going to vote for this time. Outside, the rain had stopped but the glass was still pebbled with bright drops. I saw the police cruisers pull into the gravel lot. They were moving fast and crunched to a stop. Light bars flashing and popping. Red and blue light in the raindrops on my window. Doors burst open, policemen jumped out. Two from each car, weapons ready. Two revolvers, two shotguns. This was heavy stuff. One revolver and one shotgun ran to the back. One of each rushed the door.
Notice how the prosaic details of this diner (we’ve all been to one like it), along with the way Reacher calmly has his breakfast, contrast with the violence of the police storming in. Is he worried? From the dispassionate way he observes the lights refracted off the raindrops in the window, the reader thinks not. The passage continues with Reacher finishing his eggs, leaving a tip, folding the newspaper, and draining his coffee before he reacts to their presence.
Now You Try: Write a Diner of Your Own (Worksheet 17.1)
Write a paragraph or two in which your character is sitting in a diner reading a menu in rural Vermont, Malibu, Tijuana, your home town, or the town where you’ve set your novel. Pick details that give that setting its own unique flavor.
Download a printable version of this worksheet at www.writersdigest.com/writing-and-selling-your-mystery-novel-revised.
On Your Own: Writing Setting
- Go to a place that resembles a setting in your book. Bring a notebook, and jot down what you see and hear; tune in to all the other sensory impressions, and note the quirky details that define this particular place. Then write the scene. Remember: You want to evoke a place, not render it in painstaking detail.
- Revise passages you’ve written that describe a setting. Try to do the following:
- Replace generalizations (“a beautiful day,” “a nice breeze,” “a handsome man”) with specifics, details that show rather than tell.
- Use a range of sensory images.
- Use contrasts.
- Go back and add dabs of setting to scenes you’ve written.