Your Setting Examples - #7

This example comes from an anonymous author too shy to send her example in directly. She asked a friend to do it for her. I want to commend our shy friend for taking this step. It can be hard to share your work if you feel intimidated or unsure. I think Alicia and I are pretty friendly and approachable most of the time, and yet I hear frequently that we scare people. Must be with our claws and scales and firebreath, not with our attitudes, or at least so I hope. In any case, sorry if we come across like dragons, and pat yourself on the back, Anon, for donning your armor and entering the fray. It's a good thing, and we're glad you're here.


She paused and glanced at her surroundings, taking note of the weeds forcing their way through the herringbone-patterned driveway, the overgrown lawn and the growing collection of unused charity bags tossed into an empty flowerpot at one side of the welcome mat. Ted O’Malley’s garden was his pride and joy, a riot of colour last time she’d visited in the summer, yet looking at it now it seemed unlikely the elderly man had made it outside in weeks.


Still the bungalow’s door remained shut. She frowned and knocked again, standing slightly back to make sure she was easily visible through the peephole.

Those of you who've been around the blog long enough to remember the neverending PPP rants will not be surprised to see me single out the "taking that" phrase. It's what I do, and there's no help for it, so let's just accept that this is going to be my first comment about this piece. In fact, let's just line edit that sentence.

She paused and glanced at her surroundings. Weeds forced their way through the herringbone-patterned driveway and the overgrown lawn, and a growing collection of unused charity bags had been tossed into an empty flowerpot at one side of the welcome mat. Ted O’Malley’s garden was his pride and joy, a riot of colour last time she’d visited in the summer, yet looking at it now it seemed unlikely the elderly man had made it outside in weeks.


Still the bungalow’s door remained shut. She frowned and knocked again, standing slightly back to make sure she was easily visible through the peephole.

It's a simple change but it yields big dividends, even without any modification beyond what's needed to change the structure. We eliminated "taking note," which is a bit weak as far as verbals go. We can't picture "taking note" the same way we can picture "writing a note" or "taking a nap." It's not concrete or active. And it sort of duplicates the idea contained in "paused and glanced." It's not a direct repetition, but it's the same basic notion. And finally, it's what some people call filtering -- what happens when the act of thinking is narrated in the text. This can be a complex notion to grasp, but the basic idea is this: it puts a layer of interpretation between the character's direct experience and the reader's grasp of that experience. It's a form of micro-exposition, and I've never yet read a manuscript that didn't do this at least a little bit. (You can get away with it a little bit. A very little bit. And as far as we know, Anon rarely uses this type of narration. I'm really not trying to be a dragon about this, but it's an important concept, so I have to talk about it.) (And in the effort to stem my firebreathing tendencies, I'll just point out without further comment that "looking at it" can be cut for much the same reasons.)

Now, we're supposed to be talking about setting, so let's take a loot at how it's being manipulated here. In that second sentence, we have six concrete setting details -- weeds, driveway, lawn, bags, flower pot, welcome mat. Boom! That's a packed sentence, and I like it. It works. Why? Because what we're seeing aren't lifeless details, but specific details used to show the way the environment has changed. Overgrown. Weedy. Trash mounting in a specific way in a specific location. These details are evidence of negative change, and even without the conclusion offered in the final sentence of that paragraph, we know that something's not as it should be.

Let's take a moment to look at that conclusory sentence:
Ted O’Malley’s garden was his pride and joy, a riot of colour last time she’d visited in the summer, yet looking at it now it seemed unlikely the elderly man had made it outside in weeks.
If you're going to have a character state a conclusion, this is the way to do it. First she evaluated the evidence in a way that let us see the evidence and experience it with the character. Then we got the emotion (pride and joy -- a bit of a cliche, but we'll let it go on the assumption that it fits the character's viewpoint), and then the past state for contrast (riot of colour last summer). And then -- and only then -- we get the conclusion (unlikely he'd been outside in weeks).

Using a progression like that -- specific details, evidence of change, an emotional component -- leads the reader to understand how the conclusion is being formed. More than that, the reader will be silently, and perhaps subconsciously, thinking, "Yes! That's exactly what I think, too!" So the psychological bond between reader and character is deepened by this small moment of agreement. And none of us are surprised by the final paragraph with its suspenseful action. Something is very wrong at Ted's bungalow, and we all know it.

So there's a good structure here, and some good detail, and we'll just pretend we never saw those little PPPs. :)

Theresa