Relationships & Partners and Writing Skills Tips. (A Writing Advice Guide Book

Lecture 18: Evoking Setting & Place In Fiction

Lecture 18: Evoking Setting & Place In Fiction

Every story has a setting, but setting is not equally important to all stories. For some narratives, setting is a sort of painted theatrical! backdrop against which the story plays out, and that backdrop can be changed for another one without fundamentally changing the story itself. In most contemporary fiction, however, setting is important, and much of what makes a novel or story memorable is the author's careful evocation of a particular place and time. In this lecture, we'll talk about some of the purposes to which setting can be put in a narrative and some of the ways in which setting can be evoked.

Setting As A Metaphor
In many narratives, setting can be a metaphor for the narrative as a whole. One of the most famous examples here is the opening paragraph of Bleak House, Charles Dickens's novel about a complicated and never-ending lawsuit in mid-19th-century England.

Before we meet a single character in Bleak House and before the plot even starts, Dickens indelibly evokes a vision of dark, dirty London, full of filthy animals, ill-tempered pedestrians, and people wheezing and shivering in the all-encompassing fog.

This exceptionally vivid evocation of setting serves two purposes: It vividly evokes the sensory details of London in the mind of the reader— the darkness, the cold, the dirt—and it makes the setting serve as a metaphor for the misty, insinuating, impenetrably foggy coils of the lawsuit itself.

In J. G. Farrell's historical novel Troubles, which is about the Irish rebellion against British rule in the years after World War I, the main setting is a giant resort hotel on the Irish coast called the Majestic, and it serves throughout the novel as a metaphor for the grand, ornate, and crumbling edifice of the British Empire.

At the end of the novel, the Irish Republican Army burns the hotel to the ground, not only destroying the hotel but metaphorically destroying the dominance of the Protestants and British in Ireland. On the last page, a gentle and befuddled retired British army major surveys the ruins, including the skeletons of the hundreds of cats that lived in the hotel.

Even readers who don't know anything about the history of the Irish Revolution understand that the major is surveying the ruins of an empire, not just a burned-down hotel.

Note that the descriptions of foggy, dirty London in Bleak House and the Majestic Hotel in Troubles are also full of vivid sensory details that draw readers into the scene, putting them in the moment even if they don't consciously pick up on the metaphor. Even when a setting is used for a metaphorical purpose, it should be visceral and vivid, allowing us to experience that imaginary world as if we were characters in the story.

Setting To Evoke A/An Mood (maybe possible.)
Setting can also be used to evoke mood, especially when the point is to evoke a strong vicarious emotion, such as the feeling of fear readers get from a horror story or the feeling of suspense they get from a thriller.

Consider part of the description of a haunted house from the early pages of Judith Hawkes's marvelously creepy novel Julian's House:

Inside the gate a silence falls. Leaves stir and are still. At the foot of the porch steps the silence deepens, wrapped around with the fragrance of the shallow pink roses that twine the uprights and shadow the wide boards with their leaves. And yet it is more than a silence, as the leaves stir and again are still: it is a silence of breath held, of a sob stifled in a pillow, the silence that follows the blow of a fist upon a table. In the moving leaves this silence seems to murmur in its sleep of too many closed doors, keys turning smoothly in well-oiled locks, glances exchanged without words.
(In the actually mystery novel this paragraph above is found on its 12th page, Skylights. —Lumna10)
—James Hynes