Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Identifying types of setting
Potent setting
Character, setting, and types of stories

Now that I’ve led you through the different manifestations of setting as the world, camera, atmosphere, and action, consider the excerpt from the creative nonfiction piece “Satyr.” As your writing prompt, identify which types of setting are employed. Then try to determine if they’re the right ones. In other words, what would happen if different forms of setting were employed at various points in the essay?

“Satyr”

“Marvellous!” a character once exclaimed—a British character to be exact, hence the double-L spelling of the word. “The marvellous beauty and fascination of all wild things! The horror of man’s unnatural life, his heaped-up civilization!” As it is the magical essence of the former exclamation I wish to get at, I shall say again something of my own relationship with nature, for I have written on it more than once but never seem to get it exactly right. Too often I fear I dwell on its darker, wilder manifestations—the storms, the predation, the ahumanism—since it is they which have left the deepest marks on body and mind alike, shaping them in the process. Yet in truth I have loved just as well and been molded by a great host of harmless, benign representatives of the natural world, having always possessed, for instance, a pronounced fondness for flowers: whether admiring the uniform arrangements of rare varieties in gardens or watching the wild natural sort sway and bob on a windswept field. Even the manmade manifestations have proven attractive and moving to me on occasion, in particular those which grew beneath Grandmother’s needle as I sat at her feet holding the quilt and watching.

Though it was home to three separate fenced-off pastures—the wire of which I had spent many a weekend and summer day running tree to tree or post to post, or some mixture of the two—my family’s farm was covered mostly in woods. I am well aware I am not alone in having always felt there is something about a forest, any forest, when considered as an entity of its own, that remains primal, enigmatic, and majestic. It resembles a vast dark sea in the mysteries it conceals and the manner in which it envelops you. One may judge by its sounds how it senses and greets your approach—the scattering and silencing of wildlife, the modulations in bird song, the give of the ground and the old decaying matter beneath your feet. Though I have always found that greeting reassuring, as though returning to a beloved homeland or other sacred place, it is a response which nonetheless forces you to sense your insignificance. You do not matter to a forest. Yet the knowledge is comforting to the extent that it also renders your modern trials—paying a bill say, or quarreling with a coworker over some forgettable trifle—into their proper places of insignificance. In a forest the synthetic human communities and accompanying rules which modern life forces us to function within and observe are made to appear ridiculous. Stay there long enough and your concerns give way, consciously or no, to the old animal verities of food, shelter, water. Your shoes and clothes begin to look and feel increasingly out of place, ridiculous even. Our bodies make themselves known to us again and, in doing so, move us a little closer to the stripped down essence of ourselves.

I have found it a great joy and privilege in the woods merely to sit and listen. Doing so over the course of your youth develops within you certain gifts: the ability, for example, to close your eyes and tell what time of year it is solely by the manner in which the leaves rustle. So precious were the woods to me during my own youth that I went through periods during which I loathed to leave them at all and would spend the entire weekend, day and night, within their confines. In preparation for a night’s slumber in the forest I would always try to find the thickest bed of bracken to lie down on—often set on the north face of a hillside beneath a dense stand of mountain laurel or rhododendron. If I had heard tell of rain or knew of its coming by other means, I would choose a spot where the leaves on the overhanging branches were thickest so that they might shield me. Otherwise, I slept beneath an opening in the canopy where I might contemplate the moon’s cataract or the slow sweep of the stars. Then I would fall into an untroubled yet attuned slumber known only to hunters and other forest folk. Sometimes it seemed to me as though the ragged brittle leaves and sharp pine needles I had heaped about and upon my body were the forest’s version of the protective wings of some great loving bird which sought to enclose me in a downy safety. And I loved how the pale white sycamore branches, rising from the low watery places and visible sometimes even in a moonless dark, called to mind bone or silk depending on my mood. They came to be a second home to me, those woods, though a full understanding of them would always evade me. I never felt fearful or restless there, but rather loved that long silence which has been likened to death but in truth was merely the life of the place.

For all their subtle teeming life, it remains forests are places which know death constantly, that rely on it in fact for the ongoing promulgation of their life systems. The most notable human participation in death’s function in a wood or grove nowadays presents itself via the mostly lamentable pastimes of logging and hunting. The former most often takes the form of outright annihilation—the severe alteration of the environment into a non-forest: something unrecognizable, or even just “not”—while the latter, though distasteful to many forest lovers, visits a far more negligible impact. Yet the endgame of both actions is “caused death,” which is really a form of murder. I continue to count a number of hunters and loggers among my friends, despite the fact I consider them death dealers by virtue of their craft. And I myself—having grown up on a farm and cut short the life of many a tree and creature—would be remiss not to acknowledge my complicity in such actions. But then we might say something similar of undertakers and doctors who specialize in terminal maladies. There is, after all, an art in the way a being chooses to render death; there is too an art of dying. And at least one of those blank canvases will be set before each of us, ready or not, at a certain time, appropriate or not, during the course of one’s life.

Remember that setting predominantly is important in a narrative because it draws the reader into your written world. Setting can also be like another character in your story; it can make things happen.

Keep in mind, too, that setting should be a pleasurable creative exercise rather than a chore. It can be quite fun developing a world consisting largely of your own whims and preferences.

Lastly, remember that the story of your world—of your own particular setting—often is a wonderful and inspiring place to start your story.

The least you need to know

·  Setting is its own functioning world and should appear lifelike.

·  Photos can help you order and detail your setting.

·  Settings should emit a sense of atmosphere that gives readers feelings and impressions about what they’re reading.

·  Settings should be intertwined with action to help propel your narrative.