Anna Staniszewski

As I’ve been reading through Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel, I’ve been rushing to jot down all of its nuggets of brilliance. One thing that especially stood out to me as I was reading yesterday was Maass’s discussion of setting. I’ve previously talked about the use of landscape as part of the story, and the role of description, but Maass looks at the relationship between the two in a slightly different way. Here’s what he says:

As our colleagues in science fiction and fantasy have shown us, building breakout time and place starts with the principle that the world fo the novel is composed of much more than description of landscape and and rooms. It is milieu, period, fashion, ideas, human outlook, historical moment, spiritual mood and more. It is capturing not only place but people in an environment; not only history but humans changing in their era. Description is the least of it. Bringing people alive in a place and time that are alive is the essence of it.

For him, setting isn’t a passive part of the story that’s merely alluded to through snippets of description. Setting inspires and influences the story. A story isn’t independent of its setting; it happens in part because of its setting. I really like this idea because it means that describing the time and place of the story isn’t a chore; it’s the way to get at the core of the story and to make it unique.

There are lots of great fantasy and science fiction examples of memorable, active settings, but even in realistic fiction there are ones that come to mind. Holes is a perfect example of a setting that infuses the story with life. In fact, the book begins not with character or story, but with setting. In a way the setting is the most prominent character throughout the book. After reading the story, you might not remember all the details, but you can’t forget the brutally dry landscape dotted with five-foot-wide holes.