Alumni Voices with Ellen Kazimer: Resetting My Setting

As someone who has lived overseas and moved twelve times, I know that every place is unique. Two towns from a small state like Connecticut appear so similar to an outsider, but to a native, they are as different as night and day. There is a different rhythm, a different sensibility. Every town has a unique, idiosyncratic heartbeat once you get beyond their similar appearance.

So I shouldn't have been surprised that shifting my setting upended my novel. I naively thought this would straighten out a few plotting issues. My characters kept wandering over into this town for entertainment so I figured I would situate them there. My plot problems would be solved, right?

Of course not. In fact, I created a slew of new obstacles for myself. And as the esteemed Jane Resh Thomas wrote last month, "setting, like yeast, is not put-in-able at late stages of the cookery." I had ruined my "bread." Most of my original scenes no longer fit.

My first town was largely homogenous in demographics and was located on a sheltered harbor. My new setting jutted out into the Atlantic, its harbor unprotected from the elements. In many ways, my young protagonist was less protected, too. She finds more ways to get in trouble. While other characters had to find new jobs, she found new dreams. So I experienced first hand what Jane wrote last month. "Although place does concern distances and landmarks, it also determines character."

As I revised, I recalled Ron Koertge's lecture back in summer residency of 2013. He proposed we let our characters wander through the town and see whom they meet as an exercise in character cartography. On any summer’s day, my characters would have run into some of the wealthiest families in America. Additionally Ron advised that we “map out your character's world and see what sticks out.” As it turned out, my characters tripped over things that stood out and lay splayed out on the sidewalk. From that vantage point, though, they could see the underclass—the nameless, faceless servant class of those moneyed families. I realized these servants were not nameless or faceless to my characters. So I had to uncover their stories as background to my story.

In the end, social class became an antagonist in my story, thwarting the dreams of my protagonist. She can't go anywhere without being affected by class distinctions. My protagonist loves to swim. In the former town, there were lakes and a shoreline available to everyone. In the new setting, there is a swim club reserved for only the very wealthy and the shoreline is privately owned. She also loves the movies, but class determines where she sits. Affluent summer residents reserve the box seats and servants crowd the theater on their solitary afternoon off.

Moving my setting presented many challenges to my "work in progress." Using Jane's metaphor, I had to throw out the bread I was baking. Truly, this new loaf is so much better. We often hear about letting our characters lead as we write and revise. Perhaps we should consider having the setting lead, and see what happens to our characters and plot.

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Ellen Kazimer is a January 2014 graduate of the MFAC program. She lives and writes in Virginia. 

Faculty Voices with Jane Resh Thomas: Setting and Fiction

Jane Resh Thomas

Developing writers have assured me so many times that they would “put in setting” after they had completed first drafts of their novels that you'd think I'd be prepared for this proposal, but still it always shocks me. A writer's inserting setting into a half-baked story is like a baker's adding the yeast after the bread is kneaded. Yeast releases the air bubbles that create the grain of the loaf, its physical structure. Without yeast or some other leavening, the loaf cannot rise. Setting is the world through which characters move and conflict and plot play out. Setting, like yeast, is not put-in-able at late stages of the cookery.

A writer's inattention to setting from the beginning of a story results in its floating in the clouds, unmoored, deprived of a specific culture and definite place. Fiction needs a context, something impossible to provide without a setting. For this reason, fantasy writers must build worlds as well as characters. Writers of realism must place their plots in a real place that affects events, not a generic one.

Although place does concern distances and landmarks, it also determines character. The remark “Bless her little heart” may mean something ironic, rather than fond, something entirely different in Charleston, South Carolina than it does in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The subtle assumptions of a Louisiana fisherman differ from those of a Wisconsin farmer in ways we can't know without experience in both places.

In early April, my son Jason and I drove from Minneapolis to the North Shore of Lake Superior for the day. We went to the mouth of the Gooseberry River, where we sat at a picnic table overlooking the open water where the river entered the big lake. The wind was cold; I wore my beloved old secondhand beaver coat with the collar up around my ears. As we sat there, we talked about the scene before us and hypothesized.

On the far side of the river, on a sandbar, two people sat looking for agates, far enough away for us to be uncertain of their age and gender, though we thought they were a youngish woman and a twelve-year-old girl. How had they reached that sandbar? Beyond them, a seventy-five-degree bluff arose. They couldn't have descended that steep incline on the opposite bank. They must have gone from our side across the river ice. But look, we said. Look how rotten the ice is. See that dark place, where the snow is saturated? They were lucky once, but they'll have to cross again. Those people are headed for a swim.

After a while, the child returned across the ice to our side of the river. She avoided the dark spot. She was lanky and her weight was light; she made the crossing without mishap. A few minutes later, the woman followed her, but she quickly left the girl's tracks. As she headed straight for the place where the snow was wet and dark, Jason took off. He skidded down the ten-foot cliff on our side of the river and came even with her upstream when, just as we had foreseen, she fell through the ice. Perhaps she found a footing on a submerged rock, for she caught herself on the sharp edge of the hole and hauled herself out. Jason shouted at her to lie on the ice and crawl to the riverbank, but, still oblivious to her danger, she ignored the advice. The last time we saw her, she had taken off her icy jeans and stood shuddering and barefoot in a cotton skirt. She did not thank us.

Here were four characters in a far-north landscape, on the banks of a river where the flow and depth varies according to snowmelt, which was light this year. The two agate-seekers were strangers to this place; no native would cross river ice in April, knowing that it's unreliable even in cold January. No native would bring a cotton skirt on an April road trip to the North Shore. No. Natives bring wool and fleece and down and beaver skins. This mother who had risked her own and her child's life was also a fool.

The observers, Northerners all their lives, were not particularly prescient or wise. They foresaw events not only because of their own experience with rivers and lifetimes in the North, but because they had read Jack London's terrible story, “To Build a Fire,” where an Alaskan trapper falls through river ice and freezes because his hands are shaking so hard he can't keep a match lit. People on the North Shore say that, if you capsize on Lake Superior in early spring, you have twelve minutes to save yourself from hypothermia. After the incident at the mouth of the Gooseberry, a blasé gas station clerk said to us, “Oh, ya. People die down there every coupla years.”

Fiction writers must create the world through which their characters move. They must consider how that world influences events and how it has shaped the people who inhabit it.

Re-Seeing

     Here’s another testimonial to  Marsha’s excellent advice about writing  about houses and neighborhoods.  Try it in the city, too.  

     By walking the streets I created  an historical fiction novel involving a 13-year-old girl  who lived in the 1920s.

     Wait now. I didn’t really “walk the streets” (the way some might define that) and I wasn’t around in 1921.  But I’d studied Raleigh, NC’s  downtown area for years, wondering about the people who’d once lived and worked  at the State Capitol, and well-known historic hotels situated on  famous streets.

     Then my muse made me “re-see”  run-down buildings with broken boards and glass and even empty lots  I’d overlooked before, and write about what they would have looked like and who would have been in them back in the day:  dentist and law offices, beauty salons, shops with layers of painted over window signs, boarding houses tucked back in neat alleyways, movie theaters, drugstores with soda fountains,  street vendors, ice cream parlors, a jook joint even, and other places beneath my radar.

    Settings, sense of place, world-building and compelling characters  arose from these environs.  What will you re-see? Thanks, Marsha!

    

Nomenclature

Hello--I'm new to the Hamline blog (though not to the program). I'm excited to be part of the conversation.

A week ago today, Phyllis Root and I slipped away to see the McKnight Prairie Preserve, a remnant of original prairie that runs along a low ridge south of the Cannon River. We parked next to a cornfield. I was still seeing generic grass and flowers when a meadowlark sang from a post, and Phyllis began to name the blossoms at our feet. Daisy fleabane. Milk vetch. Grey headed coneflower. Flowering spurge. Prickly pear cactus. (Yes, cactus native to the prairie. Who knew?) Prairie milkweed, nothing like Vermont milkweed, but also tasty to monarchs. Lead plant, far prettier than its name. I felt like my grandkids, who are pointing at everything and asking “Zat?” Luckily for me, Phyllis knew the answers.

I love learning new names, even though I may forget them. Specific names add spice to bland prose. They also bring up images and associations. When an illustrator for my picture book wanted me to remove the word “seagrape” from my story—because she’d never seen a seagrape bush—I sent her photos. For me, the word seagrape evokes the sound of flat, saucer-shaped leaves rattling in the wind. I smell the salt air, and hear my grandfather’s scratchy voice as he shows me the tracks of a bobcat, imprinted in wet sand beneath a seagrape bush.

As I clear my desk this morning, perhaps these names will find their way into a poem or story, like Ron Koertge’s talismanic words. Showy tick trefoil. Culver’s root. And here’s one for Buddy the Poetry Cat: Field’s Cat Foot.

What specific nouns and names show up in your writing now?