Setting: If You Build It, They Will Come

A story can take place across a span of galaxies or it can take place at the bottom of a well. Every story, unless it’s an especially experimental tale, has to take place in some kind of physical environment – we need to give the characters somewhere to stand (or, if it’s taking place in space, or underwater, float).
 In some cases, the setting may be crucial to the story; this is why, for example, world-building is considered an integral part of the sci-fi author’s skill-set. In other cases, the setting may not be as important to a story as its characters and plot, but we still need to afford it the attention to detail that will persuade the reader that they have stepped into what John Gardner calls the ‘vivid, continuous dream’.
 If you’re a writer like me, you simply won’t be able to start a story without having a very clear idea of where it takes place. In fact, it’s frequently happened that I had no idea for a story, nor any plan for writing one, until a setting presented itself. In a way, it’s the equivalent of a bare stage when the curtains are pulled back, and we know that the actors will soon appear. Once I feel the dart of recognition – that this place, this very particular place, would be a wonderful setting for a story – then I know it’s only a matter of time before the characters will start strolling into place. If you build it, they will come …
 Oddly enough, the initial setting, the one that provides the inspiration, isn’t necessarily where the story takes place. I first got the idea for The Lammisters while we were on holidays in Donegal, visiting an old stately home where the Anglo-Irish owner would host Hollywood stars from the 1920s. It seemed to me the ideal spot for a PG Wodehouse kind of novel; but for the purpose of the story, I needed, as it began, for Young Archie, the foolish third son, to travel to Los Angeles to encounter some Hollywood stars. And so the story opens on the terrace of Musso’s in Los Angeles; but Young Archie and I both enjoyed our brief sojourn in Los Angeles so much that we never made it back to Donegal, and the whole novel played out in Hollywood.
 But that initial setting gave the story a kind of palimpsest quality. Its physical environment and its history, its economics and its culture, set the tone for who Young Archie was, and what he needed to escape, and what he wanted to achieve. It was as if that setting underpinned the story’s immediate setting of Hollywood in the Silent Era, invisible but informing Archie’s motives and aspirations.
 Setting isn’t just about giving your characters a place to stand. Setting is what your characters emerge from, where they’ve evolved, the place they learned to speak and think, where their loves and hates and prejudices were formed. If you’re prepared to look and listen – to observe, as Joyce Carol Oates says, with reverence – then your setting will tell you more about your characters than you realise you know.

The Tyranny of Perfection

Reading Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds recently, I was reminded of an Intro I wrote for Knock and Enter, a book I edited during my stint as Writer-in-Residence with UNESCO / Dublin City Libraries. To wit:

I’ve always thought that an octopus would make for an ideal Editor, with its eight arms and a complex nervous system that consists of one main brain and eight mini-brains that operate each arm independently.
 Of course, most writers would likely also wish that their editors were octopuses, given that octopodes possess three hearts, one of which might be given over to compassion for those who toil at the coalface creating the imperishable prose which the editor, having nothing better to do, then proceeds to blithely deface with his or her ‘suggestions’ and ‘advice’.
 Happily, whilst all octopuses are venomous, only the blue-ringed octopus is actually deadly to humans. And while the business of writing can feel like a tiresome chore – planning and writing and editing, and rewriting, and re-editing, and then rewriting some more – it very rarely proves fatal.

 Writing advice is hedged about with clichés (‘Write what you know’; ‘Read, read, read,’ etc.) but some clichés have their kernel of truth, and none more so than ‘Writing is re-writing’ – and if you’re a writer who doesn’t like the idea of reworking your stuff, then you’re in for a long, hard uphill slog.
 There are very good reasons, of course, why new writers might resist the idea of re-writing. Whether it’s schoolwork or sport, or life itself, we’re socialised from a very young age to get it right first time (‘Do you want it quick or do you want it good? Both, you say? I see.’) and to view mistakes as some kind of personal failing. And we’re all time-poor these days; if we can only get it right at the first attempt, think of all the time we can save.
 Except getting ‘it’ right – when ‘it’ is the creation of a whole new world peopled with complex characters – is virtually impossible. Even if you’ve plotted your story out before you begin, even if you know exactly who your characters are and will become, there’s simply too much to get exactly right at exactly the right time.
 This might sound like something of a downer; in fact, it’s one of the great opportunities that writing offers. In life, we have no choice but to stumble ever onwards, tripping over our mistakes and fixing them on the hoof (or ignoring them and hoping no one notices); in writing (or re-writing, rather) we get to go back in and fix it until we’re happy (happy-ish).
 Accepting that you’re not going to get it right first time might come as something of a blow to the old ego, but it does allow for an enormous amount of freedom. The freedom to get it not quite right; to make and acknowledge mistakes; to allow yourself, for the purpose of this draft at least, to be less than perfect (‘Perfect is the enemy of good’).
 We can waste a lot of our energy in worrying about getting it immediately right, turning what should be a positive (creativity, imagination) into a negative (the grinding, Sisyphean pursuit of perfection). But perfection can wait. Instead, take a deep breath, open yourself up to the inevitability of temporary failure, and allow yourself the delicious freedom (dare we call it fun?) of getting it wrong for now.

Mailer, Democracy and Huckleberry Finn

Norman Mailer’s The Spooky Art (2003) is a rattlebag of memoir, criticism and testosterone-fuelled opinion (sensitive readers might wish to skip his piece on Last Tango in Paris), one of the highlights of which is the essay ‘Huckleberry Finn – Alive at 100’, which concludes like this:

What else is greatness but the indestructible wealth it leaves in the mind’s recollection after hope has soured and our passions are spent? It is always the hope of democracy that our wealth will be there to spend again, and the ongoing treasure of Huckleberry Finn is that it frees us to think of democracy and its sublime, terrifying premise: Let the passions and cupidities and dreams and kinks and ideals and greed and hopes and foul corruptions of all men and women have their day and the world will still be better off, for there is more good than bad in the sum of us and our workings. Mark Twain, whole embodiment of that democratic human, understood the premise in every turn of his pen, and how he tested it, how he twisted and tantalized and tested it until we are weak all over again with our love for the idea. – Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art

On Cliché and the Reader-Writer Contract

A sure sign that a writer has yet to develop confidence in his or her use of language, and perhaps the most obvious, is the use of cliché. But which is worse: the unintended cliché, or the one deliberately used?
 A cliché used unintentionally, simply because the phrase has become so polished by popular use that it slips unnoticed through the beginning writer’s neural network, is just about forgivable – let’s call it a venial sin. A minor offence, and one more to be pitied than censured (is ‘more pitied that censured’ a cliché?); moreover, it’s a fault that can be easily remedied, providing the writer is willing to bear down and pay close attention, and be worthy of the words they choose.
 A cliché used deliberately, on the other hand, can only be regarded as the blackest of mortal sins. For the writer who chooses to employ hackneyed phrases, and with malice aforethought to boot, there can be no forgiveness nor redemption; for such writers there is only Dante’s inferno, suspended somewhere in the outer dark between levels seven (violence against neighbours and/or God) and eight (fraud and deception).
 The beginning writer, of course, might feel that this is all rather strong stuff, and that the occasional lapse into platitude might even be expected – there must be a reason, after all (possibly because they contain their kernel of truth), why clichés became clichés in the first place.
 The issue for the experienced reader, however, is overly familiar phrases are bum notes; and should they go clanging and banging about in our inner ear, we will immediately know that the writer-reader contract is being violated. Implicit in the writer-reader relationship is the idea that, should a reader choose to read a particular book, she will be offered a new way of seeing the world, or at the very least get a distinctive perspective on whatever subject the writer has chosen to offer. Clichés are the laziest kind of plagiarism, and a very strong hint that the writer is more interested in sounding like a writer than being an actual writer, which is to say delivering original insights derived from the writer’s unique take on the world.

Writing Advice: Highsmith, Plotting and (Re)Living Your Dreams

One of the main issues that tends to come up when I’m teaching creative writing is that of plot – as in, many new and aspiring writers generally believe that they don’t know how to plot and/or tell a story. And it’s no use telling them that they’ve been listening to stories since before they knew they were listening to stories, or that they have been absorbing plots ever since they first started watching TV, or that our species thrived, evolutionarily speaking, because our minds are hardwired to think in narrative terms. Most new writers are conditioned to believe that the secret to great writing is plotting, and they’re depending on me to reveal the great secret.
 There is no great secret, of course, but because people appreciate concrete detail and examples, I’m very happy to break down the basic plot mechanics and talk about seven-point plot arcs (other plot arcs are available) – I tend to use Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley as a case study, because (a) it’s a brilliant book and (b) it allows for a neat contrast between the novel and Anthony Minghella’s film due to one crucial scene change (no spoilers, etc.) in Minghella’s adaptation.
 And then, at the end of that class, I’ll give them a task: remember a dream and write down as much of it as you can, trying to capture its weirdness and bright colours and its random twists and turns (if you dream in seven-point plot arcs, so much the better).
 Some of them follow through on this homework, some of them don’t (some people, like me, rarely remember their dreams). And some of the results can be fantastic. But none of the results are anywhere near as fantastic as the wild idea that humans are so hardwired to tell stories that we do it even when we’re asleep; that even when we’re unconscious, we’re still telling ourselves stories.
 Do we know how and why it happens? I’ll wager that most of us don’t, and – unless the dreams become traumatising nightmares – we don’t much care. And in this context it really doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we understand we already know everything we know about the storytelling basics at the unconscious level; that we appreciate and accept that, in our most fundamental sense of self, we are storytelling beings.