Writing Great Fiction

Lecture 18: Evoking Setting and Place in Fiction

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z Of course, setting doesn’t have to slow down the narrative; it can also

evoke speed and danger. In a chase scene from Rosemary Sutcliff’s 7KH

(DJOHRIWKH1LQWK, we delight in the vivid evocation of the landscape

in its own right—luminous green bogs, bronze tides of dying heather—

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description with breathless action.

A Continuum of Setting

z The many ways in which setting can be evoked fall between two ends

of a continuum: At one end, setting is evoked by stopping the narrative

in its tracks and describing a place or a time period. At the other end,

setting is evoked only minimally.

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in narratives similar to %OHDN+RXVH or 7URXEOHV, where the

setting is important to the story, while at the other extreme,

when the setting isn’t that important, writers don’t bother with

it as much.

o In between, there are many variations, including evoking setting

as you go, inserting a few telling details along the way without

stopping the action. As always, most novels and short stories fall

somewhere in between, combining the various methods.

z In narratives that include standalone descriptions of setting, how the

writer uses them depends on the point of view of the novel, whether it’s

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o The omniscient third person is almost cinematic. The opening

of %OHDN+RXVH, for example, is like a crane shot in a movie,

starting high up—“smoke lowering down from chimney-pots,

making a soft black drizzle”—and slowly descending to street

level—“dogs, undistinguishable in mire.” This passage gives

the mind’s eye something to look at, and it introduces a central

metaphor for the plot.