o When a standalone description of setting is told from the
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character. How the character sees the setting—what details he
or she picks out as important—tells us something about the
person through whose eyes we, the readers, are seeing them.o :KHQVHWWLQJLVGHVFULEHGIURPWKH¿UVWSHUVRQSRLQWRIYLHZ
it can become even more multilayered. For example, setting
is important to the novels of Raymond Chandler, but it’s also
important that the setting is seen through the eyes and mind of
Chandler’s protagonist, the private detective Philip Marlowe.
Marlowe’s descriptions tell us a great deal about himself.z Writers who only scarcely evoke setting often use a kind of shorthand,
relying on the fact that certain places, street names, or even brand names
are familiar to the reader and will be evocative of time and place. The
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Washington, DC, and Pelecanos skillfully mixes real street and place
names in Washington with brief bits of description.
z Whether you choose to lavish your reader with a richly detailed
description or simply say that your detective walked into a Starbucks,
remember that in most cases, how you use setting depends on the overall
purpose of your narrative. Scene by scene, you want to lavish detailed
descriptions on settings that recur or are especially important, but you
need only a line or two to evoke settings that don’t matter quite as much
or that appear only once.
Austen, 3ULGHDQG3UHMXGLFH.
Chandler, 7KH%LJ6OHHS.
Dickens, %OHDN+RXVH.
Eliot, 0LGGOHPDUFK.
Farrell, 7URXEOHV.
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