Nanowrimo Break: Inception and All Your Settings

It may not be a surprise to regular readers that I sort of have a thing for Inception. I have a shout out tag for Inception and this blog is not about a.) film making b.) suits or c.) Tom Hardy. I also occasionally mention my Inception view count, which has now gotten a little confusing as I own it on dvd, digital copy on my computer and my phone. Some people take a one minute break by viewing photos of loved ones, I like to watch a little Inception. Make of that what you will.

Anyway, this is not about my undying love for Joseph Gordon-Levitt in zero gravity or Leonardo DiCaprio's strut, but rather a study in setting. No, not the awesome hotel decor or the matchy-matchy bad guys wearing white in the snow level. This is about using all the bits of your setting to create a world that works for you while you entice the reader to continue reading your work.

We first see setting the second the movie opens, but seriously, the first time we truly interact with setting is when Mal mentions "Postwar British painters". She refers to the artwork in the dream hotel and hey! It's by Francis Bacon. That's not the cool part. That is an easy way to engage setting - and by engage I mean draw the audience's eye toward it. Now for people who hear Postwar and British and Painter, it's a detail. It's dialogue that says she knows what she's talking about. To people who hear that and see the painting and think Francis Bacon, that's a little reach out and say hello to the audience members in the know. We like to feel smart. Some of us may use Google to get there, but we become members of a special club when we figure it out.

That throwaway line, by the way, tells us a lot about Mal. She can spot a postwar British painter for one thing. Now - SPOILER - for the 0.01% of you who haven't seen or possibly heard of Inception, Mal is a figment in Cobb's head. What does that tell us about what Cobb knows?

Anyway, the point of being in people's heads is that we aren't supposed to be there and so the projections in other peoples' heads try to uncover you and then remove you from the landscape, by tearing you limb from limb if they have to. Knowing this, watch the scene where Cobb begins to convince Fisher that something is wrong while he sits at the bar surrounded by rich older people. At one point there is a sound so out of tune with the ambience of the bar that everyone pays attention. Can you imagine that older woman with the shawl and the white hair with blood staining her mouth, fingers curled into claws?

You can now.

********************************And NOW****************************************

So.

I wrote the above about halfway through November and then remembered that I was writing a novel. I was also municipal liaising my region, with roughly 400 people (on paper) and got a little caught up in my newfound productive writing life.

Here we are in the year the world ends (see previously 2000, 1999, and 1997 according to the World Weekly News) and I am a novel richer and half a blog post poorer.

It happens sometimes that you come back to something you were writing in a different head space, physical space, you-space and you realize - hey! This was pretty good! I wonder what happens next. And then you totally blank.

I have no idea where the rest of the post was going. I do, however, know what I would like to say now, 55,000 words later, about scenery and setting and how different and necessary the two are to everything in your story and how your audience perceives your world.

I've been using setting and scenery interchangeably in my previous posts (and if I haven't, I've been doing it in my head) but they really are quite different. Scenery is a necessary part of setting but setting encompasses scenery. Scenery is the vase on the mantelpiece and the stone setting in the hearth and the rich yet threadbare rug under your feet. Setting is the opulent sitting room gone slightly to seed in a story about an old rich family that has possessed wealth so long they have forgotten they have it. You know the type, the ones who wear t-shirts and drive beamers and buy tens of thousands of dollars of diamonds just to say it's Tuesday, I love you.

Take away some of those details and they become nouveau riche, conscientious of what they have and how much they have to show it to the world. Take away other details and they become misers. Suddenly your story is about something else entirely.

The settings may be the easiest to describe later when you're talking about that book you just read, but it's the scenery that makes it so memorable. Scenery, the bangles, the gun, the hidden corpse, the missing figurine on the bookshelf, the details give your story a why without you having to come right out and beat your reader over the head with what you're trying to say.

Getting back to my minor obsession with Inception, let's look at Arthur. He's gorgeous. And now, analytically, let's look at what says competent. It's the slicked back hair, the suits, the fashion forward little touches, the flashy fighting style, and the way he remains calm under any kind of pressure, with or without gravity.

Ariadne, on the other hand, screams college student. If we hadn't met her first in a college, we would quickly place her there in the Inception special anniversary edition paper doll playbook (I would totally buy that, wouldn't you?). There's the brash manner of speaking, the curiosity with none of the temperance borne of what some might call maturity but what we can also call the knowledge of consequence from touching a hot stove. She hasn't had that curiosity slapped down yet. She wears those scarves and coats with rolled up sleeves, stands slightly to the side and watches and learns while the others move.

The settings of Inception and the personal scenery of each of the characters (including where they stand in relation to one another...I guess I have another rewatching to do) require all those little details and more - leave nothing to chance. Your dialogue, character descriptions, workspaces and living spaces advance the reader's understanding of what you are trying to say in your story. Are you talking about money? Love? Evil and our interactions when faced with such a thing?

Now you (and I) get to shave away every detail that doesn't have to do with cementing your answer to the question you are discussing in your work, right down to how your character eats lunch and where and why.

Yay, scenery!

Chewing Scenery Pt. 2

One of my good friends described our hometown to her new college pals thusly:

"You ever drive down that long stretch of highway with mountains on your left and flat on your right, and you see that tiny little town out in the distance and you think to yourself, Man, I'm glad I don't live there.  

Well, that's my home."

Even with memories of learning to quickly turn my back to oncoming wind so that powerful blasts of sand would sting the backs of my legs instead of my face or placing my hands on the backseat of the car to absorb at least a little heat before subjecting the backs of my knees to plastic melting temperatures, I get a little something in my throat when I pass through my hometown. It's the setting that made me, and it still invokes a complex connection of emotions.

With all the heat and the dirt and the never-ending sun, it still introduced me to the sweet scent of wet dust just after rain begins to fall and the sight of the desert bursting into color as long dormant plants taste the smallest amount of water.

Obviously, the settings that make us affect our feelings, but unless you're writing a memoir, you want your setting to affect your readers' feelings. In order to pull your audience's strings, you'll have to speak through your characters to tell them what to feel.

This telling readers what to feel goes hand-in-hand with show, don't tell. Remember way back when someone first told you to show, don't tell? Remember that confused feeling (or if you are like me, that bullheaded I know better feeling...yeah, still trying to outgrow that one) deep in your chest resulting from the kid's book you were reading at the time? The character is angry. The author writes, Sara is angry. You know, Sara is probably angry. But what kind of spiritual fulfillment am I getting from a story that doesn't take the time to describe the socioeconomic plight of low class space jumper engineers who are angry because they can't find their alien six-eyed cat and their boss just nixed overtime citing budget concerns?

This all has to do with scenery, just bear with me.

If she is angry, really pissed off, everything will compound that anger. The door will stick, the lights will flicker and spark that headache into a full blown migraine, the shoes squeaking on the floor will put her one step away from psychotic break. You remember those days when you're late on a deadline and the mail server goes down? Obviously, it's just to inconvenience you. But it's a part of your setting (for the purposes of this example, you, like me, work in a cube farm and suffer from a dangerous co-dependency on technology stuck somewhere between the late nineties and early oughts, you know, before DSL really took off and when IT guys coined the fix-all, "Have you tried restarting it?"). All those little things that never mattered before become a symbiotic part of your emotional state.

Clive Barker's Coldheart Canyon is one of those odd horror novels that didn't really scare me after I put it down. I could walk away from it; I could sleep easy at night. When I was reading it, however, the ever changing mosaic and the desert wild with the perverted creatures running rampant made my breathe hold in my lungs, just in case I attracted their attention before my eyes could turn away from the page.

Think of the setting. It's a horror novel tied to the past of Hollywood opulence of the 1920's or so and the Hollywood opulence of today. It's tied to the depravity of both eras, and a sense of richness that is best viewed through the sepia toned nostalgia lenses. Once Barker has you thinking about the suits and the gowns and the men and the women, he turns it all around until you get peacock bodied human headed monsters roaming the canyon, looking for humans to rape. So...horror.

Coldheart Canyon could have been a romance - take away the monsters and the horror bit, right? Not quite. How far does the desert stretch in a romance? Will it reach out to the horizon without a soul in sight? Will it sear the flesh from your arms and burn your eyes with mirages? Will the house turn cold and hidden in the dark, with twists and turns meant for trapping you with the bad things hot at your heels?

In a romance, the desert will be cool, just beginning to heat up. Romance in the desert happens in the early morning, I think, or late at night when the sky has bloomed with stars. If you are reading something that requires a sense of "all will be well" by the end, the ground beneath your character's feet might crumble and the weather will turn against him, but something in the scenery will still signal to the reader that comfort is soon at hand.

The house will stand. The moon will rise, the forest will be curiously devoid of bears, except from a safe distance, the bad guy will be safely defeated (or a rake in disguise who can be cured with magic virgin sex, if you are writing a romance circa Harlequin eighties style, but that's a discussion for another time).

How does your setting affect your character? How does your character's mood affect our perception of the setting?

Chewing Scenery Pt. 1

When I was in eighth grade, I had one of the best history teachers. Unlike my all-time favorite history teacher who had in fact lived through most of the timeline his particular course covered (US History, he remembered when Christmas lights came into vogue), I learned an incredible writing lesson from this guy: setting makes the story.

He didn't use the word setting, of course, this being a history class, but he made the point several times. Why did certain societies flourish when parked on fertile ground? Well, they could grow enough to feed their people and didn't have to rely on trade for certain necessities. Why did some people fall to cannibalism? They lived on an island and after removing access to fertile fishing grounds, they had no one but themselves for sustenance. Who needs a navy if you are entirely landlocked, how do you feed 200,000 bodies in the dead of winter with no easy preservation methods for food storage, isn't it a bad idea to split up in a haunted house?

The story I tell in a ravaged apocalyptic city is quite different from the one I tell in an apocalyptic overgrown forest. In the city you are contending with other survivors, limited canned goods and medicine, feral children and animals, painful memories, and dangerously unstable structures. In the forest you are dealing with wild animals who no longer feel the need to allow their fear of you to stand in the way of a full belly, unfamiliar landscape, roving bandits, sudden drops in the ground and a lack of easy access and preserved food as well as a distinct lack of medical care.

Sometimes I use a certain setting because I am fascinated with the voice of the people who live there. The voice of a character who lives in a small town is quite different from one who lives in a city, is different from one who lives in a house, on the street, in an apartment, in the basement, under the bed. The setting guides the plot by boxing in my possibilities, especially given the cardinal rule of writing (and the only one I am unwilling to break) that I should never stretch the reader's ability to suspend disbelief beyond the breaking point. Between the voice and the plot, the setting builds the structure of my story in immutable ways. If you think of a story as an equation, the setting is not a variable like a character or a goal, but it is the rules of order in which you can perform the functions necessary to solve the equation. Remember, solve the bit in the parentheses, then multiply before addition and subtraction. Those invisible rules are the setting.

The invisible rules of my setting creates this logical plot flow for my character in my current short story: If she lives in the small town during winter, she must contend with isolation and a limited suspect pool, which most likely means someone she knows is the killer. What does that kind of knowledge do to my character? Ah, conflict!

Setting makes it possible.

Once you have the setting that makes your story's voice sing and your plot tie itself with nearly no effort on your part - ahaha, but this is writing. Once you have the setting and have mopped the blood from your forehead, examine the setting.

Stress test.

How much of your setting are you using?

Inception, a little flick you may have heard of (personal Inception watch count as of this post: 36), uses the setting to the point where the people are tension setters (projections who can become violent at a moment's notice) and settings within settings affect the plot and the how-the-hell-will-he-solve-that-puzzle-now rising tension. When Yusuf takes the van off the bridge, Arthur loses gravity and has to create his own drop to wake up his fellow mind-heisters exactly on time. Gray urban landscape filled with gunmen morphs into opulent amber hotel halls evolves into labyrinthine snow covered forest trails surrounding an ominous compound.

So...is your setting breaking a sweat yet? Work it, baby!