Setting the Scene—Jillian Grant Shoichet

I attended a writing conference in Stockholm recently. All the sessions were useful in their own way, but one session keeps returning to me. It wasn’t the most complex session, and it didn’t cover a lot of material, but perhaps that’s why it keeps haunting my imagination: sometimes one good idea is all you need.

The session was devoted to the exploration of how setting can move a narrative.

The presenter was Adnan Mahmutović, who arrived in Sweden in the 1990s as a refugee from Bosnia and is now an associate professor of literature and creative writing at Stockholm University. His most recent novel, At the Feet of Mothers, follows Jewish-Cherokee Joseph Schneider on a pilgrimage to Gaza to find his biological mother.

When I first read Mahmutović’s biography, my initial thought was that he’d led a life tailor-made for writing. I, by comparison—born and raised in a loving, hetero-normative, ostensibly white middle-class home in one of the wealthiest regions of a peaceful Western democracy—really had nothing of interest to say.

But by the end of the session, I understood that writing about setting has little to do with the writer’s personal experience. Instead, it’s all about the writer’s focus.

Someone with lived experience of a narrative setting (an event, a location, or a time period) may bring that setting to life using language and details that evoke in the reader an emotional response. But someone without such lived experience can present a setting in an equally powerful way, by using a different focal point.

In fact, as Mahmutović points out, if we’re very familiar with a particular setting, we may have difficulty writing about it. An environment’s uniqueness becomes everyday, so mundane that we are desensitized—to both great beauty and great ugliness. That’s why it’s possible for someone who lives in the Pacific Northwest to lose sight of the mountains or to overlook the poverty of those living on the streets—to become blind to the gross juxtaposition of destitution and wealth that characterizes Vancouver and Victoria.

In other words, it’s easy for a writer to feel she has nothing to write about.

But writing powerfully about a setting has almost nothing to do with the writer’s experience of that setting. What it requires is the ability to focus the lens.

When setting a scene, choose one detail, maybe two. Those details are the touchstones you return to in your narrative descriptions. When you describe the interior of an airplane, for example, focus on that overhead compartment that pops open every time there’s turbulence. If you’re describing a crowded city, focus on the garbage bin overflowing on a busy street corner—examine the activity around that bin over the course of the day, the bin’s contents, the smells; they will become representative of the city’s residents and their actions.

After that, you need mention only those details to recall an entire world.

For example, when your character later experiences a minor earthquake and a cupboard door swings violently on its hinges, your reader will recall the character’s first turbulent flight experience. When your middle-aged character sees a rat while taking the garbage to the bin in the apartment’s back parking lot, your reader will be reminded of the character’s early adult years in New York City during the garbage collector’s strike one hot August in 2002.

Focusing on small details to illustrate a larger picture enables the writer to create whole environments without having to paint the entire landscape. This is why there can be many stories set in one location or written about a single event. Each writer focuses on different details.

If every writer focused only on what they know, many of the writers we admire most would have far less to say than they do; we aren’t all refugees, or survivors of abuse, or child soldiers, or child brides, or victims of unusual circumstance.

But the uniqueness of a writer’s personal experience doesn’t automatically make her a good storyteller, and a good story doesn’t include all the details. A good writer narrates an entire lifetime, a complete saga, using only small, intimate fragments.

Her task is to find the world in the details.