Keeping it Real – Settings

Cape Porpoise by Sarah Phillips Pellet

I had the occasion to visit my family in Maine over the summer and took this picture. While I love the dramatic clouds and the sun hitting the houses to the left, I admit I was somewhat disappointed I couldn’t take the shot at high tide. At high tide, the docks and boats are floating and everything looks picturesque. Like a postcard. Perfect. It’s the way the most people want to see it. In fact, while I was taking this picture a tourist was standing nearby with her camera, she shrugged and yelled over to where I stood, “Shame it’s low tide.” I get it. Low tide is just, well, low tide. It smells dank and musty (or worse), flies and mosquitoes buzz about the sea grass, little dead crabs and other ocean cast-offs cling to the glistening muck, and as you can see, pleasure boats tilt to their sides, waiting for high tide to come so they can go out to play in the sea.

But then I thought about what’s really going on in this picture and decided that I love it, low tide and all. In fact, I think I like it better than the high tide pictures I’ve taken over the years. Why? Because it tells the real story of the place.

Sometimes you need the tide to go out in order to reveal things – like peeling back a layer of a facade. This can be figuratively or literally, as in the case of this picture. Low tide here reveals a dredged harbor. It separates the pleasure boats from the working boats. The pleasure boats (a fair number of them), lie useless on the seabed for several hours twice a day, while the working boats, they can maneuver out to sea no matter the tide level. This isn’t just a pretty place on the coast of Maine. It’s a working fishing village. There’s a story here. It says something about the people who work here and their way of life. Low tide also reveals boulders and other boating hazards that lie beneath the surface during high tide. If you don’t know they’re there, you’ll hit them and damage your boat or perhaps capsize and get hurt. Peeling back the facade shows what you need to look out for when things change.

So now I’m thinking hard about my setting in my next book. What’s the high tide story – the picture perfect story? What does that look like? What happens there, when everything is peachy-keen? Conversely, what happens at low tide, when night falls, the weather changes, or when the perfect facade is peeled back? What does it reveal? How does the landscape change? What – or who – comes out when things change? What hazards are exposed? How do the characters discover them?

This picture has taught me to really think about setting in a dynamic way. I like it.

 

 

Inspiration for Settings

Old North Bridge by Sarah Phillips Pellet

I have a scene in my current Work In Progress (WIP) where my main character and his sidekick encounter a raging river. While I grew up nearby the Concord River in Massachusetts and spent many an afternoon roaming around the gardens of Buttrick Mansion and canoeing under the Old North Bridge, I haven’t spent much time on rivers in my adult life. So to re-enforce my memories, I turned to a virtual source for my setting’s inspiration: Facebook.

A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words

A friend of mine from childhood is a fly fisherman now and lives, breathes, and luckily for me, photographs, rivers. He spends hours immersed in the subtleties of his environment in solitude. He has managed to find places to fish where nothing – apart from the natural  life cycle of things – has changed. No cars, no boats, no other people. Just him, his fishing pole, his dog, and the river. And in the quiet moments of the morning or evening, he captures the nuances of river life: the interesting details of rock formations, the dappled sunlight on the water, the mist curled around rocks, rotting trees spanning banks, unusual bugs. They are taken from the perspective of a patient native, content to let life unfold, not of a tourist taking a snapshot. His pictures don’t scream, “Look where I’ve been.” They suggest, “Look at what I’m surrounded by.” When I see his pictures, I can smell the river, hear the water rushing, and feel the cool soft moss on my fingertips. I can experience the river vicariously through him and it inspires me to take a reader to that same place through my words.

Memories Shape Perspective  

I could have gone on-line and snagged a few shots like the one of the Concord River above, courtesy of Wikipedia, but there is another layer to the photographs from my friend: memories. I haven’t seen him since we were kids, so my memory of him is from that time in my life. When I look at his photographs, I imagine him as he was as a child and thus, see the pictures through the eyes of a child. Interestingly, the river scene in my WIP was one of the easiest ones to write. I was so in the moment, in the character, in the place and I think that had everything to do with my friend’s pictures putting me there in that mindset.  Now, if I could just get my other childhood Facebook friends to capture other settings for me, I’d be all set!

I wonder how other writers glean the finer details of the settings in their stories? Do you immerse yourself in a setting? If so, how?