If there's one thing I have trouble with in my writing, it's setting. I have to admit, while reading I often skip lovely, long passages, jump right to the dialogue. Now that I'm beginning to get a little attention from small presses, I've devoted more time to studying how writer's achieve a sense of place. My education comes late. My writer friend and SLR partner Jan Rider Newman has a fine eye for setting and her short stories prove it. Read what Jan has to share about Fitzgerald's setting in
The Great Gatsby.
Setting: The Character We Overlook
by Jan Rider Newman
The Great Gatsby, first
published in 1925, has gained renewed attention lately because of the latest
movie remake. F. Scott Fitzgerald fictionalized the North Shore of Long Island
into West Egg and East Egg. Tom and Daisy Buchanan live in more fashionable East
Egg. Gatsby and Nick Carraway, the narrator, live in West Egg.
Setting
and sense of place is so important to a story it can be one of the characters. Consider
Nick Carraway’s descriptions of West and East Egg:
I . . . rented a house . . . on that slender
riotous island which extends itself due east of New York — and where there are
. . . two unusual formations of land . . . [A] pair of enormous eggs, identical
in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most
domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet
barnyard of Long Island Sound. . . .
I lived at West Egg, the — well, the
less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express
the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at
the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between
two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on
my right was a colossal affair by any standard — it was . . . Gatsby’s mansion.
. . . My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been
overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn,
and the consoling proximity of millionaires — all for eighty dollars a month.
Across the courtesy bay the white
palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water . . .
Even
if you couldn’t afford one of the “palaces” or a twelve or fifteen thousand
dollar “place,” wouldn’t you really enjoy living in Nick’s little house?
The
home of Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson, provides jolting contrast:
About half way between West Egg and New
York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter
of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a
valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and
hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys
and rising smoke . . .
Could
anything else offer more contrast or give a better idea of distinctions between
and within classes than the descriptions of where the characters live? Tom and
Daisy inhabit the ultimate circle—old-money fashionable. Gatsby is fabulously
but newly rich, unfashionable in the Buchanan stratosphere. Though not especially
rich, Nick is old-money fashionable and moves within both circles. Myrtle, in
that village of ashes, lives above a garage, is poor and desperate.
Where
is your story set? What does it say about your characters and their society,
their passions and ambitions? If possible, go to your setting or one like it.
What do you see? Don’t judge. Just look. See the people, the buildings, the
sidewalks, streets/roads, animals, trees, and plants. What does the setting say
to you? After you figure that out, ask what the setting says about your story.
How can you condense the relevance of your setting the way Fitzgerald did, so it
practically tells the story for you?
Good
luck!
Jan Rider Newman has published short stories, nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews in competitions and anthologies, print and online literary journals. Her published short stories are collected in A Long Night’s Sing and other stories. She publishes and co-edits Swamp Lily Review, an online literary journal, and is webmaster for the Bayou Writers’ Group. Jan’s current WIP, a novel about the 1755 Acadian exile from Nova Scotia, is close to her heart because many of her ancestors fell victim to it.
Her family, including two granddaughters, makes her world go around. They plus writing, research, genealogy, and photography keep her busy.
A Long Night's Sing and other stories is available for
Kindle and
POD.
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