Today my writer’s companion instructs on the importance of setting, especially those places so known we look past and consider them insignificant. But in good writing everything, I am painfully learning, should import at least one or two points in a story; description of setting should tell us something about the character or plot as much as paint a word picture. Below are two bathroom descriptions that used in this exercise:
In the sixties, teenaged girls travel home in Northern Alabama from a football game. Between towns the road darkens into farmland. Only the full moon lights the highway. A shy red-haired girl who rides in the backseat needs to pee and thinks she started her period. The driver, a blond born-again Christian can’t find a bathroom. Nothing is open now. All the girls laugh except the redhead. She’s in pain. Finally having mercy, the driver cuts her green mustang, fastback, onto a red chert road toward a farm house; the gravel road ends at a wooden shed. The redhead crawls out of the backseat, making quick high steps to the outhouse. The barnwood door creaks on rusted hinges; so does the floor boards. Inside, she hears crickets, frogs and giggles. The rough wooden commode rim stabs her narrow rear. Yes, she’s ok, she answers, and yes, she will hurry. There’s no paper. Seems everyone needs a turn says the slutty brunette cheerleader as she lights a cigarette; the smoke waffles into the shed. No, don’t hurry; says the blond, we can wait. More giggles.
***
The telephone hung on the wall with a chewed-up twenty-foot cord. For privacy even though no one was up at midnight, the young girl stretched the phone into the bathroom across the hall and called her boyfriend. A brass chain locked the door. The room ran rectangular, long and narrow. A linen closet housed towels, sheets, some feminine products used by her mother and sister, her father’s razor everyone used and lied about, and way in a back covered-corner were matches the girl hid to light stolen cigarettes. The phone didn’t quite reach to the white commode, so she stacked the towels on the floor to sit on, and used the sheets to cover chilled legs. The window air-conditioner in kitchen blasted artic winds down the hall just outside the bathroom door. She wished to get closer to the clawfoot tub, crawl in there, smoke her cigarette, and maybe read a book, but instead she rested her feet on the black and white vinyl floor and listened to the phone’s buzz as it rung over and over.
***
What are some of the settings you take for granted, a car, a kitchen, a deck, an elevator? Here in my part of the south, subways are a novelty, but we have buses, and van pools. See if you can describe people, time, and plot with the setting. I would love to hear what you think about using setting to drive along your story.
Karen
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