Paying Attention

Happy Fourth, y'all!

Last Saturday I was up in Sullivan County for the Dylan concert at Bethel Woods. (Awesome new rendition of All Along the Watchtower, in case you’re interested in the tour.) Because it was a gorgeous day, my husband and I went hiking in the Shawangunks at Sam’s Point – up and into the ice caves – for the sake of a scene in my story. The place was once a commercial operation, but it’s now a preserve managed by the Nature Conservancy.

Eric’s a professor of botany and plant ecology. He knows his plants, plus he’s an avid – and speedy – reader of mystery and sci-fi. As a resource for flora, he comes in handy. But as for the reader bit...sadly, he has confessed to occasionally skipping descriptions of setting.

Since I find setting just about as juicy in a novel as story, this habit of his bothers me. It offends me almost as much as the fact that he feels free to skip ahead just to see if an unpromising book is worth his while. So as we climbed along the old coach road to the dwarf pitch pine forest for the sake of my novel’s botanical and geological accuracy, I asked why he skips setting descriptions. I wanted to know if he finds description boring in general...or only when an author gets the landscape wrong. Do writers mix up the details in such a way that it offends his botanical sensibilities?

I asked because on this hike I realized I’d guessed wrong about a particularly important detail of the caves. In my story I’d described echoes. Echoes, in fact, played a large role in the scene, so I was pretty disappointed when that afternoon I failed to raise a single non-human response to my shouts. A reader who knew the geology of the place might have noticed.

He said that an occasional incongruity doesn’t bother him as much as a sense that the writer isn’t paying attention. “I don’t skip description when it matters to the story, or when an author gets it right. But to some writers, all this is one big green blur.” He swept an arm to indicate the hay-scented fern and mountain laurel along the road. “And a blur is how it comes across in their books.”

There you have it. To capture the reader's attention with setting details, as writers we need to pay attention.

The advice applies equally well to indoor settings. As in the child steering a toy armored humvee with flare launchers across his mother’s painted toes. Or a cleaning lady pushing a Hoover around slippery stacks of Good Housekeeping magazines.

Setting details, when applied like spice, work well when they’re combined with a character’s actions. Better when they reveal character. Best when they contribute to a story’s mood or theme.

Open The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel at any page, you’ll pull out a plum:

“And now, in California, the rock that had sat on a glass coffee table in several states in several years was going to be ‘planted’ beside slabs of granite, lichen-covered granite hauled down from the Sierras, and all of it bordered by white sweet alyssum. The Tom-rock would be as much a marker as a headstone. And hadn’t I nearly died to get it, holding my breath for so long, and those eels?” (From “Tom-Rock Through the Eels,” page 181.)

It’s not as easy as Hempel makes it sound. I’m working on it. Meanwhile, I’m aiming for accuracy. I don’t want my husband skipping ahead in my book.

–Lois