FUNDAMENTALS OF SETTING: ACTIVATING DEMANDS
Part IV of Our Setting Series
We’ve been singing the benefits (and features) of Demands — and exploring how best to activate Demands in your Story.
Let’s continue that discussion.
MINDFUL NOTATION
Basic shit I should have stressed before that a writer should put in play as early in their process as possible: write your Story’s Demands down. Start out mindful and intentional and write down what the social aspect of your Setting wants from your characters.
When I’m working on my Setting I always jot down what I’d like the Demands to be, and even though this Demand draft is non-binding and will likely change, you’d be amazed how often even a provisional Demand helps guide me to what I’m really after — or reminds me that I should keep Demands thumping throughout the tale.
Whether your Setting’s Demands are pitched low or high, whisper or chomp, Demands are most easily rendered through exposition. For example: “The city was cruel and oppressive to Orcs.”
Exposition is quick, easy, efficient – that’s the plus. The minus is that it’s not very evocative or participatory. Exposition delivers information (and a judgment about the information) to readers whether they want the information / judgment or not; strips the fiction game of play.
As opposed to dramatization, which asks your reader to live what you’re describing in narrative real time — and to make choices about what they’re “living” — to play. But even the most dramatizing writers will resort to exposition, though the skilled writer uses exposition judiciously, because they understand that what you gain in expository efficacy you lose in reader investment.
But let’s say you intend to dramatize your Demands. From my experience the most effective and reliable ways are through
— Relationships between Protagonists and their people.
— Character-conditions: what the characters are putting up with or enduring.
— Incidents: moments that put the Setting’s Demand into sharp (or at least interesting) relief.
Each of these only works, of course, if they have the Setting’s Demands baked into them, either in whole or parts.
Let’s use Katniss from The Hunger Games as an illustration: Katniss has a starkly precarious life (Condition) on top of a dead father, a broken mother, a best friend Gale who wants to run from the district (Relationships) precisely because the Capitol is a cannibal predator whose elites feasts on the districts without pity (Condition). Then comes the Reaping (Incident) that really hammers home the overwhelming power of the Capitol and Katniss’ resourceful courage in the face of her own relative powerless.
Non-Katniss example: let’s say you have a Setting with oppressive skin color hierarchies as one of its Demands. You could have the Protagonist observe that skin color hierarchies are in play (exposition) or give the Protagonist a father (relationship) who keeps pestering the Protagonist to stay out of the sun for fear of turning dark. Or have the Protagonist’s new partner comment loudly at a party that all the Protagonist’s ex-partners were always light-skinned (Incident).
SPEAKING OF RELATIONSHIPS
I often love having the Setting’s Demands trouble one of the Protagonist’s friends / relationships more than it troubles the Protagonist. This type of Demand-by-Proxy is one of my favorite two-fer type techniques: it gives you bifocal perspectives on the Demand — the Protagonist and the Friend — but narrative displacement also makes the reader feel like they have more choice on how to read the Demand — it feels somehow less instrumental, less coercive, and often very powerful when it's situated in a Protagonist’s key relationship. You know how that be. Sometimes shit that you would shrug off becomes harder to shrug off when it’s happening to someone you care about.
PITY THE WRITER -- OR AGAIN WITH THE FRICTIOUS
Can’t say this enough: the hardest shit about Setting in fiction is how unbearably abstract it is. In film you get way more Setting for zero-to-no work. The visual rendering combined with sound design combined with our visual strengths as a species means that filmmakers get Setting for free in ways that fiction writers can only dream about.
We writers need to summon a living feeling convincing place out of some of the flimsiest materials on hand — words — versus, say, full-color moving images. The challenge for writers is steep and real but we’ve evolved awesome solutions to our disadvantage — we writers have learned to bring our Settings to life by keeping them frictious and Demand-ing.
These two modalities are the core, they are your activators — without them the Setting becomes insubstantial, nothing at all. We want the character’s body to interact with the narrative world — this is the Frictious level — we want to feel the world through the shocks (small or large) it delivers to the Protagonist’ body — because I’m an old videogame head I often imagine the Protagonist in my stories as my Dual Shock controllers — through them the world communicates its materiality.
But we also want our characters to interact with the social world of the Setting — it is the social dimension, after all, that gives the material world shape and meaning.
The Frictious Setting illuminates the character’s body-in-the-world and Demanding Setting illuminates the characters’ self-in-the-world — and if you only deliver one mode, the Setting will start to decohere in the reader’s imaginary, will only live inside the reader partially.
But when you have both of these modes in your Setting, rubbing against one another, your Setting will attain a virtual solidity, a virtual vibrancy that makes it possible for a reader to feel this fictional word as if it was their own — and even to love that fictional world, sometimes even more than their own. And that’s no small power.
.
.
Part I of Our Setting Series here