On setting
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/04/why-every-good-story-needs-a-good-setting/361110/
This was a good article about the importance of having a sense of place in a story. The writer, obviously a huge fan of Alice Munro (who isn't, really), talks about the importance of saying that something happened here. Some lines that jumped out at me:
'..You can have all these novels in your head, all these characters and ideas, but if you don’t actually show up to your writing day—the physical place where you get the work done— you have nothing. The characters, too, need to “show up”—the story needs to happen somewhere. Again, Munro: “Something happened here.” That line could be the epigraph to everything I write. The “here” is every bit as important as the “something happened.” For me, the two cannot exist without each other; setting and character respond to and inform one another..'
Burroway makes a similar point in her book -- that setting is inextricably linked (hate this phrase, but I can't think of anything else at the moment) to tone and character. I'm beginning to see that the writer is really 'God', the all-seeing creator, and the writer chooses what to reveal or conceal and what to describe, how to describe. It's a strange kind of tension, really, because the writer is not really all-knowing. Characters change as the plots move. On some sort of semi-mystical level, you know when your characters are too far out -- like how I knew Kiat wasn't a pedophile. (It's probably not even close to mystical, really. It's probably that you based bits of the original character on someone you know, and you know he's this-and-this, but definitely not that-and-that).
It does seem quite obvious on one level. Fairytales have castles and meadows, places where evil people in cartoons live are dark and scary. But what is intriguing is how the familiar becomes the unfamiliar, and vice versa. How the same setting can look different to different characters, under different circumstances. It's as if one's emotions are projected on the landscape, so nothing is really an objective response to the built or the natural surrounding, but a response that is rooted in context, in what happened there earlier and what that means to the person. Again, not an unobvious line of thought -- the other day I read an article about Amy Bishop, a university professor who shot her boss and colleagues at a meeting, and who was found to have shot her brother as a teenager. Whether the shooting of her brother was an accident or not is still being investigated, but there were some lines in the article that made reference to the fact that she continued living in the same house, walking in and out of the kitchen where she shot her brother, and past his bedroom, which their parents still kept in the same way after he died. The author also mentions a few times that the parents still continue to live in the same house. Most people who live in or near places that trigger bad memories would move. What may look like a tacky country kitchen according to one's lens might be the scene of a murder to another. The thing about setting in fiction however, is the entering of the character's world, to reveal the inner state of the character through the setting -- not just the description, but the significance of the setting.
In all this, I wonder what it will look like for Singapore, with buildings that are in a constant state of flux. This is a blog entry I wrote 4 years ago, and I think I captured the essence of what makes a building or a space or a scenery different -- layers of memories. Our pleasures, our discomforts, our fears are mostly rooted in some sort of memory. I think about this blog post sometimes when I guide at the museum. When I tell people that the 126-year-old building that houses the National Museum of Singapore is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) buildings in Singapore, and add in a line about how buildings in Singapore don't last very long as they are constantly being torn down and rebuilt, I always read a look of regret in their eyes. Some people shake their heads, saying what a shame it is. Our memories are not just what people said or did, or what we felt or said or did, or how we interacted with each other, but also how we did all that in a particular space. Like teaching and learning, and perhaps, all things in life, nothing happens in a vacuum. Just as for the sake of lazy/efficient simplicity, I assume that a student has no prior knowledge or experiences related to a particular topic that we teach, I assume that my characters can come to life in a non-space.
The thing about setting though, is that it plays different roles in different types of stories which for the sake of rough generalisation are probably -- plot-driven, setting-driven, character-driven. Plot-driven stories are all about the action -- the setting invokes emotion, the descriptions of the setting/characters and the general sentence length (even in dialogue) sets the pace and tone. In setting-driven stories, the setting becomes the main point -- the story cannot exist anywhere else. I'm finding how to do this with the Cat story, to locate it such that the locale is the key. The idea of setting as character however, is still one that eludes me. What does it mean to have a character that is so all-encompassing and which does not speak? I suppose the answer would that the setting is the main point of reference for all or most of the characters -- in terms of memories, feelings, musings, arguments, points of tension. At the extreme of setting-driven stories would be the sort where whole other worlds are created, either of the fantastical nature (e.g. Lord of the Rings, Narnia) or real worlds with criss-crossed human ecosystems. The more I think about setting, the more I can't seem to grasp what it is. I suppose it's like a basket of sorts, with culture, worldview, beliefs, repeated motifs all mixed inside. 'Culture' itself is a loaded word, meaning so many things -- a way of life, food, practices, customs, familial history. I keep thinking about how friends my age, having grown up on a diet of Enid Blyton, go to London to look for treacle pudding, scones, crumpets and fresh blackberries. We talk fondly of the milkman who leaves milk in glass bottles at the door, and the friendly postman who comes with the mail in a sack. It's this whole world/setting/culture that Enid Blyton has in all her books that those of us who have read enough of her stories would be familiar with.
NOVEMBER 29, 2010
Yesterday we went to the old church together, "for old times' sake", just because it'll be two weeks before the entire building gets torn down. We weren't alone in this attachment to an otherwise soul-less concrete structure; around us were people taking photos of the stained glass, of rooms, of areas that held some sort of significance for them. Perhaps (and perhaps rightly so) a place of worship holds a deeper spiritual significance to people than an outright altar to consumerism like a shopping centre...although I would be very upset if they ever decide to tear Parkway down or to close Chatuchak. But I digress.
I had expected intellectually that saying goodbye to a building to which I went to weekly for the 1st 25 years of my life would be more significantly emotional but as I posed for pictures and tried to work myself into some sort of reminiscent state of mind, it felt at once forced and contrived. I could see my 4-year-old self singing in the kindergarten room with its white louvered folding doors and artwork, could see my primary-school aged friends in our basement hideout under the old stage, could see the teenaged me in various groups and meetings and weddings, but that failed to evoke any sense of nostalgia. Sure, I had some good memories about that place, but in Singapore, where our need for social upgrading and expansion is manifested to a large extent in our need to renovate and rebuild our buildings, I guess I have become numb to the almost-transient nature of the spaces we live, work and worship in, perhaps a cautionary reaction to the dangers of forming deep emotional ties to any particular physical structure, for fear that it too will be torn down in the name of development and upgrading. Down the years, I might find myself caught in a conversation that sought to validate a collective social memory-- to recall where the library was, or where the toilet cubicle on the 3rd floor was-- and I might even indulge the listener with a fond memory or two beginning with "Yes, I really loved XYZ place..." but really the present reaction to the demolition of this building is a distant, pragmatic one, one that is more concerned with the logistics of the move and the building; how long it will take, what it will involve.
Also, the building itself has gone through enough renovations over the years for me not to hold any real attachment to it. The old library and the basement hideout disappeared during one such extensive renovation years ago, as did the stage upon which I danced as a fairy during my kindergarten concert. The old playground with its creaky wooden bridge which we tirelessly reenacted The Three Billy Goats Gruff on week after week was replaced by a set of plastic blocks about 15 years back. The kindly lady who I went to for copious amounts of coffee and tea on Sunday mornings passed away some months ago. Bit by bit the building had already died for me, and what remains is just a shadow of what it had been, too new to mourn, still somewhat foreign and strange in comparison to what it had been in my childhood memories.
Maybe one's thoughts about a particular building is really tied in closely with the fore-mentioned collective social memory. I keenly feel the loss of my school's pre-war building, even before it is torn down in 2 years' time, because of all the stories I've heard and read about the various rooms. I look at pictures of the old National Theatre and the Van Cleef Aquarium with a sense of loss even though I have no distinct memories of either place. I look with fondness at Katong Shopping Centre and various Katong landmarks largely from stories my parents tell me.
Strangely enough though, a residual effect of living in an urban landscape that is in a constant state of flux is the sense of pride one seems to have in remembering where a building was and what used to be on a certain plot of land. It's a mark of authentic citizenship to a particular area if you can accurately recall where a certain shop was and what the area used to look like. Remember Jackies Bowl? Remember Seaview Hotel? Remember Rose Garden? Remember the old Siglap Market? Ah, you must have grown up in the East during the 1980s. One's memories of places and buildings (or food stalls) past serve as a social marker in urban landscapes; it wouldn't be the case if we lived amid 300- year- old stone castles and churches and old wooden barns that get abandoned, but never demolished and developed.
What social markers then, do people in rural areas use to validate their sense of place and belonging? Weather patterns perhaps? (e.g. Do you remember the drought of '63?) or human relations? (e.g. Remember when old Mrs H from down the street ran away with the milkman?) Perhaps our urban landscape city lifestyles have all but reduced weather to an inconvenience rather than a force of nature from which our harvest and livestock are dependant on and have so alienated us from each other that buildings, rather than people or nature, become our social reference points in our memories. But then again, what we feel toward buildings is really a hybrid of the memories of human relationships forged within its walls and of good food eaten, along with particular memories of the architecture itself because of the impossibility of divorcing the meaning attributed to an object or building from the thing itself.
Alistair MacLeod
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/books/alistair-macleod-author-of-no-great-mischief-dies-at-77.html?_r=0
This was a charming article I read about Alistair MacLeod, whose book I will read as soon as Portfolio 4 is done. I love the amount of attention to the craft, as well as the kookiness of this man. It made me feel (a little) comforted that the Cat Story (which in my mind, has become 'The bloody cat story') has taken a year to morph into a respectable form.
