On alternate Wednesdays, I run a little writers' group sharing insights and critiques with other writers. I'm the most experienced there, though not the only one who has made a living as a writer, so often I am leading the discussions and providing some of the things I have learned.

The group is called "Taking Pains" as a reminder that being a writer is a craft that requires attention to detail, and too, an ability to stand up to constructive criticism. Which we try to do a lot of, and as little of the other kind as can be managed.

One of the things that comes up in our discussions repeatedly is how to manage setting, and why setting is important.

Setting can mean several things but the importance comes from using setting to bring readers into your story. If they can feel present in your scenes, the stories gain reality and what happens to the characters has more meaning.

So, how to make your readers part of the story? How to make them feel they are really there?

Old style fiction, think of people like George Eliot or Nathaniel Hawthorne, might spend pages on descriptions of the scenery. Why? Because readers, for the most part, had very little experience of a reality different from their own. And even familiar environments had few representations in the culture. Readers needed lots of help.

Now we have tons of literature, movies, tv shows, interactive video games, and so lots of vicarious experiences for readers to draw on to help them inhabit the stories you are telling. Unless you are writing fantasy or science fiction of one of the wilder kinds, you don't need to over-describe your scenes.

Still the reader needs some assistance. But you don't want to spend too much time on it, not too many words. You want to get on with the story you are telling, and frankly, the reader wants you to get one with it too.

Okay, how to do that economically and effectively? This is where I came up with my Rule of Three.

If you want the scene to feel real, you have to use three senses in describing it.

The rain came down in curtains of chilly mist, first obscuring my view of the city lights, then parting to reveal some gritty detail I had previously missed: the garbage cans standing on the corner like disheveled schoolboys waiting for the bus, their hats on crooked and their hands in their pockets.

One sentence and I got three senses into it. Visual of course, this one is almost always used, but thermal with the use of "chilly" and tactile with "gritty." Gritty may be metaphorical in that construction but it counts.

He ran heavily along the beach, his bare feet making soft imprints in the wet sand with each thud, the muttering waves erasing the evidence of his passage almost as quickly as it happened, his breath beginning to come in raspy pants and painful wheezes.

You don't want to get too "purple" with this sort of thing so try to avoid too many adverbs or adjective chains.

I watched her scratch out the hopscotch pattern on the sidewalk with the dry yellow chalk gripped in her pudgy fingers, her tongue appearing now and then at the corner of her mouth to help with making the numbers inside the boxes.

If you can get the knack of doing this, burying the scene-setting into the action, your writing will feel dense and evocative.

Hugs,
Erin