Setting: If You Build It, They Will Come

A story can take place across a span of galaxies or it can take place at the bottom of a well. Every story, unless it’s an especially experimental tale, has to take place in some kind of physical environment – we need to give the characters somewhere to stand (or, if it’s taking place in space, or underwater, float).
 In some cases, the setting may be crucial to the story; this is why, for example, world-building is considered an integral part of the sci-fi author’s skill-set. In other cases, the setting may not be as important to a story as its characters and plot, but we still need to afford it the attention to detail that will persuade the reader that they have stepped into what John Gardner calls the ‘vivid, continuous dream’.
 If you’re a writer like me, you simply won’t be able to start a story without having a very clear idea of where it takes place. In fact, it’s frequently happened that I had no idea for a story, nor any plan for writing one, until a setting presented itself. In a way, it’s the equivalent of a bare stage when the curtains are pulled back, and we know that the actors will soon appear. Once I feel the dart of recognition – that this place, this very particular place, would be a wonderful setting for a story – then I know it’s only a matter of time before the characters will start strolling into place. If you build it, they will come …
 Oddly enough, the initial setting, the one that provides the inspiration, isn’t necessarily where the story takes place. I first got the idea for The Lammisters while we were on holidays in Donegal, visiting an old stately home where the Anglo-Irish owner would host Hollywood stars from the 1920s. It seemed to me the ideal spot for a PG Wodehouse kind of novel; but for the purpose of the story, I needed, as it began, for Young Archie, the foolish third son, to travel to Los Angeles to encounter some Hollywood stars. And so the story opens on the terrace of Musso’s in Los Angeles; but Young Archie and I both enjoyed our brief sojourn in Los Angeles so much that we never made it back to Donegal, and the whole novel played out in Hollywood.
 But that initial setting gave the story a kind of palimpsest quality. Its physical environment and its history, its economics and its culture, set the tone for who Young Archie was, and what he needed to escape, and what he wanted to achieve. It was as if that setting underpinned the story’s immediate setting of Hollywood in the Silent Era, invisible but informing Archie’s motives and aspirations.
 Setting isn’t just about giving your characters a place to stand. Setting is what your characters emerge from, where they’ve evolved, the place they learned to speak and think, where their loves and hates and prejudices were formed. If you’re prepared to look and listen – to observe, as Joyce Carol Oates says, with reverence – then your setting will tell you more about your characters than you realise you know.

On Writing and Jazz

Set during the Jazz Age, THE LAMMISTERS is a novel that plunders the literary canon in the manner of a starved child let loose in a sweetshop. Of all its influences, though, the strongest is that of jazz itself, although not the jazz of that era, but that of the post-bebop period: throughout the writing, I was listening to a playlist made up of Davis, Coltrane, Mingus, Coleman, et al. Being no scholar of music, all I can say is that I love the playful irreverence, the ceaseless reinvention, the sense of an ongoing homage to the history of jazz even as the music itself is bent out of shape and transformed into new forms and styles. You don’t always understand what it is you’re trying to achieve when you’re doing it, of course; Ted Gioia, writing about free jazz, shed some retrospective light:

Freedom stood out as a politically charged word in American public discourse during the late 1950s and early 1960s […] It is impossible to comprehend the free jazz movement of these same years without understanding how it fed upon this powerful cultural shift in American society. Its practitioners advocated much more than freedom from harmonic structures or compositional forms – although that too was an essential part of their vision of jazz. Many of them saw their music as inherently political. They believed that they could, indeed must, choose between participating in the existing structures – in society, in the entertainment industry, in the jazz world – or rebelling against them. The aesthetic could no longer be isolated from these cultural currents. ~ Ted Gioia, ‘Freedom and Fusion’, THE HISTORY OF JAZZ