Setting by Jack M Bickham Read Free Book Online

improbable or impossible settings work for the reader lies in making the impossible imaginable and acceptable —making the setting enough like something that does exist so that the reader can "buy it." The copious use of actual facts in presenting the setting is mandatory to get the reader to suspend disbelief. Crichton, for example, provides heavy detail on real scientific developments in biological engineering—cloning, and the like. I heavily researched work in artificial intelligence, computer design and childhood-learning theory before writing Ariel, and put heavy doses of facts about such real aspects of science in the novel as part of its setting.
    The moral of this, perhaps, is that even when you make something up out of whole cloth —or perhaps especially when you do so —it's even more crucial that you know what the real facts are and present many of them to make your departure from actuality more credible. There seems to be no escaping the need for careful attention to detail—and research.
    In all the cases mentioned in this chapter, the use of a vivid bit of setting that never really existed might be better than use of the real thing, even if scrupulously researched. But in every case we have seen the need for factual information lying behind the make-believe, as a point from which it can take off and still be believed. There are advantages, sometimes, in making up part of your setting, but that doesn't relieve you of the need to be accurate and true.
    The trick, it seems to me, lies in seeing what might ring false to your reader —and never taking a chance in such a case. If you can construct part of your setting from memory of a real place, or from your imagination, it can be perfectly all right as long as you don't stray too far from what the reader knows is real. You can set your story in the fictional town of Bickham, nineteen miles outside of Houston, for example, and if you do so, you can make up street names and everything else since the town does not really exist. But you can't have a blizzard in August in that general locale, and if you have a character drive to Houston to shop, you'll have to have the street names and all other details of the real city accurate in every detail.
    So, you can see that accuracy is a prime requisite even in an imagined setting. Imagined setting must be just as consistent and detailed as one built on an actual place or time. It cannot deviate from realities about the region or era. You may, for reasons of convenience or legality, obscure the actual identity of a place, or you may play loose with certain aspects of an actual place's history. You can make up a setting from memory or imagination. But your job always is to convince the reader. Specific detail is convincing, and generality is not. That's why made-up details of a setting are so often extrapolations, not wild invention, and why writers so often research heavily into a real setting before making up a similar one of their own; they want to have a lot of detail, and they want to be very close to what's really "out there" someplace.
    A "DEPARTURE CHECKLIST"
    Assuming you are considering making up part of your setting or deviating from actuality in some ways as you depict an actual setting, here are a few questions you might want to bear in mind —a sort of safety checklist for your departure from reality.
    1. "Do I have good reason not to use the actual place or time?" If the only reason you're making up a setting is to make it easier on yourself, you may be making a mistake. You'll probably end up researching a real place, and then basing your imagined setting on hard facts, anyway.
    2. "Am I sure that my imagined setting will be more vivid and believable than the actual place might be?" As useful as imagined settings may be, credibility is gained by placing your story in an actual, recognizable place and time. Don't carelessly assume that a made-up town, for example, would necessarily be more interesting