Shattering the Setting Stereotype

SHATTERING THE SETTING STEREOTYPE
By Stoney M. Setzer

As most middle-school students could tell you, fiction has three major components: plot, characters, and setting. Setting, of course, refers to the time/space backdrop in which the characters act out the plot of the story.
Depending upon what genre a given story or novel falls into, we tend to expect certain sorts of settings. For example, when we think of a mystery story, we may think of police departments, locked rooms, or offices belonging to seedy private investigators. If we think of espionage stories, we usually think of exotic, faraway locales frequented by the glamorous and wealthy--the sorts of places that Joe and Jane Average will only see on TV or in books. Although these are obviously not the only places where such stories can happen, these settings are so linked with their genres that they almost become stereotypical.
Likewise, we have our own stereotypical settings in speculative fiction. Outer space, alien planets, medieval kingdoms, or creepy mansions tend to dominate most people’s ideas of spec-fic settings. Although there is nothing wrong with such oft-employed settings (depending on the needs of a given plot, I’ve used some of them myself), I’d like to take a moment to encourage everyone to consider shattering the setting stereotype.

THE TZ FACTOR

One of the biggest influences in my writing has been that of classic Twilight Zone reruns. Several years back I tried to determine what it was about that series that made such a lasting impression upon me. I came up with a lot of possibilities: The inventive storytelling, the twist endings…and, believe it or not, the settings.
Sure, some of the episodes took place on distant planets, but most of them didn’t. The majority of them dealt with ordinary people, in ordinary settings, who have something extraordinary happen to them. A prime example is one of its most famous episodes, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (the Shatner-on-a-plane episode). It took a relatively mundane setting, that of flying cross-country on an airplane, and made it unforgettable by sticking a gremlin on the wing.
Because of the setting, the viewer is left with a man-that-could-happen-to-anybody feeling.
That is exactly the sort of effect I shoot for in my stories. My plots fall squarely into the spec-fic category, but I try to set the plots in places that are familiar to average people so as to bring the events as close to home as possible. Such strategy also involves using average people as my characters, but that’s another topic for another blog.

WRITE ABOUT WHERE YOU KNOW

All of us have been told at least once to write about what we know. My challenge is to write about where you know.
I have spent thirty of my thirty-three years in Griffin, GA, a town of about 25,000 people situated approximately 40 miles south of Atlanta. Although I have never called my hometown by name in my stories--and indeed, I usually have different town names in each story--Griffin and the surrounding area is what I picture. Sometimes I may be picturing one of the “mill villages” scattered throughout town, or I may envision the large research area that the University of Georgia has here if a laboratory of some sort figures into my tale. Either way, it gives me a sort of ready-made stage for my plots and characters.
Some may think that this is a “lazy” way to create a setting, but I take the opposite viewpoint. To me, it takes more creatively to tell a story about aliens or supernatural events in a small Southern town than it does to tell the same story on another planet (or even in a big city here on Earth). It forces me to be more creative, because I have to think of logical reasons why the story should happen in such a parochial place, as well as how the story can believably unfold in that setting. Really, it’s a challenge, and it carries the pay-off of hitting closer to home.
That’s my two cents’ worth. Authors, give it a shot. Try setting your next spec-fic story in your own backyard.