Unconventional Settings Create Unique Stories
This essay was recently published by Flash Fiction Magazine.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
Escaping the Traditions
“Place is often something you don’t see because you’re so familiar with it that you devalue it or dismiss it or ignore it. But in fact, it is the information your reader most wants to know.”
—Dorothy Allison
Flash fiction is a form that continues to rewrite itself, to challenge the traditional short story, to break from rules in order to serve its ultimate task of using brevity, to sharpen and shorten our reading experience, and to distill it into the most meaningful moment. While life is full of surprises, we often write about universal moments or scenes, hoping to understand them, live in someone else’s experience, and make art from our lives’ pain and joy. This desire often runs us into trouble of creating scenes that have already been rendered better, more resonant, or just over-used in our pursuit to make art of our lives. You know these moments: funerals, weddings, getting bad news in the doctor’s office, giving bad marriage news, depictions of the suffering from incurable diseases, getting fired or the loss of a family member at the hands of God or nature, or the zeitgeist. And many more scenarios or stories that we’ve already read, watched, or listened to in popular music. So, how can we make these moments resonant and not sentimental? How can we use the power of these situations and write past the cliché?
One method to present these moments in a unique way, to discover the novelty in their emotional cores, is to transplant them into new settings, to alter the time and place, to give our characters a sense of being outside their usual environment, of struggling to comprehend not only the moment of suffering but also how it can occur in this particular place. Flash fiction, even in its limited word count, can transport us to new realms by focusing on the main character’s perspective. It’s not just what they see or sense, but how they perceive it in the moment of the story that gives the setting the ability to do more than just provide a backdrop. Characters will have fresh ways of revealing themselves when they have a new setting to interact with.
If a story isn’t working in a rough draft, one of my first thoughts is to change the setting, to get it out of the common and into the slightly weird or unusual. We see the world anew when we are faced with new rules, cultures, and experiences of place. A new place is just the friction we need to add new tension, to twist the emotional knob, to make the feelings fresh. Stories set in the usual places with the usual concepts or situations are too easily classified and labeled, and we want to create the ineffable, the mysterious, the unnamable. We want stories that are more than their summaries, that must be read, pondered, and felt by the reader.
Running Away From Home: Two Examples
Now, let’s look at a few examples of stories that have transplanted the action into new settings to see how this can work for your writing, too.
In “Wedding Party Moved to the Cemetery at Midnight” by Joshua Michael Stewart, the title tells usthe setting will cause some tension between these opposite places, that the narrator will need to think of fresh ways to reveal the characters and this setting to us. A standard wedding has a standard setting and that can leave the story listless, without anything fresh in the sensory details and nothing exciting for the character to do to reveal themselves to the reader. In Stewart’s story, notice how all of the typical wedding things happen, but they now have a new spin, a new tension since they seem out of place in this setting!
Add in the extra pressure created by the one-hundred-word count, and exciting uses of language pop throughout the story: The bride floats between the stones. Her groom plays dead for an iPhone camera. Laughter spills from mouths sweet with spirits. A plaid blazer dances with a pearl necklace. The groom plants a fat kiss on his new wife’s lips under a marble angel with a chipped wing.
Not pews but stones, and she floats. A groom not just standing nervously on the stage, but hamming it up for a photo. And notice the way that Stewart uses words with ghostly connotations throughout the story. Float, dead, spirits, angel, souls, departed, and harping. Most of these words and their associations, both literal and figurative, wouldn’t appear in a standard wedding story. This story is less than standard, less than conventional, just from the change in setting.
Photo by Georgia Mashford on Unsplash
Our second example is “A Quick Word About My Life” by Trent England. In this story, the narrator’s wife has started a peculiar hobby of visiting “a falling club” instead of the typical gym or bar. We know those places well, but a falling club is something new, something, as we’ll see from the story, usually more associated with children than adults. This is another way to secure a new kind of setting, by changing who uses the setting, by making it for adults instead of children or for some other oppositional binary pairing:
After her daily shift at the ball bearing plant, she drives to the large, lime-stained building that used to be a Toys R Us, where she falls into foam pits, backwards, as though she’s a concertgoer in a mosh pit or a toppled statue of a despot. Like a gym, it has its members and regulars and Theresa remembers everyone’s names. Over dinner, she tells me about Dan who falls because he has a stressful job as a 911 operator or Janet who has three children to feed and thinks that any day her husband will get fired. I hear about Becki who sleeps with night terrors and Greg who can’t sleep at all. And while she’s telling me that if she falls enough, she will one day earn a spot in the platinum level, which is the old stock room, and get to step off backwards from an even greater height.
England spends a lot of time describing the place the narrator has never been, a place that is somewhat off-limits to him, though this is unspoken. A place where his wife has “friends,” a shared intimacy about these other characters’ lives. This place has put a rock between the narrator and his wife, and England reveals their relationship dynamic by what the wife shares about these other people she seems to know more about than her husband. Even the genders have been flipped here, as the common story has the man not coming home after work to go to the bar with his cronies. With two small shifts of a new kind of setting not usually meant for adults, and the change in the gender of those escaping the home, we have something new.
Summary
Some story events or scenarios have been used so many times that they lack inherent tension or rely too much on typical descriptions. Therefore, they need to be moved to new settings to provide the story with fresh language and tension.
Sometimes, the writer needs to add tension to the writing, to add a new setting, to make them aware of and utilize new associations borne from opposites and counter-pointed settings and scenarios.
Changing the setting can be a great way to revise a story that isn’t quite working. It can wake up the main character and can add a different or more heightened pressure on them to act.
Boring characters often arise out of boring settings because there are no new pressures on them to act or react, and therefore, they don’t reveal much or enough about themselves to the reader in these common scenarios or settings. Changing the setting can help create new plots and new ways to reveal your characters!
Minor changes in the conventional in character, plot, and/or setting can create fresh and resonant stories.
Writing Prompts
Prompt 1: Take a typical event and put it in a new setting. A high school graduation in a monster truck arena, a christening in a YMCA pool, a birthday party in the middle of a corn field. Focus on using the images that come with the new setting and see how they apply to shaping these characters, this event now that it has been put in a new, but unexpected setting. What new choices or actions can/will your character take because of the new setting? How does the new setting put pressure on the main character to act? What objects are important to the setting and to the character? How can we learn about the characters through their treatment of these objects? Is there a way to thread through a theme like Stewart’s use of ghostly terms in the example above?
Prompt 2: This time, we’re not so worried about each word but more about the weird places this micro takes us! Developing new ways of looking at or entering fictional worlds is one way to fresh flash! Play around with creating a slant on our world and our lives, and think of a business, maybe something normally used by kids but now marketed for adults, something adults are usually too serious to do. The wackier, the better! Give your characters a chance to interact with other characters in this setting and build a counterpoint between them. Someone who wants to be there and someone who would rather be anywhere else. The bored employee and the person experiencing the wackiness for the first time! Trust your imagination to provide the right details, images, and metaphors!
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Love this
This is brilliant Tommy, very useful, thank you