 Action/Adventure: September 30, 2015 Issue [#7237] |
  Action/Adventure
This week: When Setting Fuels the Action Edited by: Cinn  
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Once again, I find myself writing a newsletter in a genre more geared toward fiction writers than poets. However, I believe that there is always something that can be learned from poetry. Today, the topic is setting, and I thought that I would share the setting from a poem. Yes, some poems do have settings.  This particular snippet is the introduction to the poem as well.
After seeing the nature documentary we walk down Canyon Road,
onto the plaza of art galleries and high end clothing stores
where the orange trees are fragrant in the summer night
and the smooth adobe walls glow fleshlike in the dark.
~Excerpt from "Romantic Moment" by Tony Hoagland
Hoagland is one of my favorite poets, and I could not resist the urge to share. There is a greater purpose though. This setting is unique and not the most obvious place for a 'romantic moment'. Where is the sunset? Why are they walking down the street instead of barefoot in the surf? The result of such settings is obvious and possibly even boring, while changing the setting adds some mystery and makes the future action less predictable.
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In high school, my creative writing teacher gave me a critique that I never forgot. I proposed a story about conjoined twins who hated each other (the stories of my youth were often a touch weird). He seemed fine with the premise, but he halted me at the setting: Their father owned a sawmill. Okay, so my stories were a bit on the gruesome side as well. I am quite sure that everyone filled in the mental blanks there as quickly as my teacher did. The setting made the action far too obvious. Against my better judgment (as at 17, I happened to know everything about everything, of course), I decided to take his advice and set the story in a carnival. I also shifted the time period to the heyday of sideshows. It not only made more sense, but the action at the end was much more dramatic and interesting because of that change.
I think that this basic lesson in choosing settings is especially important for the action/adventure genre. If the setting implies very predictable action scenes, your audience will not get much thrill out of it. Conversely, if the setting is quirky and unique or the action within the setting is unexpected, it will make people want to keep reading. These are two of the best ways to avoid stagnant and predictable uses of your setting.
 Something More Interesting
Some stories take place where they ought to take place. If it must be in a city, then that is what you are working with, but it does not have to be in a nondescript alley or a generic hotel room. Cities have lots of unique attractions, but there are also areas with high ratios of certain types of businesses. For instance, one street might have a number of high-end art galleries, while another has multiple bookstores on one block. Choose a district that is interesting. It might provide you with some unique details that will push the action in an original direction.
If the adventure takes place in the great outdoors, the same thing applies. Someone falls in a river and gets swept away... obvious. During a chase in the jungle, someone grabs a vine and swings to safety... obvious. What sort of occurrence would be less expected? Even if the alternative isn't entirely fresh, it will provide a bigger thrill than the most likely scenario.
Same Action, Different Setting
If possible, you might want to do just what I did when taking my instructor's notes. Change the setting completely. Take that car chase out of the city and plant it firmly in the country with 4-wheelers instead of luxury cars. Send a tractor smashing through a house, followed by bad guys with guns. Have someone get swept away in a sewer instead of a river. Okay, that last one is gross, but you see the point. Sometimes creating the unexpected is as simple as using something you would expect only in a different setting. If someone grabs an extension cord at a construction site and swings to safety, it is more satisfying than the typical jungle chase.
Even with a really interesting and versatile setting, like a carnival or sawmill or ski resort, there are obvious and less expected options. Personally, I love to read a good chase down a ski slope but only if the details are interesting. At a carnival, the house of mirrors and ferris wheel offer the most obvious thrills and suspense, but why not place the hero in one of the crazier rides? Perhaps a gravity denying ride that spins and sucks you to the sides, forcing the hero to plan his next move before the ride stops and that dizzy footrace continues. Or maybe the fight scene takes place in a clown's trailer or a inside a food stall.
Going with your first instinct is excellent for a first draft, but getting more creative on later drafts might be a fun change from the dull editing routine. If a scene isn't clicking the way you want, perhaps a minor change in location could solve the problem and put the thrill back into your action filled adventure. Some of the examples used here are exaggerated, but the bare bones advice is very simple. Why have a fight in a hotel room when you could have it in the hotel's laundry room? Crashing through the glass in a washing machine door might make more impact than a bad guy's head going through a television set. It's creative writing, so you might as well get creative!
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