No, I don’t mean a space where your main character is the only person of color in a room of white faces – though it might sound that way.
Have you ever found yourself reading a scene in a book and not being able to picture a single thing about the setting?For the life of you, you can’t picture a single detail of the room or city or wherever they are. Where are they? And what time of year or day is it?
If you recognize this, then you’ve hit White room syndrome. And, as a voracious reader and author, I can vouch for this being god-awful frustrating.
That space you see now? That was my apartment when I moved in a year ago. It was a white space. It had no personality. It may as well have been a vacuum in time and space. I’m working on changing it now.
So why am I bringing this up?
I’m reading two books – one on my Kindle, the other a paperback. Both are relatively new releases by authors whose previous work I’ve enjoyed.
Only one of the books is holding my interest; the other is frustrating me.
The book that has me hooked is full of local color that makes me feel like I’m walking beside the characters in this tiny hill town in North Carolina. I can envisiion the farms, the main street where one of the characters has a café that’s the beating heart of the town. I can even imagine how the mountain air smells at the beginning of autumn, the season when the story takes place. And I love it.
The other book is the one that’s frustrating me. It lacks the sensory details so vital for a story’s setting to pull me in. A good part of the book is set in Rome in the 1960s and 1970s – and yet there are no descriptions of the city or the people other than very cursory things like a shop being on a back alley or a character having surprisingly blond hair. I have no clue where we are other than when the author mentions a place even armchair tourists would be familiar with (e.g. the Trevi Fountain or the Colosseum) but what good is simply mentioning these places without describing them in some way for the reader who doesn’t know much about Italy and wants the book to be like a movie for their mind?
The setting is flat. It’s not vibrant. It doesn’t come alive.
It’s suffering from white space syndrome.
Add a little set dressing
That white space is essentially a vacuum, devoid of any detail that might ground the reader and help immerse them in the scene. And it needs to be set dressed and populated.
As a reader, I want to know what time of day it is. Is it useasonably cool and rainy, or is it humid, hot and sticky? Is the piazza teeming with tourists or is it early enough that only locals are passing the fountain while on their way to work or to the nearest espresso bar for un caffè and a cornetto? Is the sun bearing down on our main character and making her feel faint? Are beads of perspiration forming on her forehead and neck? Is the light a clear, bright blue of summer or is it pale, almost watery winter light? I couldn’t tell you based on what I’ve read so far.
And with this scene taking place in front of the Trevi Fountain, I expected more details. How do you set the scene and describe it for someone who has never been outside their home country or perhaps never even seen the Trevi Fountain without going overboard?
Make sure the reader knows who is in the scene, where they are and what they’re doing and when the scene takes place. Without these, the characters are simply in a white studio space. And it makes for boring reading.
A few details are enough to set the scene
Sometimes it’s enough with just a few details – say, three or four – to ground a scene its setting. We don’t need all the historical details, we just need enough to picture where we are – ask yourself what you first notice when you are somelpace new. Of course you notice what it looks like. Do you also notice the sounds or scents of the place? Does it feel surreal for you or like home?
Your reader needs to picture where they are and feel like they’re there without it feeling like you’re simply listing historical details. Readers don’t want a history lesson that feels like something from a text book. They want a living, breathing setting that makes them feel like they are there.
Help them feel like they are walking beside your main characters by giving them the sensory details they need to feel completely immersed in the setting.
How I am trying to do it
Since I am such a pain in the ass stickler for details, here’s a scene I am working on at present in a scene from a standalone novella that is a part of the Maybe… series:
“Ci sono scale, si?” He made a zig-zaggy gesture with his index finger.
“Stairs?”
“Sì. Stairs… e ti scendi. You go down. And that is where you are.”
He smiled at me and shook my hand. “Benvenuti a Matera.”
Then he got back into his van and drove off, which pleased the Fiat driver, who flipped me the bird as he passed me by. I hefted my backpack on my shoulders and then entered the piazza. I’d typed the address into my phone’s GPS. The street we were standing on was actually a piazza as it was called in Italian – Piazza Vittorio Veneto. At its heart was the Palazzo dell’Annunziata. Its graceful, buttery yellow facade glowed golden in the afternoon sun. I recognised it from Pino’s stories and vacation snapshots. He’d once told me about an ice-cream bar hidden on the roof of the palazzo and said it was perfect for an evening view of the city. I’d find it later.
Right now, I was exhausted from my too early morning flight to Munich, followed by a nearly too-short transfer to the flight to Bari. All I wanted to do was find the apartment, take a nap and then shower…or maybe I’d shower first. I reeked of sweat eventhough I’d showered before I left for the airport at four-thirty in the morning. It was one o’clock in the afternoon here in Matera and the sun was blaring down on me from a perfectly blue, cloudless sky. The paving stones seemed to glisten in the heat.
Yeah, it was going to be a scorcher.
It’s still raw. It’s not perfect. But I hope you get a sense of place. I could (and probably will) more but I can tell you that this is more than I got from the book I am reading that’s set in Italy.
No passport required
So, my advice is this: don’t deprive your readers of a fantastic sensory experience. Pull them into the setting.
They want to feel like they are in that place. Give them details and NOT a history lesson or simply name-dropping.
Make them feel like they are on the same journey as your protagonist. And they won’t even need a passport.
