setting

For years, Susan said in a story work exploration, even the idea of having the ability, much less permission or power, to choose what she wanted to do with her life was an impossibility. She couldn’t imagine it.

As she talked about how she felt that she had drifted from relationship to relationship, from job to job, from dilemma to stuck place to dead end, I kept thinking of one of the key questions in story work, so at a point when Susan took a breath and stopped to think, I asked her, “What was the world like for the young girl in your story?”

Asking “What was the world like?” is a way of doing the exploration into the story, by examining the setting of the story. In narrative theory, or screenwriting, asking questions about setting is crucial. Nothing on a movie screen is there by accident; it was put there, on purpose, by the production designers and set designers and prop masters. Everything in a scene in a book is there because the author put it there, to help us understand something about what the characters are about to experience.

We don’t realize that the things that are part of the world we grow up in, were put there by human beings, on purpose. The chairs. The language. The rhythms of a day or a meal or a work week. It may be that the people around us didn’t put these things in place, if they inherited the world from those before them, as most of us do. But the wallpaper or the office furniture or the coffee breaks or the vacation plans – those things are all in place, as if put there by a set designer or a playwright, and they inform how we move through the scenes of our life.

Susan began to describe what the world was like for the young girl in her story. “Susan lived in a house with the curtains pulled closed most of the time. Her room had ugly shag brown carpeting. She woke up in the morning worrying about her homework and whether she would feel afraid of the mean kids again. She would eat her breakfast and her mother would be rushing around saying ‘Hurry up, hurry, we’re all going to be late and your mom’s gonna lose her job and we’re gonna end up in the poor house.’ Susan would bolt down her cereal and grab her lunchbag and scurry into the car.”

Setting can tell us a lot about what the characters in the story are feeling and struggling with. In this case, we know that Susan’s house was dark, and her room had brown deep carpeting that she didn’t like. Her mother’s predominant message was one of fear – your mom’s going to lose her job and we’re going to be destitute. School is a threatening place because of mean kids. In this story, Susan isn’t someone with a sense of power or agency. She’s buffeted around by forces beyond her control. She feels hurried and scared.

Many, many people tell me that they feel this way, starting as kids but continuing into their adult lives. They feel powerless to choose who they want to be and how they want to live.

I repeated back to Susan what she’d just described about this young girl’s house, and room, and morning routine. After a moment of thinking, she added, “Susan grew up and kept just going from one part of her life to another, just like running from the breakfast table into the car and off to school.”

Then she made a small gasp and said, “Oh my God. Now I see it.” Tears came to her eyes. “That little girl – she was always moving around, not feeling like she could choose what to do. And then she went to the same college her friends did. And she dated the first boy who was nice to her, and that went nowhere. And she took the job that came the easiest. And she wandered around for years, and never stopped to ask herself what she wanted.”

I said, “Did Susan ever change her story?”

Susan took a deep breath and said, “Yes. She did.”

I asked, “How did Susan change her story?”

Susan said, “She saw. She saw that she’d been following the urgency and fear of her mother, but that she wasn’t a little girl anymore. She saw that she was a grown woman who had the power to decide who she wanted to be. She stopped being led by the loudest or most urgent voice. She took the time to finish her breakfasts, and decide what she wanted for herself every day. And her life changed.”