Setting is a static word. I’m revising scenes right now that don’t need to be set but unsettled, so the characters can move on the page. My draft has scenes in it that currently run mostly to dialogue, with not enough blocking–that thing you do when you place people in relation to their surroundings. The problem is that you can’t do this by writing “about” setting, because that brings the movement to a crashing halt. Instead you need to stir it up, bring character into sync with setting, or place them at odds with it, or filter the scene through the viewpoint character’s perceptions, or jar it up against those perceptions, or any number of other little writerly ploys that create the illusion you’re after.

The other problem is that if I think of all this stuff too directly, it all seems to fly away from me. I can’t write anything because instead of Birnam Wood, I’m seeing matchsticks!

I deal with this inevitable stage of revision by flipping the pages of a few books on my shelf that have the capacity to breathe words into me, words that sing or soothe or awaken. Some are craft books, some are meditations, others are a bit of both. They include books like Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses, and Dag Hammarsjöld’s Markings. This time, Markings gave me the connection I needed. He writes the disturbing account of a news item, the finding of a young woman’s body in the “clay-brown water” of a river during the spring melt, with this sentence:

It was probably a little too early for the snake’s-head fritillaries. 

I haven’t ever seen a snake’s-head fritillary but the name was unsettling enough that I looked it up, a far easier thing to do now than when the book was written in 1964. How about this for unsettling a scene?

One look at this flower with its freckled petals and you know that what comes next is not about to be ordinary.