How To Establish Setting

Analyzing description of setting in "The Purple Swamp Hen" by Penelope Lively using concepts described in Jane Friedman's "How Writers Can Craft an Effective Setting".

It's so pretty ahhhhhh

In her article, Jane Friedman discusses why establishing a clear setting is important in writing. She discusses how with omitted, unclear, or wordy descriptions of setting, "The reader will become more removed from the story and characters, and instead be trying to figure out the where, when, who, or why."

According to Friedman, it is important to give details about the setting that characterize the POV character and/or other supporting characters. For example, the POV character might notice certain artifacts in a room because he loves to travel to exotic places, or a supporting character's room might be described as having bright pink wallpaper to characterize her as a girly girl.

At the same time, one shouldn't present the audience with so many details that they become jarring (or worse, boring) to the reader, or do not add purpose to the story.

I will analyze Penelope Lively's use of setting in her story "The Purple Swamp Hen" in the context of Friedman's tips for good setting description.

I personally thought this story started off incredibly booooring. Penelope Lively starts off describing the Latin scientific name of a purple swamp hen, before moving on to other details about the species such as where they are native to and so on. Basically, a ton of stuff that is really boring, useless, and never mentioned again the whole story. I don't really think Lively was taking Friedman's advice here. I was snoring through the first page and a half.

In fact, you know the story is boring if the author has to beg you to keep reading. Lively writes, "Wondering where all this is going? Have patience. You'll get your story."

Yeah, but we only get it after about a page of useless information! By then, and through the whole rest of the story, I didn't care anymore.

I think the whole first paragraph could be omitted. The second paragraph really starts the story and I think would have been a much more interesting start. But because of the stupendously boring first paragraph, the second paragraph just felt like the first paragraph's slightly less boring cousin. I was trying to wake up from falling asleep during the first paragraph.

Anyway, Lively paints a pretty picture of a Pompeii fresco depicting a garden with lots of flora and fauna and one boring purple swamp hen. Then we get a history of purple swamp hens and how they were kept by the Romans for garden decor and that's how the narrator of this story (a purple swamp hen) ended up in the garden of Quintus Pompeius. This is actually the part where I started to (just barely) care.

Lively uses the whole "sex sells" trope to get our attention by describing the garden as "nothing like any garden you've ever known," full of rape, incest, fornication, fighting, bodily harm, getting drunk, animals reproducing and so on. From this point on, Lively does an honest job of keeping us interested. We get that fact that this garden, as most gardens in Pompeii, is occupied more or less with acts of sex, dealing, bribery, cheating, busy servants, ornery children and so on.

Lively describes the other households in Pompeii as "engaged in selling bread and oil and grain and fruit and fish and meat and dormice and sea urchins. Plus the provision of other services, including of course sex." She uses this overall description of Pompeii and its businesses to shift into describing the business of Quintus Pompeius (a wine magnate). From there, she describes the other members of Quintus's household and then shifts again into the main story.

So to sum it up, first we get a whole paragraph of useless junk, some stuff about purple swamp hens, then the setting of Pompeii, then a description of Quintus and his household.

I think overall Lively did a pretty good job describing the setting of this story. She didn't have to do a whole lot. She didn't say "there was a fountain on the east end and statues on the west end and chairs here and a table there." Instead she focused on describing the flora and fauna that lived within the garden, including the people who lived and worked there, which is really all we needed. The rest we could fill in for ourselves.

Despite the horrendously boring first paragraph, I thought this was a pretty well-written piece. It wasn't my favorite, but it was a nice sort of insight into the lives of people living in Pompeii and their final moments before destruction, told through the insight of an animal that lived there.