by The Anatomy of Story- 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller (mobi)
We see the forest used in many fairy tales, as well as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter books, Return of the Jedi, Shrek, Excalibur, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Song of Solomon, The Wizard of Oz, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Wolf Man, The Blair Witch Project, and Miller's Crossing.
Jungle
The jungle is the state of nature. Its primary effect on the imagination is the feeling of suffocation. Everything about it is grabbing you. The jungle gives audiences the strongest sense of the power of nature over man. In that environment, man is reduced to beast.
Ironically, such a primal place is also one of the two natural settings that express the theory of evolution, the modern theory of change.
The jungle world is found in the Star Wars movies; the Tarzan stories, including Greystoke; King Kong; The African Queen; Jurassic Park and The Lost World; The Emerald Forest; Aguirre: The Wrath of God; Mosquito Coast; Fitzcar-raldo; The Poisonwood Bible; Heart of Darkness; and Apocalypse Now.
Desert and Ice
Desert and ice are the places of dying and death, at all times, liven stories have a hard time growing there. Desert and ice seem completely impersonal in their brutality.
When something valuable comes out of these places, it is because the strong-willed have gone there to be toughened and grow through isolation. A rare example of the ice world portrayed as a Utopia is found in Mark Helprin's novel Winter's Tale. Helprin presents a village whose sense of community is actually heightened when winter shuts it off from the rest of the world and freezes the lake, on which the villagers enjoy every kind of winter fun.
Desert or ice worlds are prominent in the Star Wars movies, Fargo, Lawrence of Arabia, Beau Geste, Dune, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Once upon a Time in the West, The Wild Bunch, The Sheltering Sky, The Gold Rush, and The Call of the Wild.
Island
The island is an ideal setting for creating a story in a social context. Like the ocean and outer space, the island is both highly abstract and completely natural. It is a miniature of the earth, a small piece of land surrounded by water. The island is, by definition, a separated place. This is why, in stories, it is the laboratory of man, a solitary paradise or hell, the place where a special world can be built and where new forms of living can be created and tested.
The separate, abstract quality of the island is why it is often used to depict a Utopia or dystopia. And even more than the jungle, the island is the classic setting for showing the workings of evolution.
Stories that use the island as a central setting include Robinson Crusoe, The Tempest, Gulliver's Travels, The Incredibles, King Kong, Treasure Island, The Mysterious Island, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Lord of the Flies, Swept Away, Jurassic Park and The Lost World, Cast Away, the television show Lost, and arguably the greatest use of the island in story history, Gilligan's Island.
In many ways, the island has the most complex story possibilities of any natural setting. Let's take a closer look at how to get the most out of the island world in your story. Notice that the best way to express the inherent meaning of this natural setting is through the story structure:
■ Take time in the beginning to set up the normal society and the characters' place within it. (need)
■ Send the characters to an island. (desire)
■ Create a new society based on different rules and values. (desire)
■ Make the relationship between the characters very different from what it was in the original society. (plan)
■ Through conflict, show what works and what doesn't. (opponent)
■ Show characters experimenting with something new when things don't work. (revelation or self-revelation)
Mountain
This highest of all places translates, in human terms, into the land of greatness. This is where the strong go to prove themselves—usually through seclusion, meditation, a lack of comfort, and direct confrontation with nature in the extreme. The mountaintop is the world of the natural philosopher, the great thinker who must understand the forces of nature so he can live with them and sometimes control them.
Structurally, the mountain, the high place, is most associated with the reveal, the most mental of the twenty-two story structure steps (see Chapter 8, "Plot"). Revelations in stories are moments of discovery, and they are the keys to turning the plot and kicking it to a "higher," more intense level. Again, the mountain setting makes a one-to-one connection between space and person, in this case, height and insight.
This one-to-one connection of space to person is found in the negative expression of the mountain as well. It is often depicted as the site of hierarchy, privilege, and tyranny, typically of an aristocrat who lords it over the common people down below.
KEY POINT: The mountain is usually set in opposition to the plain.
The mountain and the plain are the only two major natural settings that visually stand in contrast to one another, so storytellers often use the comparative- method to highlight the essential and opposing qualities of each.
The mountain world is important in the Moses story, Greek myths of the gods on Mount Olympus, many fairy tales, The Magic Mountain, Lost Horizon, Brokeback Mountain, Batman Begins, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, A farewell to Arms, The Deer Hunter, Last of the Mohicans, Dances with Wolves, Shane, The Shining, and a number of other horror stories.
Plain
The flat table of the plain is wide open and accessible to all. In contrast to the jungle, which presses in, the plain is totally free. This is why, in stories, it is the place of equality, freedom, and the rights of the common man. But this freedom is not without cost and conflict. Like the surface of the ocean, the extreme flatness of the plain becomes abstract, highlighting the sense of contest or life-and-death struggle that will be played out in this arena.
Negatively, the plain is often depicted as the place where the mediocre make their lives. In contrast to the few great ones living up on the moun-taintop, the many average ones live as part of a herd down below. They do not think for themselves, so they are easily led, usually in ways that are destructive to them.
We see the plain depicted in most Westerns, including Shane and The Big Country, Days of Heaven, Dances with Wolves, In Cold Blood, Lost Horizon, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, A Farewell to Arms, Blood Simple, and Field of Dreams.
River
The river is a uniquely powerful natural setting, maybe the greatest one of all when it comes to storytelling. The river is a path, which makes it a perfect physical manifestation for myth stories that rely on the journey for their structure.
But the river is more than a path. It is the road into or out of somewhere. This intensifies the sense that the path is a developing, organic line, not just a series of episodes. For example, in Heart of Darkness, the hero goes up the river, ever deeper into the jungle. The line of human development attached to this path is one from civilization to barbaric hell.
In The African Queen, the hero reverses that trip and that process by going down the river, out of the jungle. His development begins in a hellish landscape of death, isolation, and madness and moves toward the human world of commitment and love.
The river as the place of physical, moral, and emotional passage is found in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Deliverance; Heart of Darkness and its adaptation, Apocalypse Now; A River Runs Through It; and The African Queen.
A note of caution: beware of visual cliches. It's easy to fall into the trap of using natural settings in a formulaic way. "My hero is getting a big revelation? I'll send him to the mountaintop." Make sure any natural setting you use is fundamental to the story. And above all, use it in an original way.
Weather
Weather, like natural settings, can provide a powerful physical representation of the inner experience of the character or evoke strong feelings in the audience. Here are the classic correlations between weather and emotion:
■ Lightning and thunder: Passion
, terror, death
■ Rain: Sadness, loneliness, boredom, coziness
■ Wind: Destruction, desolation
■ Fog: Obfuscation, mystery
■ Sun: Happiness, fun, freedom, but also corruption hidden below a pleasant exterior
■ Snow: Sleep, serenity, quiet inexorable death
Again, avoid simply repeating these classic correlations and instead try to use weather in surprising and ironic ways.
Man-made Spaces
Man-made spaces are even more valuable to you as a writer than natural settings, because they solve one of the most difficult problems a writer faces: How do you express a society? All man-made spaces in stories are a form of condenser-expander. Each is a physical expression, in microcosm, of the hero and the society in which he lives.
The problem for the writer is to express that society on paper in such a way that the audience can understand the deepest relationship between the hero and other people. The following are some of the major man-made spaces that can help you do that.
The House
For the storyteller, man-made spaces begin with the house. The house is a person's first enclosure. Its unique physical elements shape the growth of the person's mind and the mind's well-being in the present. The house is also the home of the family, which is the central unit of social life and the central unit of drama. So all fiction writers must strongly consider what place a house may play in their story.
The house is unsurpassed as a place of intimacy, for your characters and your audience. But it is filled with visual oppositions that you must know in order to express the house to its fullest dramatic potential.
Safety Versus Adventure
The house is, first and foremost, the great protector. "In every dwelling, even the richest, the first task ... is to find the original shell."4 Put another way, "Always in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle... . Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house."5
The house may begin as the shell, cradle, or nest of the human being. But that protective cocoon is also what makes its opposite possible: the house is the strong foundation from which we go out and take on the world. "[The] house breathes. First it is a coat of armor, then it extends ad infinitum, which amounts to saying that we live in it in alternate security and adventure. It is both cell and world."6 Often in stories, the first step of adventure, the longing for it, happens at the window. A character looks out through the eyes of the house, maybe even hears a train whistle calling, and dreams of going.
Ground Versus Sky
A second opposition embedded in the house is that between ground and sky. The house has deep roots. It hunkers down. It tells the world and its inhabitants that it is solid and can be trusted.
But a house also extends skyward. Like a tiny but proud cathedral, it wishes to generate the "highest" and the best in its inhabitants. "All strongly terrestrial beings and a house is strongly terrestrial- are nevertheless subject to the attractions of an aerial, celestial world. The well-rooted house likes to have a branch that is sensitive to the wind, or an attic that can hear the rustle of leaves."7
The Warm House
The warm house in storytelling is big (though usually not a mansion), with enough rooms, corners, and cubbyholes for each inhabitant's uniqueness to thrive. Notice that the warm house has within it two additional opposing elements: the safety and coziness of the shell and the diversity that is only possible within the large.
Writers often intensify the warmth of the big, diverse house by using the technique known as the "buzzing household." This is the Pieter Brueghel technique (especially in paintings like The Hunters in the Snow and Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap) applied to the house. In the buzzing household, all the different individuals of an extended family are busy in their own pocket of activity. Individuals and small groups may combine for a special moment and then go on their merry way. This is the perfect community at the level of the household. Each person is both an individual and part of a nurturing family, and even when everyone is in different parts of the house, the audience can sense a gentle spirit that connects them.
The big, diverse house and the buzzing household are found in such stories as You Can't Take It with You, Meet Me in St. Louis, Life with Father, The Cider House Rules, Pride and Prejudice, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Royal Tenenbaums, Steel Magnolias, It's a Wonderful Life, TV's Waltons, David Copper-field, How Green Was My Valley, Mary Poppins, and Yellow Submarine.
Part of the power of the warm house is that it appeals to the audience's sense of their own childhood, either real or imagined. Everyone's house was big and cozy when they were very young, and if they soon discovered that they lived in a hovel, they can still look at the big, warm house and see what they wished their childhood had been. That's why the warm house is so often used in connection with memory stories, like Jean Shepherd's Christmas Story, and why American storytellers so often use ramshackle Victorian places, with their many snug gables and corners from a bygone era.
The bar is a version of the house in storytelling, and it too can be warm or terrifying. In the television show Cheers, the bar is a utopia, a community where "everybody knows your name." The regulars are always in the same spot, always making the same mistakes, and always in the same quirky relation to one another. This bar is also a warm place because nobody has to change.
Casablanca
(play Everybody Comes to Rick's by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison,
screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, 1942) The story world is as important to the success of Casablanca as it is to the most advanced fantasy, myth, or science fiction story. And it is all focused on the bar, Rick's Cafe Americain.
What makes the bar in Casablanca unique as a story world, and incredibly powerful for the audience, is that it is both a dystopia and a Utopia. This bar is where the king of the underworld makes his home.
Rick's Cafe Americain is a dystopia because everyone wants to escape Casablanca, and this is where they pass the time, waiting, waiting, always waiting to get out. There is no exit here. It is also a dystopia because it is all about money grubbing and bribery, a perfect expression of the hero's cynicism, selfishness, and despair.
But this bar is at the same time a fabulous Utopia. Rick is the master here, the king in his lair, and all of his courtiers pay their respects. The cafe is a big, warm house with lots of nooks and corners and all sorts of characters to fill them. Each character not only knows his place but also enjoys it. There's Carl the waiter and Sascha the bartender; Abdul the bouncer; Emil, who manages the casino; and Rick's sidekick, Sam, master of song. Over in that booth is Berger, the nerdy Norwegian underground fighter, just waiting to follow Laszlo's command. There's even the perfect hiding place for the letters of transit, under the lid of Sam's piano.
In a land of contradictions, this warm house is the home of cool, the origin of hip, embodied in King Rick, impeccably dressed in his white tuxedo jacket, a man who is always suave and witty, even under threat from Nazi killers. But this is a world that lives at night, and the king is dark and brooding too. He refers to two murdered couriers as the "honored dead." This king is Hades.
By creating a sealed world that is both dystopia and Utopia, the writ-ers of Casablanca in effect create a Mobius strip story world that never stops. Forever in time, Rick's Cafe Americain is open every night. Refugees still gather there; the captain still gambles and enjoys the women; the Germans still make their arrogant appearance. It is one of those timeless places that make great stories, and it continues to exist because it is a cozy lair where everyone enjoys their role.
Far from being the place where everyone wants an exit visa, Rick's bar in far-off Casablanca is the perfect community where no one in the audience ever wants to leave.
The Terrifying House
Opposite the warm house, the terrifying house is usually a house that has gone over the line from cocoon to prison. In the best stories of thi
s kind, the house is terrifying because it is an outgrowth of the great weakness and need of the character. This house is the hero's biggest fear made manifest. In the extreme, the character's mind has rotted in some way, and the house too is in ruins. But it is no less powerful a prison.
In Great Expectations, Miss Havisham is a slave in her own run-down mansion because she has chosen to martyr herself on the altar of unrequited love. Her mind has grown sick with bitterness; her house is a perfect picture of her mind. In Wuthering Heights, the house is a horrible prison because Cathy gave up true love there and because Heathcliff's bitterness has made him commit awful acts against its inhabitants in her name.
Horror stories place such strong emphasis on the haunted house that it is one of the unique story beats of the form. Structurally, the terrifying or haunted house represents the power the past holds over the present. The house itself becomes a weapon of revenge for the sins committed by the fathers and mothers. In such stories, the house doesn't have to be a decrepit, creaking mansion with slamming doors, moving walls, and secret, dark passageways. It can be the simple, suburban houses of Poltergeist and A Nightmare on Elm Street or the grand hotel on the mountaintop in The Shining. On this mountaintop, the seclusion and the hotel's past sins don't lead the hero to think great thoughts; they drive him mad.
When the terrifying house is a grand Gothic hulk, an aristocratic family often inhabits it. The inhabitants have lived off the work of others, who typically dwell in the valley below, simply because of their birth. The house is either too empty lor its size, which implies that there is no life in the structure, or it is stuffed with expensive but out-of-date furnishings that oppress by their sheer numbers. In these stories, the house feeds on its parasitic inhabitants just as they feed on others. Eventually, the family falls and, when the story is taken to the extreme, the house burns, devours them, or collapses on them. Examples are "The Fall of the House of Usher" and other stories by Poe, Rebecca, Jane Eyre, Dracula, The Innocents, The Amityville Horror, Sunset Boulevard, Frankenstein, Long Day's Journey into Night, and stories by Chekhov and Strindberg.
