Making scenes

Stories without any scene setting abound among spanking authors:  we are drilled into the standard plot (there is going to be a spanking, there is a spanking, there was a spanking) that using up valuable white space with petty descriptions of where it all happened seems, to many of us, to have a very low return on investment.

So we get sloppy:  she is caught smoking, gets sent to the headmistress's office, has her backside caned, and rues the sad adventure.   There is no need to spend time and effort describing what a school looks like, what a musty dank corridor leading to the office looks like, or what impact the oak panels have in casting a solemn countenance to the tragic events.

And - full disclosure - I have done the same.   Admittedly, in the torrid little pot boiler "Atonement", the leaving out a scene setting paragraph was one of the deliberate mistakes you were supposed to spot.   But in other would-be "masterpieces", the omission was just careless idleness.

Now, you do not need a huge wad of material to set up a scene,   Tolkien spent over a whole page describing a hole in the ground - an exceptional whole in the ground mind - but some of our tales take less than a whole page in total.   We need to cut our dress according to our cloth, to coin a phrase, for it would be a tad peculiar to spend the whole narrative in setting up a scene and not going anywhere with it..

A scene setter needs to give the reader enough background material for the rest of the tale to have substance.   And we need not go to lengths.   For instance, suppose you want to describe a beating in the manner of the way one might be dished out in the  Royal Navy - back in the days of George III.   You don't have to overdo it.

Eight days out of Portsmouth, HMS Banshee, a 120-gun ship of the line, was in full sail as she ploughed South through light swell en-route to join the sixth flotilla in the Indian Ocean.   Her sails were a brilliant white in the morning sun, and her pennants told the world at large that she carried a Commodore as officer in command.   Two frigates and one supply ship maintained station to her rear.

And that is quite enough to show that the action is aboard a military war ship, far out at sea, on a bright sunny morning.   Even so, some rather dreary research was necessary to avoid making a huge error in the set up. 

But it does not take many words to set out the store of what is to follow.   If you are working on a school girl gets the cane for smoking tale, I really think it behooves a few opening lines to lay out the red brick stones of your old all-female academy, shiny from a light rain shower.   And those oak panels in the Headmistress's study are surely worthy of a mention - they have been there for years and years waiting for you to acknowledge how solemn they make the scene.   But the best thing, your readers will be more comfy in understanding where your narrative takes them.