It was a setup (Part 3)

Today, I'm in happy teacher mode to continue discussing setup.

Part 1 is HERE.

Part 2 is HERE.

To recap:

The setup answers the following questions:

• Who are the main characters?
• Where does the story take place?
• When does the story take place?
• And the most important question of all: What is the story about?

 
Let’s take a look at one more example of setup from another experienced writer: Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. 

Here is the opening of Shiloh:

The day Shiloh come, we’re having us a big Sunday dinner. Dara Lynn’s dipping bread in her glass of cold tea, the way she likes, and Becky pushes her beans up over the edge of her plate in her rush to get ‘em down.

Ma gives us her scolding look. “Just once in my life,” she says, “I’d like to see a bit of food go direct from the dish into somebody’s mouth without a detour of any kind.”

She’s looking at me when she says it, tough. It isn’t that I don’t like fried rabbit. Like it fine. I just don’t want to bite down on buckshot, is all, and I’m checking each piece.

“I looked that rabbit over good, Marty, and you won’t find any buckshot in that thigh,” Dad says, buttering his bread. “I shot him in the neck.”

Somehow I wish he hadn’t said that. I push the meat from one side of my plate to the other, through the sweet potatoes and back again.

“Did it die right off?” I ask, knowing I can’t eat at all unless it had.

“Soon enough.”

“You shoot its head clean off?” Dara Lynn asks. She’s like that.

Dad chews real slow before he answers. “Not quite,” he says, and goes on eating.

Which is when I leave the table.

We know right away that the story takes place in a country, backwoods setting. 

Our clues? 

1. The grammar (“The day Shiloh come, we’re having us a big Sunday dinner”); 

2. The menu (fried rabbit); and 

3. The fact that Dad has shot the rabbit himself and that this seems to be a regular occurrence.



We know who the main character is (the narrator, Marty) and his family members.


We also know that Marty is a softhearted boy, i.e. character development. 

He doesn’t like hearing that his Dad shot the rabbit in the neck and it’s important to him that the rabbit died “right off.”


The story continues:

The best thing about Sundays is we eat our big meal at noon. Once you get your belly full, you can walk all over West Virginia before you’re hungry again. Any other day, you start out after dinner, you’ve got to come back when it’s dark.

I take the .22 rifle Dad had given me in March on my eleventh birthday and set out up the road to see what I can shoot. Like to find me an apple hanging way out o a branch, see if I can bring it dow. Line up a few cans on a rail fence and shoot ‘em off. Never shoot at anything moving, though. Never had the slightest wish.

We live high up in the hills over Friendly, but hardly anybody knows where that is. Friendly’s near sistersville, which is halfway between Wheeling and Parkersburg. Use to be, my daddy told me, Sistersville was one of the best places you could live in the whole state. You ask me the best place to live, I’d say right where we are, a little four-room house with hills on three sides.

Now we know that Marty is eleven years old. 

His softhearted nature is reinforced here when he tells us that he never shoots at anything moving.


Naylor also reveals where the story takes place: the small town of Friendly, West Virginia. 

We know Marty lives in a “little four-room house with hills on three sides” but more importantly, we know that he loves it there - he considers it “the best place to live.”


Two paragraphs later:

And this particular afternoon, I’m about halfway up the road along the river when I see something out of the corner of my eye.

Something moves. I look, and about fifteen yards off, there’s this shorthaired dog - white with brown and black spots - not making any kind of noise, just slinking along with his head down, watching me, tail between his legs like he’s hardly got the right to breath. A beagle, maybe a year or two old.

 
The reader is now getting a sense of what the story is about with the introduction of a beagle. This is a dog story.

On the next three pages, the beagle follows Marty home. Marty’s father asks about where the dog came from:

“On the road by the river? Bet that’s Judd Travers’s beagle,” says Dad. “He got himself another hunting dog a few weeks back.”

“Judd got him a hunting dog, how come he don’t treat him right?” I ask.

“How you know he don’t?”

“Way the dog acts. Scared to pee, almost,” I say.

Ma gives me a look.

“Don’t seem to me he’s got any marks on him,” Dad says, studying him from our window.

Don’t have to mark a dog to hurt him, I’m thinking. 
 
Now we are grounded in the story. 

We know that this is a story about a softhearted, backwoods boy who finds a dog that he thinks has been abused by its owner.
 
Seven pages into Shiloh - SEVEN PAGES, PEOPLE! - Naylor has completed the setup. 

Now the reader can move forward into the story armed with all the necessary information.

Class dismissed.

It was a setup (Part 2)

Today I continue in my teachy-preachy mode - discussing setup.

If you missed Part 1, please go now and reread. It will be on the

test.

To recap:

The setup answers the following questions:

• Who are the main characters?
• Where does the story take place?
• When does the story take place?
• And the most important question of all: What is the story about?

To continue examining examples (um, can a preachy teacher say that? I don't think so) let’s take a look at Holes by Louis Sachar (edited, by the way, by my editor, Frances Foster).

The book opens like this:

There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. There once was a very large

lake here, the largest lake in Texas. That was over a hundred years ago. Now it is just a dry, flat wasteland.

There used to be a town of Green Lake as well. The town shriveled and dried up along with the lake, and the people who lived there.

During the summer the daytime temperature hovers around ninety-five degrees in the shade - if you can find any shade. There’s not much shade in a big dry lake.


Setting, setting, setting. Sachar jumps right into the story with the where. 

The reader is immediately drawn into a “dry, flat wasteland.” The image of a “shriveled and dried up” lake that is “ninety-five degrees in the shade - if you can find any” is front and center in this setup.


Let’s continue:

The only trees are two old oaks on the eastern edge of the “lake” A hammock is stretched between the two trees, and a log cabin stands behind that.

The campers are forbidden to lie in the hammock. It belongs to the Warden. The Warden owns the shade.

Sachar is starting to hook us right here in the setup. 

There is something not right about this camp. 

The reader is beginning to suspect that this is not a pleasant summer camp. 

Why? 

One word: warden. There’s a warden at this camp. Not a counselor. Not a director. A warden.


The setup continues:

Out on the lake, rattlesnakes and scorpions find shade under rocks and in the holes dug by the campers.
 
Holes dug by the campers?

Camp Green Lake does not sound like a summer camp that kids would want to go. It does, however, sound like a summer camp that kids would want to read about. Sachar has definitely hooked the reader.

So far, we know where the story takes place and we are getting a strong suspicion that this is not a realistic story. It already has a bit of a “tall tale” aura to it - with a dried up lake and scorpions and a warden and campers digging holes.

The second chapter begins on the third page:

The reader is probably asking: Why would anyone go to Camp Green Lake?

Most campers weren’t given a choice. Camp Green Lake is a camp for bad boys.

If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a good boy.

That was what some people thought.

Stanley Yelnats was given a choice. The judge said, “You may go to jail, or you may go to Camp Green Lake.”

Stanley was from a poor family. He had never been to camp before.
 
Now we know that Camp Green Lake is a camp “for bad boys” and that the main character is Stanley Yelnats. 

During the next few paragraphs, we learn that Stanley is on his way to Camp Green Lake because he was convicted of a crime. But we also learn:

Stanley was not a bad kid. He was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. He’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was all because of his no-good-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather!
 
Sachar then goes on to explain the Yelnats family curse.

We know what Holes is about: A boy who has been sent to a camp for bad boys and who is the victim of a family curse.

But what about the when of the story? 

This is one of those stories that doesn’t really need a specific when. 

It is timeless. It could be current. It could be historical. It doesn’t really matter.

We are only five pages into the story - FIVE PAGES, PEOPLE! -  and the setup is complete. 

The reader is off and running.

Well done, Louis and Frances.

It was a setup (Part 1)

Today I put on my teachy-preachy hat.

There! You've been warned. You may leave now, if you so choose.

One of the most critical parts of the structure of a book for children is the setup. 

What is setup?

The setup gives the reader all of the important basic information needed in order to become grounded in the story.

The setup answers the following questions:

• Who are the main characters?
• Where does the story take place?
• When does the story take place?
• And the most important question of all: What is the story about?

The setup will also reveal the genre of the book (e.g., fantasy, historical fiction, contemporary fiction), as well as the overall tone of the book (e.g., a humorous middle grade novel, a dark, edgy YA).

The setup should come as early as possible in your story. 

Repeat after me: 

The setup should come as early as possible in your story.

If you take too long to start - and complete - your setup, you run the risk of losing your reader from the get-go. Young readers want to know the who, where, when and what of a story quickly. They want to settle in and become invested in the story. They don’t want to have to keep reading page after page not knowing all the important basic information about the story.

A great example of a masterful setup is from Walk Two Moons by

Sharon Creech:

Gramps says that I am a country girl at heart, and that is true. I have lived most of my thirteen years in Bybanks, Kentucky, which is not much more than a caboodle of houses roosting in a green spot alongside the Ohio River.
 
We are two sentences into the story (TWO sentences) and we know that the main character is a thirteen-year-old “country girl” from Kentucky.

Just over a year ago, my father plucked me up like a weed and took me and all our belongings (no, that is not true - he did not bring the chestnut tree, the willow, the maple, the hayloft, or the swimming hole, which all belonged to me) and we drove three hundred miles straight north and stopped in front of a house in Euclid, Ohio.
 
Now we know that she has just moved from Kentucky to Ohio. 

In addition to telling us that the main character is a “country girl,” Creech now shows us:  he did not bring the chestnut tree, the willow, the maple, the hayloft, or the swimming hole, which all belonged to me.
 
Obviously, those things are important to her.

The next line of the story is dialogue that drives home the point yet again:

“No trees?” I said. “This is where we’re going to live?”
 
Two paragraphs into the story (TWO paragraphs) and look how much we know!

Let’s continue:

“No,” my father said. “This is Margaret’s house.”

The front door of the house opened and a lady with wild red hair stood there. I looked up and down the street. The houses were all jammed together like a row of birdhouses. In front of each house was a tiny square of grass, and in front of that was a thin gray sidewalk running alongside a gray road.
 
Now we know two more characters: father and Margaret.


We know that the main character does not know Margaret because she refers to her as “a lady.”

We know that main character does not care much for this location. The houses are "all jammed together" and there is only a “tiny square of grass” and there is a “thin gray sidewalk running alongside a gray road.” 

Notice how the choice of the words jammed, tiny and gray reveal a lot about how she perceives the setting.

The next line, which is dialogue, reinforces, once again, her love of all things country:

“Where’s the barn?” I asked. “The river? The swimming hole?”
"Oh, Sal," my father said. "Come on. There's Margaret."
 
We know that the main character’s name is Sal.
 
A few paragraphs later, we are introduced to another character:

I didn’t know it then, but that face belonged to Phoebe Winterbottom, a girl who had a powerful imagination, who would become my friend, and who would have many peculiar things happen to her.
 
In addition to giving us vital story information, Creech is also beginning to reel us in, especially with that word peculiar.

The second chapter (only four pages into the story - FOUR pages) jumps forward in time, but continues the setup:

It was after all the adventures of Phoebe that my grandparents came up with a plan to drive from Kentucky to Ohio, where they would pick me up, and then the three of us would drive two thousand miles west to Lewiston, Idaho.
 
Now we have two more characters, Sal’s grandparents.

We know that this is a contemporary story, since they are driving.

We can also assume it is summertime, since Sal is not in school.

Two paragraphs later, we learn that Sal’s mother is not in her life:

My father started chipping away at a plaster wall in the living room of our house in Bybanks shortly after my mother left us one April morning.
 
And two more paragraphs later:

I was only thirteen, and although I did have a way with maps, it was not really because of that skill that I was going, nor was it to see the “whole ding-dong country” that Gram and Gramps were going. The real reasons were buried beneath piles and piles of unsaid things.

Some of the real reasons were:
1. Gram and Gramps wanted to see Momma, who was resting peacefully in Lewiston, Idaho.
2. Gram and Gramps knew that I wanted to see Momma, but that I was afraid to.
3. Dad wanted to be alone with the red-headed Margaret Cadaver. 

He had already seen Momma, and he had not taken me.
 
There! 

Now we know what the story is about: Thirteen-year-old Sal is traveling to Idaho with her grandparents to see her mother, which she has reservations about.

We are only on page five - PAGE 5, PEOPLE!  - and we know the who, the where, the when and the what of Walk Two Moons. 

We are grounded in the story and ready to move forward to see what is going to happen.

You have just been set up by a master. 

A round of applause for Ms. Creech!