THE WORST THING THAT HAPPENED TWICE

When building my Settings, especially those places that the narrative will be spending some time in, I’ve lately been deploying two techniques in order achieve the desperately sought-after illusion of life: a Samuel R. Delany method and another approach I picked up when I lived in Berlin, twenty-plus years ago.

Delany has argued that believable characters are often composed of “three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. If the writer can show a character involved in a number of all three types of actions, the character will probably seem more real.”1

I use Delany’s Character triad all the time but I’ve started to apply a modified form to my Settings. As I write I try to imbue important spaces with obstacular, habitual, and gratuitous actions or aspects.

Even two of these aspects will keep your Settings reading real, reading dynamic.

The second technique was born of a late night conversation in Kreuzberg, when my date asked me What’s the worst thing that happened twice in your hometown.

Not the worst thing but the worst thing that happened twice.

You might guess why this stuck with me — the worst thing that strikes a place can be sui generis, pulls everything into itself, becomes more than the place it’s set in, but the worst thing that happened twice will often, by the nature of the repetition, speak more emphatically to the character of a place.

Por ejemplo: my Central Jersey landfill-adjacent neighborhood, in the late 70s and 80s, was full of Vietnam veterans and many of them were poor and poorly served by the government and the worst thing that happened twice was that on two occasion a returned veteran took their family hostage — in both cases the cops showed up and the block got cordoned off and there was even a hostage negotiation situation — fortunately in both cases the families were released, no one was “hurt,” etc.

Even if I don’t use the Worst Thing that Happened Twice in the actual narrative having this detail helps stabilize in my head the texture of the Setting, its atmosphere, its mood.