The previous lessons dealt with spaces in and of themselves, divorced from their context in your story. But of course, the object is for you to integrate space and time, images and words, in a way that adds up to a seamless reader experience.

With that in mind, it’s important to recognize that the qualities and attributes you listed for your test space are not necessarily absolute. Although the size of a room is unlikely to change during or between scenes, and unless some natural disaster occurs that affects an outdoor environment a landscape is similarly unlikely to change, the uses of that space, the sensory experience, could easily alter depending on the context in your story.

My grandiloquent application to this process of perhaps the loftiest concept in nature is a bit presumptuous, but it is apt. It’s important to consider where your spaces are in story time if you’re going to use them to immerse your reader in the content and meaning of your scenes.

Example: Georgette Heyer’s Venetia

This exquisite Regency romance takes place (not surprisingly) in the country manors and London drawing rooms of the ton. Three-quarters of the story time places the reader in Yorkshire, at Undershaw—the estate of the Lanyons (Venetia and her disabled brother Aubrey)—and at Elliston Priory—the estate of the rakish Lord Damerel.

The reader becomes acquainted with the Priory when Aubrey falls from his horse and breaks his ankle, and the “wicked baron” finds him and brings him back to his estate—nearer the site of the accident than Undershaw. Until that point, we have not been inside it, only heard stories about it and the wild party Damerel had there the previous year that scandalized the conservative neighborhood.

Our initial image of the space is one that is suitable to debauched entertainments, dilapidated from lack of attention, not at all welcoming and homely.

Toward the end of Aubrey’s residence while he convalesces enough to be moved back to his home, Heyer gives us a scene that completely upends any thought of the Priory as a lonely, reprobate baron’s home:

Aubrey remained for ten days at the Priory, and even the weather conspired to make them halcyon days for his sister. There was only one wet and chilly day in all the ten, and then the gold of the mellowing landscape crept into the house, for Damerel had a fire kindled in the library, and its light, flickering over the tooled backs of the volumes that lined the room from wainscot to cornice, made them glow like turning leaves. He carried Aubrey down, and laid him on a sofa, and they played three-handed cribbage, pored over books of engravings, discovered rare treasures on the crowded shelves, and argued hotly on every imaginable subject, from the esse of material things to the proposition that a black horse with no spot of white upon him must necessarily be full of mischief and misfortunes. Then Damerel brought out his Grecian sketch-book, setting Aubrey in a blaze; and Nurse, established by the window with her interminable tatting, looked over her spectacles at the group by the fire, and was satisfied. The Lanyons had their heads together over a book of pictures, Venetia on the floor beside the sofa, and Aubrey explaining them to her, and the pair of them looking up every now and then at his lordship and pelting him with questions as he stood leaning over the back of the sofa. Nurse saw them as children, and Damerel as an adult person, like herself, good-naturedly allowing them to tease him with their questions.

Heyer, Georgette. Venetia (Regency Romances Book 18) (pp. 111-112). Sourcebooks. Kindle Edition.

What physical features of the space are we aware of in this scene?

• It’s a library: tooled backs of the many books (wainscot to cornice, crowded shelves)
• There is a hearth with a fire in it
• Also at least one window
• It’s furnished with a sofa
• It’s on a low floor (Damerel carried Aubrey down)

Now, what physical features has she not given us?

• The exact size and shape of the room
• The location of the door
• Any furnishings beyond the sofa, which has a role in the scene

We’ll come back to this scene in the next lesson, because it’s a little masterpiece of evocative writing, without even any dialogue. But the point is that this cozy indoor scene occurs toward the beginning of Venetia and Damerel’s friendship/courtship.

We return to the priory at about the 80% point, after we know for certain that Venetia and Damerel are in love, and Venetia’s uncle wants to take her away to London. Here is the scene:

She remained standing by one of the windows, but it was several minutes before Damerel came to her. The saloon seemed unfriendly, with no fire burning in the hearth, and the furniture primly arranged. They had never sat in it when Aubrey was at the Priory, but always in the library, and it still bore the appearance of a room that was never used. Venetia supposed that Imber must have led her to it either to emphasise his disapproval, or because Damerel had not yet finished his business with his agent. It was cheerless, and rather dark; but perhaps that was because heavy clouds were gathering in the sky, and it had started to mizzle.

She had begun to wonder whether she had missed Damerel, who might have set out for Undershaw by way of the road instead of taking the shorter way across country, when the door opened, and he came in, demanding: ‘Now, what in thunder has your Empress been doing to drive you from home, Admir’d Venetia?’

He spoke lightly, yet with a hint of roughness in his voice, as though her visit was an unwelcome interruption. She turned, trying to read his face, and said, with a faint smile: ‘Were you busy? You don’t sound as though you were glad to see me!’

‘I’m not glad to see you,’ he replied. ‘You shouldn’t be here, you know.’

‘So Imber seemed to think – but I didn’t care for that.’ She came slowly into the middle of the room, and paused by the table that stood there, drawing off her gloves. ‘I thought it best to come to you, rather than to wait for you to come to me. It might not be easy for us to be private, and I must consult you. Something quite unlooked-for has happened, and I need your advice, my dear friend. My uncle has come.’

Heyer, Georgette. Venetia (Regency Romances Book 18) (pp. 255-256). Sourcebooks. Kindle Edition.

Although not the same room, this scene (the saddest in the book, IMO), takes place in the same general location. Here’s what we know about the room:

• It has several windows, but seems dark nonetheless
• A hearth but no fire
• Furniture—not cozy—and only the specific mention of a table in the center of the room, not a welcoming sofa

What she hasn’t told us:

• Exactly how big the room is
• How many windows and doors
• Where it’s located in the house

The point of this is that Heyer’s use of interior spaces reflects the arc of the story. The other point is that it’s possible to do this without going into exhaustive detail about a given space. So why did I have you do a little of that in the previous exercise? I have no doubt that Heyer herself had a very clear, detailed idea of what each of those rooms looked like. She effectively curated the details for the reader, including only those that mattered for her story.

Example: Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

The scene of protagonist Anna’s test dive in a WWII-era diving suit in this gripping novel provides a wonderful counterexample of the above. Egan evokes a space that is both unbounded and very specific, and she does it through focusing on minute details.

This is a space and time that a reader would likely have no familiarity with. Where in the example above, even with little experience of manor houses in England, the average reader could supply an image of a library and a large reception room, understanding the space in and around a cumbersome diving suit in the murky waters of the East River requires more explanation.

Egan herself wore one of these suits, which is obvious from the scene where we accompany Anna on this fraught first dive:

Holding the curled rails of the diving ladder, she began taking careful backward steps, finding each rung with the metal tip of her shoe before resting her weight there. Water contracted around her legs with cold energy, suctioning the wrinkles in her jumpsuit pinchingly to her skin. Ice cakes nudged at the dress. Soon the water was at her chest, then lapping the bottom of the faceplate. Anna took a last look up and saw Bascombe and Marle watching her from the ladder. Two more rungs and she was submerged, the green-brown water of Wallabout Bay visible through her four windows. No sound but the hiss of air.

On the last of the ladder’s fourteen rungs, she paused to increase her air supply. Sure enough: the dress inflated slightly, easing the water’s pressure on her legs. She felt for the descending line, swung her left leg around its manila cord, and let it slide through her left glove as she drifted down, the weight of the dress lulling her toward the bottom, the water darkening as she left the surface behind. At last her shoes met the bottom of Wallabout Bay. Anna couldn’t see it: just the wisps of her legs disappearing into dark. She felt a rush of well-being whose source was not instantly clear. Then she realized: the pain of the dress had vanished. The air pressure from within it was just enough to balance the pressure from outside while maintaining negative buoyancy—i.e., holding her down. And the weight that had been so punishing on land now allowed her to stand and walk under thirty feet of water that otherwise would have spat her out like a seed.

Egan, Jennifer. Manhattan Beach: A Novel (pp. 216-217). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

Egan places us intensely in this scene, which takes place within the confines of the diving suit. What she tells us:

• The diving ladder has 14 curled rails
• Anna feels them with the metal tips of her shoes
• There’s a descending line which is a manila cord, she has to swing her left leg around it and it goes through her left glove
• Her helmet has four “windows”
• The water is green-brown, so somewhat opaque

We feel through this scene that the dive is a positive experience for her. Somehow, the confined space, the lack of air, doesn’t come through as claustrophobic. That’s in large part thanks to the nature of the details Egan gives us. (And don’t tell me adverbs aren’t extremely useful when done well: Who doesn’t love pinchingly?)

Here is a crucial dive three-quarters of the way through the book, getting to the climax, where Anna is hoping and dreading to find something it has been her mission throughout the book to discover:

The obstruction, when it came, lay along the outer rope conjoining Anna to Dexter Styles. She unhooked the inner circling line—the one holding her to the weight—in order to crawl toward him. Only then did she recognize the flaw in her plan: the rope she was letting go was their only link to the boat. She remembered her first dive—the confusion of wandering, disoriented, underwater. Even in the comparatively luminous and shallow Wallabout Bay, a three-inch manila rope had been impossible to find. In the worst case, Marle and Bascombe could haul her up by her lifeline. But could they haul up Dexter Styles?

Finding no alternative, she let go the inner line from her wrist and crawled along the outer rope to the obstacle: a heavy chain attached to a block of concrete. She felt Dexter Styles crawling from the other direction and then in the water beside her. She turned on her flashlight, its sallow glow awakening perhaps two feet of murky bay. The chain’s three-inch links were slippery with plant life, as if they hadn’t moved in a long time. Anna doused the light, frightened of what else she would see.

Egan, Jennifer. Manhattan Beach: A Novel (p. 336). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

The entire tenor of this scene—despite its similarities—is completely different. It’s hard to form a really clear visual image of where they are going and how, which reflects the actual conditions below the water. And still, Egan’s descriptions are in a way minute and detailed.

Exercise

Using your test scene, write a paragraph describing the space the first time it occurs in your story, then write a second paragraph describing the space at a later time along your story’s arc. Pay attention to what has changed in the way the space should be perceived by the reader.