And if you're not careful, this is how you can wind up with a story that suffers from White Room Syndrome.
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| Where is this story happening... exactly? |
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Could Your Story Be Happening In An Empty White Room?
The meaning of this phrase is pretty simple; if the story you're telling has no details about where it is, or the environment around it, then you're basically setting your tale in an empty, white room. And that can be a problem because while the characters, interplay, plot, dialogue, etc., are all very important, they need to have a background to put them all into context for your reader.
Is your story set in a Victorian asylum? A remote mountaintop cabin during a snowstorm? The crumbling back alleys of a major city? Harlem during the 1930s? All of these things are details that we need to know as the people reading your story.
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| The where and the when is often just as important as the who and the why. |
I've found two, reliable ways to avoid White Room Syndrome. The first is to make sure you inject a little bit of scenery and context as the story goes. This works best when it comes to stories that are very action-forward, so you want your audience to focus on what your characters are doing rather than explaining where they happen to be. So in this instance you might focus on a car chase, filling in the details as you go. While the banter between the cop and her partner, the exchange of lead, etc. is clearly front-and-center, you can fill in descriptions of the city they're driving through, names of the streets, and even pointing out iconic buildings or landmarks if they're germaine to the directions. Even working it into dialogue, such as when handing off the bank robbers to uniformed officers, having a character say something like, "New York's finest, late to the party as usual."
The second method (and the one I use most extensively myself) is to front-load your audience with a description of the location your story is in as a way to really set the mood. Whether it's the fantastical streets of Kintargo in my story Devil's Night, or the bowels of the corrupt starship in my Warhammer 40K tale The Final Lamentation, I grab the audience by the shoulders, and hold them face down in the place they happen to be. And the reason for that is that both of these stories start in the calm before the storm, just before the action really starts to take place. So it acts in the same way as an establishing shot, rather than opening up a story in the midst of a an action scene's frenetic pace.
Neither method is better than the other, and you should experiment with both. It's just that the former gives your readers flashes of information in between action beats, and the latter is the central focus of the stage before the play actually begins. Both are quite functional, but it's all about choosing the best tool for the best job.
Also, for folks who are curious to hear about the problem of White Room Syndrom from a tabletop RPG perspective, check out episode 27 of my show Discussions of Darkness below. And if it's something you find you really jive with and you want to support, then consider subscribing to the Azukail Games channel, sharing the video link around on your socials, and maybe leaving a comment or two to let me know how you found the show!
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