He’s Walking Off The Cliff! Spatial Relationships In Writing

Posted by Shakirah Dawud in Writing & Editing

Photo credit: Leo Reynolds, courtesy of Flickr

We’ve all read this scene: one character is perilously trapped between another character and destruction in the form of a steep drop, a flaming pit, or a chained, vicious beast. The second character prods or distracts the first character into taking one step back, and then another, and another. The reader is frantically trying to keep up with how much distance remains between him and his doom, but there’s no way to tell.

Along with the importance of setting scenes properly comes the need for spatial relationship references, so here are some pointers from an editing perspective for the benefit of readers.

Give us the three dimensions of a room as exactly as your character sees them relative to himself and other frames of reference. When writing, “The dog lunged after the girl,” we can figure out where the dog is if we’re told where the girl is relative to the character from whose viewpoint we’re watching the scene.

Provide landmarks. Once we know the blackberry bramble marks the end of the garden and the beginning of the woods, we’ll be able to follow any scene into the woods pretty easily once we’re guided past the blackberry bramble.

Stick with one unit of measurement. It’s not easy to make this mistake, but it appears to happen when authors look up and insert technical details like distances, lengths, and heights of known and measurable objects and forget to convert them to the unit mainly used in the regional setting of the book.

I have a very hard time forming a picture of the distance between two things 10 yards apart. I know a yard is 3 feet, so we’re talking 30 feet, but how far is that? Relative terms when appropriate (e.g., a block away, ten minutes’ drive, just out of reach, two paces) really help me get my bearings.

I don’t need anything so detailed as blindman’s bluff directions except in places where the time and place are absolutely crucial to my understanding the scene and the action.

When you re-read a scene your story, decide whether the size and shape of the setting fits the natural dance of your characters within it. Watch them move in your mind’s eye, and check it against what you’ve written. Have they been described as being in the position you’re imagining now, or does the reader still think they’re where they were when they walked in? Or worse, is someone still backing up when they should have fallen off the cliff eight steps ago?

How do you like to refer to spatial positions: relatively or exactly? How does your choice suit your style?

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