Ben Hur: more than a movie

How do you describe setting?

I think the secret lies in some of the older writing, meaning ... from the 19th century. It's important to understand that writers from the days before television or even cinema had few visual images of the worlds they described. Unless they'd been there -- and some of the more prominent writers of the day did travel a lot -- they had only other books, maps and acquaintances as reference. Diaries and journals helped. Photographs were less useful. 

One can see a mountain and visualize life on it. To visualize it and describe it, two topics. The reader almost certainly had not seen this mountain. It's also important to remember that extensive travel was, depending on the area, not easily achieved by the masses.

In fact, most people of the time could scarcely afford the book, let alone the dream of experiencing what it described.

Some of that deals with verbs. They make birds fly, people sing and jump and dance. They make bears roar and trains rumble. I still don't know how many ways there are (were) to describe what people do when they are standing around, talking to each other.

Still, the classics of the 19th century can give us some direction. Here is a snippet from the 1884 novel "Ben Hur, A Tale of the Christ," by Gen. Lew Wallace. The general has taken us to a land of fantasy, nothing like the landscape he knew as a child in Indiana or later, as a military man in faraway places like New or Old Mexico.

But you are there with this paragraph.

When the dromedary lifted itself out of the last break of the wady, the traveler had passed the boundary of El Belka, the ancient Ammon. It was morning-time. Before him was the sun, half curtained in fleecy mist; before him also spread the desert; not the realm of drifting sands, which was farther on, but the region where the herbage began to dwarf; where the surface is strewn with boulders of granite, and gray and brown stones, interspersed with languishing acacias and tufts of camel-grass. The oak, bramble, and arbutus lay behind, as if they had come to a line, looked over into the well-less waste and crouched with fear.

Modern writers might describe this scene in much the same way, but the cadence of the writing will have changed. That's natural. It's what makes the craft so appealing.  

Wallace was a master at painting a scene. Again, the language and cadence of the day:

At this age the apartment alluded to would be termed a saloon. It was quite spacious, floored with polished marble slabs, and lighted in the day by skylights in which colored mica served as glass. The walls were broken by Atlantes, no two of which were alike, but all supporting a cornice wrought with arabesques exceedingly intricate in form, and more elegant on account of superadditions of color -- blue, green, Tyrian purple, and gold. Around the room ran a continuous divan of Indian silks and wool of Cashmere. The furniture consisted of tables and stools of Egyptian patterns grotesquely carved. 

Setting, and what makes it important. Wallace nails it here:

His shoes were brought him, and in a few minutes Ben-Hur sallied out to find the fair Egyptian. The shadow of the mountains was creeping over the Orchard of Palms in advance of night. Afar through the trees came the tinkling of sheep bells, the lowing of cattle, and the voices of the herdsmen bringing their charges home. Life at the Orchard, it should be remembered, was in all respects as pastoral as life on the scantier meadows of the desert.

If you only saw the movie, you missed the best part of this story.