Are You Utilizing Ugly Settings?

In lieu of the usual video post (as I continue my week off), I thought I’d share a reader’s response to the post “The Importance of a Fabulous Setting” from a couple weeks ago. David Taylor emailed me the following, and his thoughts were too good not to pass along:

I watched your video and wondered if you have ever considered how wonderful ugly settings can be? In the novel Storm Warnings, a group of German sailors as well as civilians set out a on a voyage aboard a sailing barque, going home during WW2. In the book, there is a scene where a novice nun who is the love of a German sailor is trapped aboard a sinking vessel during a winter storm. He cannot free her but chooses to not escape himself, instead holding her hand till overcome by the sea. In the horror of the surroundings, beauty won out because those last seconds for that sailor were enough to exchange for a lifetime then maybe he exchanged survival for a lifetime.

The book All Quiet on the Western Front comes to mind. There, in the awful scene of hellish trench warfare, a slight thing of nature becomes something of a magnificent beauty as it is illuminated by the squalor of waste and destruction. The man [the main character] wants so much to be a part of it, he forgets his place, and his soul soars upwards. But like Icarus, he is cast down, his body broken, wasted, a part of the carnage he sought to escape.

Using your distinction between writers and authors, would not an author accept a greater challenge? Even crave the challenge to take the ugly or unattractive, making it somehow beautiful or magnificent? Many tread the path of the mundane, but the exceptional blaze a different trail.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! Have you ever chosen to use an “ugly” setting to intensify a scene? Tell me in the comment!