Developing a Sense of Place (Part 2)
by Philip Martin
Director, Great Lakes Literary, LLC
“Every story would be another story, and unrecognized . . . , if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else.” – Eudora Welty
In Part 1 of this series, we looked at techniques to introduce a place. Now let’s look at techniques to involve the place more deeply in the story.
Place should not be an inconsequential backdrop, described in the first chapter but never referred to again. This is like meeting a character at the beginning who seems important, then disappears. Place needs to be involved at key points in the story’s flow. What are the logical spots where setting might be brought into play?
For ideas, you might think of place as a “best friend” character. Such a character becomes a foil, against which the main character is mirrored.
Step 2. Involve the Place in the Story’s Flow
Technique: use place to show or develop character
O Pioneers! (1913), by Willa Cather, begins:
One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over
them. . . .
The issue of life on the prairie, it seems, is one of permanence. How will people avoid being “blown away”? The main character, Alexandra Bergson, is a tall, strong young woman of twenty at the novel’s start. She lives on a Nebraska prairie farm with her immigrant parents and three younger brothers. Then, all changes when her father falls ill and, dying, entrusts the farm to Alexandra.
Here, at the end of Chapter 3, is a quiet pause as Alexandra sits on the back stoop and looks out at her land. It sketches in a few details of the prairie setting, but note how Alexandra sees it through her own special eyes, giving us a glimpse into her strong personality, full of intention.
That evening, after she had washed the supper dishes, Alexandra sat down on the kitchen doorstep, while her mother was mixing the bread. It was a still, deep-breathing summer night, full of the smell of the hay fields. Sounds of laughter and splashing came up from the pasture, and when the moon rose rapidly above the bare rim of the prairie, the pond glittered like polished metal, and she could see the flash of white bodies as the boys ran about the edge, or jumped into the water. Alexandra watched the shimmering pool dreamily, but eventually her eyes went back to the sorghum patch south of the barn, where she was planning to make her new pig corral.
This kind of information about character in other stories might be revealed through a conversation with a best friend. Here, the land is Alexandra’s friend, indeed, her love. We discover her character by seeing how she relates to the beautiful, ever-changing, ever-challenging landscape.
Technique: using place to develop mood
Well-placed, evocative description of place is a simple way to foreshadow what is to come. This stems from the reader’s awareness that the author is selecting details carefully, so any description of place becomes suggestive of what lies ahead. To begin a scene with a description of setting – cast in one light or another – suggests a glimmer of what is about to occur.
Throughout the novel Watership Down (1972), author Richard Adams uses descriptions of place, seen from the point of view of his protagonists (a community of rabbits), to begin chapters. Each passage sets a mood – of concern, hope, change, movement. It is seldom obvious, little more than a faint background cue, like soft music in a film (indeed, his descriptive writing is very cinematic). But the rabbits are so sensitive to their environment, so we become ultra-sensitive too.
It was early morning and the rabbits were beginning to silflay [to graze], coming up into clear gray silence. The air was still chilly. There was a good deal of dew and no wind. Five or six wild duck flew overhead in a swiftly moving V, intent on some far-off destination. The sound made by their wings came down distinctly, diminishing as they went away southward. The silence returned. With the melting of the last of the twilight there grew a kind of expectancy and tension, as though it were thawing snow about to slide from a sloping roof. Then the whole down and all below it, earth and air, gave way to the sunrise. As a bull, with a slight but irresistible movement, tosses its head from the grasp of a man who is leaning over the stall and idly holding its horn, so the sun entered the world in smooth, gigantic power.
Something, the writer is suggesting, is about to happen.
Technique: using place as a setting for action
Almost any description of action, whether a barroom brawl or a drive across town, requires a keen sense of place. As action happens, characters are set into motion across a landscape, whether through a house or traveling across a greater expanse. Action scenes are hard for the reader to visualize unless the setting is well drawn, so that we see the hero swing from the chandelier, or crash against the small card table in the dark corner of the bar. But remember, in general, beware not to insert too many fine details. Rather, the place needs to be sketched in concert with the pace of the scene.
The dark bulk of the castle loomed in front of us. The cloud cover was so low that I could barely make out the highest towers. Between us and the fortification wall lay first the river, then the moat. . . .
We slipped one by one into the river and swam beneath the surface to the far bank. I could hear the first patrol in the gardens beyond the moat. We lay in the reeds until it had passed, then ran over the narrow strip of marshland and swam in the same way across the moat.
The first fortification wall rose straight from the moat. At the top was a small tiled wall that ran all the way round the garden in front of the residence and the narrow strip of land behind, between the residence walls and the fortification wall. Kenji dropped onto the ground to watch for patrols while Yuki and I crept along the tiled roof to the southeast corner. . . .
I knelt and looked upwards. Above me was the row of windows of the corridor at the back of the residence. They were all closed and barred, save one . . . .
– Across the Nightingale Floor, by Lian Hearn, 2002
Step 3: Encourage “There-ness”
With a great character, at some point the role grows beyond mere description, or straight-forward involvement in plot or character development. They begin to speak on their own behalf and affect the course of the story in unexpected ways. In short, a great character becomes alive.
In a similar way, the place in your novel can ultimately come alive. To come alive means to achieve a rich state of presence, what might be called “there-ness.” There-ness is the sense of awe, and impact, and respect, that we (and the characters in the novels) have for the prairie in O, Pioneers! or Cannery Row in Steinbeck’s novel, for the great northern wilderness in Jack London’s tales or Narnia in C.S. Lewis’s stories or the barn in Charlotte’s Web.
How does a writer create there-ness? In the same way you allow a character to come alive: listening carefully to what the place really is, at its core, beyond the superficial stereotypes. Although a great place is not a person, it is alive, if you take the time to become aware of it. Encourage that exploration, and you will develop a greater sense of place in your story.
Like many advanced-level techniques, this is hard to chart in a diagram or explain in a tip. But it is worth thinking about and trying to work into your writing. It is less a forced act than an act of listening, and caring.
What it really is, perhaps, is falling in love with the place.
Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security. That night she had a new consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it. . . . She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.
– O, Pioneers!
As Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote in Cross Creek (1952):
There is of course an affinity between people and places. . . . We were bred of earth before we were born of our mothers. Once born, we can live without mother or father, or any other kin, or any friend, or any human love. We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and something is shriveled in a man’s hearth when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.
As few pages later, Rawlings gives a concrete example as she recalls walking down a country road:
I walk at sunset, east along the road. There are no houses, except the abandoned one where the wild plums grow, white with bloom in springtime. I usually walk halfway to the village and back again. . . .
Folk call the road lonely, because there is not human traffic and human stirring. Because I have walked it so many times and seen such a tumult of life there, it seems to me one of the most populous highways of my acquaintance. I have walked it in ecstasy, and in joy it is beloved. Every pine tree, every gallberry bush, every passion vine, every joree rustling in the underbrush, is vibrant.
I have walked it in trouble, and the wind in the trees beside me is easing. I have walked it in despair, and the red of the sunset is my own blood dissolving into the night’s darkness. For all such things were on earth before us, and will survive after us, and it is given to us to join ourselves with them and to be comforted.
There-ness. In the words of another writer, Paul Gruchow, writing of the Boundary Waters canoe country in northern Minnesota:
“This is the difference between scenery and place: scenery is something you have merely looked at; place is something you have experienced. … This voyage into place ultimately leads toward memory, the great leavening agent of our lives.”
A great sense of place can set your story apart. It will offer new kinds of insights into the characters. It can test them, support them, change them. It is, as Paul Gruchow said, the great leavening agent – that will make your stories rise above the rest.
