Know Your Place
One of the highest compliments a writer can receive is, “Your story has a good sense of place.”
But what does that mean?
Place in writing isn’t restricted to landscape. It involves characters and their moods, emotions, personalities, colloquialisms, and authentic speech patterns. It captures a specific time period, and involves all five senses. Novelist Janice Daugharty (Writer's Digest, May 1997), explained, “Most writers are wise to the rule of writing what you know. But where you know, a specific place, is equally important. Place is a character, place manipulates plot.”
Place is ethereal, yet it has substance and texture. It should be subtle, while at the same time permeate the story. Place introduces readers to locales with which they are unfamiliar or it reconnects them to areas they know well. Place is a picture drawn with words. The opening of Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory is a good example.
“Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in the country. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.”
Artwork on the next page illustrated the scene, but I envisioned the room before turning the page. I heard the fire roar and crackle, smelled the burning wood, tasted the freshly baked bread atop the stove, ran my fingers over the worn, cracked oilcloth covering the table.
Author Fred Chappell once defined the eight elements of Southern fiction; among them is a “deep involvement in place.” Southerner Eudora Welty was a master at creating place. In her essay, A Sweet Devouring, she told how, as a child in Jackson, Mississippi, she tried to maneuver around the librarian’s rule allowing only two books per day. “The librarian was the lady in town who wanted to be it. My mother took me there and introduced me. The librarian always called me by my full name. She said, ‘'Eudora Welty, does your mother know where you are? You know good and well the fixed rule of this library. Nobody is going to come running back here with any book on the same day they took it out. Get those books out of here and don’t come back until tomorrow. And I can practically see through you.’” Welty had explained earlier that females were stopped at the door if they were not wearing two petticoats, if the librarian could see through their dresses.
Although I grew up a couple generations later than Miss Welty and in a different region, I connected with her story because she transported me to a familiar place; a small-town library. She inspired me to publish Guardian Of The Books, an essay about my childhood library and its librarian.
A sense of the South is evident in the writings of William Faulkner, James Dickey, Pat Conroy, Reynolds Price, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Conner, James Lee Burke, and Harper Lee. For inspiration on setting a scene, writers need look no further than Harper Lee’s unforgettable novel, To Kill A Mockingbird.
“The Radley Place jutted into a sharp curve beyond our house. Walking south, one faced its porch; the sidewalk turned and ran beside the lot. The house was low, was once white with a deep front porch and green shutters, but had long ago darkened to the color of the slate-gray yard around it. Rain-rotted shingles drooped over the eaves of the verandah; oak trees kept the sun away. The remains of a picket drunkenly guarded the front yard––a swept yard that was never swept––where johnson grass and rabbit tobacco grew in abundance. Inside the house lived a malevolent phantom.”
How could one not be drawn to that neighborhood? Most of us in childhood knew a forbidding place like the Radley house and the eccentric people living there.
Southern writers do have a knack for creating authentic settings, but they do not hold the copyright on that aspect of writing. There are many good writers who weave regional characteristics, traditions, speech patterns, eccentricities, and values into their stories. Anne Tyler gives us a taste of Baltimore. John Steinbeck grounded us in Northern California. Willa Cather bequeathed the essence of pioneer life in the Midwest. Among today’s keepers of the Midwest flame are novelist Louise Erdrich, and poet Kathleen Norris. Norris’s nonfiction bestseller, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, is a mesmerizing sojourn into a contradictory landscape; harsh and desolate, yet beautiful and peaceful. Open the book to any page and you’ll find yourself living on the Great Plains, where “…rain is more than a blessing; it’s a miracle, and where there is no escape from the wind.” Norris devotes a chapter to wind, calling it the voice of the sky.
“Wind yanks moisture out of the ground, turning wet fields to dust in a matter of hours; it robs farmers of valuable crops at harvest, blowing them away with the dust of the combine. It encircles us, much as water encircles an island, increasing our sense of isolation. The wind is what drove many homesteaders off the land. It drove some of them mad.”
Dakota covers a year in the writer’s small-town life, with brief weather reports serving as chapter openings. “Mud and new grass push up through melting snow. Lilacs in bud by my front door, bent low by last week’s ice storm, begin to rise again in today’s cold rain. Thin clouds scatter in a loud wind. Suddenly fir trees seem like tired old women stooped under winter coats. I want to be light, to cast off impediments, and push like a tulip through a muddy smear of snow. I want to take the rain to heart, let it move like possibility, the idea of change.”
Some of my writing is set in the Midwest. Born and raised there, I know the people, the lay of the land, the seasons, the flora and fauna. I remember the deprivation of the Depression and the pleasures of ordinary events. In my essay, Visiting Gramma, set in the 1940s, Gramma and I sit on the screened porch of her cottage, eating plump sugar cookies, crisp and lightly browned around the edges, and drinking homemade nectar made from well water. “Outside, bees buzzed among the morning glories in the flowerbox, seeking sweet nectar of their own. A car sped by, boiling up road dust that filtered through the screen on a breath of wind. A housefly circled our heads. Gramma raised the swatter, then laid it down when the fly collided with the sticky strip dangling in the corner.”
After reading this reminiscence in a magazine, a neighbor brought me a plate of sugar cookies, her grandmother’s recipe. Another neighbor offered, “Your story brought back memories of fun times shared with my grandma.”
In my first published work, Simply Delicious, I wrote about the wooden crate of Delicious apples my uncle brought our family every year at Christmas. “Each polished fruit came nestled in a Prussian blue tissue paper blanket. My sister and I saved the wrappers and, after ironing out the wrinkles, we used them to make Christmas ornaments and paper doll dresses. We tucked some into dresser drawers for a sweet sachet. Long after the apples were eaten, the scattered tissues provided a fruity potpourri in the warm, dry indoor air.”
Those words evoked memories for a young man who sent me a note saying that his grandfather had sold apples from a street cart in New York City. He said he had forgotten until he read my essay that his grandfather’s apples were wrapped in colored tissue paper. His grandfather was called Poppy, as was my father in the story.
For these readers, my place became theirs through shared experience. They returned momentarily to a familiar and comfortable time in their lives.
So, what is place? Look at it this way: People often say, “I can’t define good art, but I know it when I see it.
The same can be said for place. Readers know it when they see it, through the pictures writers draw with words.