The Power of Place
By Elizabeth Havey | January 7, 2022 |
Oceanside, CA
My last post for WU (Where I Should Be, A Writer’s Sense of Place) dealt with the importance of PLACE in our work, while focusing on my growing up in Chicago—the houses, vegetation, traffic, people—because place influences much of who we are. No one can write a memoir without place becoming a major character. Think: Black Boy, All Creatures Great and Small, Born a Crime. These works rely on references to the author’s birth and living place, the experience of local mores, even the streets where he or she walked and lived.
But place also plays a powerful role in fiction, orienting readers and pulling them into story. Some authors are masters at this. And even though Joan Didion writes nonfiction, I’ll later examine her evocative work to get your creative place juices flowing.
ACTION!
Think of place as the establishing shot in a film, or the curtain rising to reveal a stage setting. Like these visual introductions, our written beginnings should gradually unfold, using the tools of dialogue and description to orient the reader to place as well as character.
All readers want a solid beginning. They want to be drawn in. But not all novels immediately establish place, preferring to allow us to be privy to the MC’s thoughts or a story problem that will steadily expand. That can work well, but if readers are not grounded in where this person is–certainly not latitude and longitude, but to a place that allows visualization–we might lose them to questioning or even impatience. Place, as well as the topics that are part of your storyline, can stimulate a reader’s excitement and attraction.
First, consider how to orient the reader, because as they begin reading your work, they will unconsciously pull from memory the images that will aid them in entering the world you are creating, the place where you are taking them.
Take, for example, the first lines from a chapter in my WIP:
Jude wrung out her mop, the floor of the sterile hallway now shining like glass from one end to the other, clean, smooth. But for how long? One of those nurses had just run through, and later there was sure to be some bed heading to a delivery room, another to the OR, blood dripping from a sheet, from a body, some woman screaming like she’s about to die.
Easy. We’re in a hospital. If you read on, the visuals open up, drawing the reader further into the story, underlining how place is important, the hospital acting as a character that moves the plot forward.
Place enhances our work, allowing the reader to bring memory, feelings, and past experiences (negative and positive) to the page. And notice, the word hospital did not appear in the above selection.
Place opens the reader’s eyes to the usual, but pulls the reader in more and more when events and characters living and moving within that place are not usual, are beyond normal, are the amazing creations of your imagination.
NOW: SOME BACKSTORY
I’m guessing that a story or novel you are working on, or one that has already been published, pulled some of its elements from your experience of place—which can be damn stimulating. I’m fortunate to have lived in three different states but, even if you have remained in the same place your entire life, how different your life has been from the lives of others and from mine.
Illinois is flat, flat. As a child, I knew that might be a detriment, as if flatness could somehow become a joke. The idea became accentuated when my mother treated me and my brothers to the trip of a lifetime: California. We traveled on the California Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco. Our train crossed through the flat plains of Nebraska, then the Rocky Mountains (real mountains, not hills), Salt Lake City (where they washed our train), and on to San Francisco—home to trolley cars, the ocean, the harbor, those steep streets.
Weeks later, after visiting the Grand Canyon, we headed home, this time on the El Capitan that runs between Santa Fe, New Mexico and Chicago. On that train, a girl my age proclaimed she was from a place that sounded more glamorous than the flat plains of Chicago. I responded that I lived near the “hills and the flats,” (a truly fourth grade answer), though not a total lie. My home, Beverly Hills, Chicago, is called “hills” for the following geographical reason (via encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org):
High bedrock under the retreating glaciers left the most prominent feature in the area, the Blue Island Ridge in South Chicago, a 6-mile-by-1-mile table of land that sits 25 to 50 feet above the adjacent flatland. Residents often identify their community as “Beverly Hills,” a reference to that glacial ridge just west of Longwood Drive, the highest point in Chicago.
THEN: OTHER PLACES OF BEING, LIVING
After our many years in Chicago, my husband and I lived in Iowa (more hills dug out by glaciers) and then California, where in Westlake Village I could see the foot of a mountain from my window. But how does one gravitate to a new place? In real life, it can be family or wanderlust. In fiction, it’s your choice.
Moving, visiting new places and/or reading about them sparks creativity. Though I often sang during car trips while exploring the eastern seaboard, there was always a notebook to jot down descriptions of place, the turn of phrase I’d heard at our last stop, something new or different to me that defined that particular place: Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Nevada…
And California.
I will always love California; there is no other place like it. And as writers and readers we are blessed with Joan Didion’s evocative pictures of the sunshine state as well as other parts of America that she captured in her books Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights–the last two volumes being Didion’s attempts to understand the death of her husband and later the death of her daughter, all while using her poetic language to keep California and New York City fresh in our minds. For Didion underlines that place colors the lives we live. Thus, if you need some insight into how to incorporate place in your work, read her, read about things so California: the Santa Ana Winds. You’ll feel them blowing in this passage:
There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now, we will see smoke back in the canyons, hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks.…To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.
Yes, California is wind, also fires, earthquakes, and sunshine, ever present. It lifts your spirits, though there is June gloom that eventually gives way to a blue sky and dry soft breezes. And there are pepper trees, jacaranda trees, roses everywhere. Some people say the roses help hold back the fires.
We packed up our car three times while living in California, completely vacating our home only once, not knowing as we drove away if it would soon be engulfed in flames or if we would find it whole and dappled with sunlight the following morning. That’s not fiction; it does present a powerful story element.
But wherever people live, they adjust. About California, Didion writes:
Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
California is fire and wind. And as Edward Albee once wrote:
There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.
FINAL THOUGHT
I’m certain all of you, no matter where you have lived or now live, are vessels of stories that spring from place. That, when you write, some of your work is set in places you know and some in places you have imagined, creating not only your characters but whole worlds that spring from your imagination. Are these worlds kinder than what you have lived and experienced?
No matter how you handle place in your fiction, your created worlds are part of you. Provide them with the power of place. Make us yearn to be there or weep with sorrow when they become a place of terror and fright. Place is powerful and how you use it will make your work live on the page.
Writing is very visual for me. When I come back to a work-in-progress, I reread, seeing again the labor hallway or Sarah’s willow tree or the street where the kidnapping takes place. I find it necessary to ground myself in the scene before editing or rewriting. Does picturing place help your creative process? Do you use photos or image boards to take you back to the worlds you are creating?
A former teacher of English and a labor and delivery RN, Beth Havey attended the Iowa Summer Writing Workshops, working with David Payne and Elizabeth Strout. From 2004-2008, she proofread for Meredith Books and co-authored Miami Ink: Marked for Greatness. In 2015, Foreverland Press published her story collection, A Mother’s Time Capsule. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Better Homes & Gardens, the Des Moines Register, The Nebraska Review and other literary and little magazines. Each week she publishes an essay on her blog, and is a member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association.
Thanks for this post–good reminders!
Thanks Carol. I wrote the piece before Joan Didion’s death, and now find her ideas and skill even more present.
Hi Beth, although visuals are only part of the rich detail that place has to offer, Salman Rushdie has also said that all of his novels start in place; otherwise he can’t “picture” what happens there. This post reminds me of the story behind Roland Merullo’s wonderful novel, THE TALK-FUNNY GIRL. As I recall it, Merullo said he was stopped at a gas station in rural Massachusetts when a girl came in speaking in completely garbled syntax. When she left, he asked the clerk what that was all about and was told that there was a cult not far from there that keeps to themselves and refuses societal constructs like proper English—and Merullo’s story mind was off and running.
Hi Kathryn, of course your knowledge and wide-spread reading would present such a fascinating comment and the seed for story! Thanks for posting.
Thank you for this, Beth. Most of my work-in-progress takes place in the Twin Cities and southeast Minnesota along the Mississippi, which is part of the Driftless area and where I’ve lived most of my life. The varied moods of winter, the grandparents’ blufftop farm, and the river itself ground my protagonist, shapes her choices about her life’s path.
Your descriptive reply is so welcome. Writing and the love of place fuels our ideas. With the various environments in our country how can we not want to share them. Wishing you the best with your work.
Grew up near 103rd and Halsted and used to go to your Beverly Hills in the 60s to skateboard down your hills! Enjoyed your piece about place since I’ve always thought of place being a character as important as the people in a story. Thanks!
Love this Nancy. Makes me wonder if we might find more connections. Place is often about the surprise of paths that cross. The hills are still there!!
Well said! – n
You said ‘Santa Ana winds’, I googled ‘raymond carver about the santa ana winds and meek housewives’, and immediately got:
“It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks. Anything can happen.” Classic.
I was born in the LA basin, spent my formative years (7-19) in Mexico City surrounded by volcanoes, finished college in Seattle, grad school in Madison, WI, first job in Maryland (no mountains), and then 37 years in central NJ where I missed mountains so much I would see them in a peculiar cloud formation at the end of long streets looking west. And I’m back in California, Davis for the rest of my life, with little short mountains on the horizon if you are looking in the right direction and there’s no smoke.
Mountains permeate and support a lot of my fiction. There is something primal about beings that were thrust into the sky eons ago.
You’re right: place is essential and visual. The same action is different in a forest than on a mountain. It just is.
Alicia I adore that Carver quote, thanks for posting it!
Alicia, I read that Carver quote out loud to my husband and we both had a great chuckle.
I don’t remember many of these, and almost never verbatim (thank you, Google), but with a little help I can almost always nail them down.
This is so perfect for the edgy feeling.
Beth, I grew up in LA county, and in the 60s and 70s, the smog was so bad you could easily forget that the San Gabriel mountains were right there. The Santa Anas wouldn’t always blow that stuff away, but sometimes (and after the rare rain), there they were.
I have written a memoir based on my criminality during those days, and a good deal of it harkens back to suburban Long Beach, my hometown, and the sense of place, sometimes blindingly bland, of growing up there. (That, among others, was my excuse to commit crimes.)
Tom, I love your reality touched with an edge of humor. My uncle moved to LA and my early experience of a place so unlike Chicago was almost fainting in the thinner air of the low mountains. And falling off a bench and visiting the ER. Not elements of good story but always my story. Thanks for yours.
Alicia thanks for your powerful words. Those who truly walk out into the world and embrace all its elements, become writers of place. And as readers, we are drawn to them.
Good essay, Beth. As a visual writer, place naturally plays an important role in my stories. Often place defines who you are and the journey away or back has a lot to say about who you become. You can’t always go home again but we carry that longing for home.
Vijaya thanks so much for this comment and outlook. Place is tied to home, to the faces we love and are familiar, whether family or the teen who bags our groceries. Despite Covid we honor our places and complete our stories by including them. Place is part of us.
I lived for 6 wonderful years in southwest Louisiana,Cajun Country. The language, music, food, traditions, not to mention the geography — all so evocative and richly atmospheric. How could I not mine it for my stories!
I also grew up in Illinois. It’s true, we have miles and miles of uninterrupted farmland, but also scenic bluffs along the Illinois River and marshes south of St. Louis.
Thanks for this. Yes, wherever we live there is beauty and there are some states I have not visited and thus have not experienced their particular allure. But Reading takes me to place. Writing reminds me of how our lives are intertwined with place.
Too often writers think of place as setting, something objectively there that needs describing. It may host a story but exists apart from it, unchanging and indifferent to the people who dwell in it. However, a story is not told by a setting. It’s told by and about people: people who live in that place and experience it each in individual ways. Thus, place comes alive not in how it looks to a reporter but how it feels to a participant. The examples you cite from Didion and your own work, Beth, nicely illustrate that principle.
Thanks so much, Don. More and more I look for that enveloping scene that moves me to country or city or a backyard that accepts and emphasizes the characters who live there. Or that presents the very struggle that character will encounter.
One challenge of using setting is knowing which and how much detail to focus on. I have a habit of writing beautiful descriptions of setting that contribute little or nothing to the story or character development. Cutting them later is like pulling teeth.
I agree with you cmvenzon. You never know how much the reader wants–some like lots of detail while others want the writing to cut to the chase. It’s a delicate balance and may depend, to some extent, on how much place is part of the story.
Editing is always difficult. My only suggestion is to save what you cut for another piece or to help promote your novel when it is published. Thanks so much for reading.
Beautiful, informative column, Beth, on one of my favorite topics. I am so emotionally attached to places that I feel place has been a major character in all my novels, something with a personality all its own. And I love novels that are strongly rooted in place, too, like Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, Willa Cather’s My Antonia–I could go on and on and on. Thanks for putting it all so eloquently into words.
Thanks so much Kathleen. I can still remember place in your novels—all three of them. I can picture the island, the coffee shop?, and the home in your first book. Hoping my work will honor place.