Not Everything Looks Perfect From Far Away
The best craft essay I've ever written on the power of place ... and a kick-ass 7-step exercise to you help find it.
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We ignore place at our own peril.
Place doesn’t care who you are or what you’re writing. Place gobbles up genre then growls for more. Place is everything, with its ancient mouth that bites, its open palms full of longing and so-called love. Place knows how to kneel down, how to croon and seduce. Sometimes, place cradles us, shields us. Place can absolutely save us from ourselves.
Place can save our lives.
Other times, breathes its hot breath in our face and gags us, traps us. Place can be both prison and portal.
No matter what, though, place shapes us as surely as water cuts rock and as quietly as open sun broils the gloss off a spring leaf.
Place is the amniotic fluid our stories soak in—and our stories could never enter the world, never come into being, without the portal of place—then, once through that portal, our stories must enter into a contract with place.
That contract states, in unequivocal terms, that place is neither atmosphere nor decoration, but, rather, an essential player in the unfolding drama.
Once when discussing the topic of place in writing, they had said, “It’s like in child development, we say the environment is the ‘third teacher’.” This was a concept I hadn’t heard before, but it made immediate sense to me. In our own lives, in this world we all share, environment shapes us. Those who guide children know this. But the rest of us sometimes forget how place limits and stimulates our behavior—often without our knowledge.
As writers, we ignore place at our own peril, because when we forget about place, it’s like leaving our characters in a white box, and then occasionally having a chair or lamp or building pop into view out of nowhere.
But the real magic of writing place is to write it so well, make it so integral to story and character, that it doesn’t assert itself as “place,” but actually recedes like the brush strokes of an oil painting, leaving behind a compelling illusion of something more real.
Novelist Clint McCown calls place the “hydrogen atom of fiction, the atom returned to its most basic form.” I first heard Clint say this during a lecture at Vermont College of Arts eight or so years ago, when I was a grad student there completing my MFA in fiction, and with some help from Clint and much effort of my own (thanks to my technological clumsiness) I was able to access a recording of Clint’s lecture on the VCFA commons so that I could share some of his wisdom with you here. It’s the best talk on place I’ve ever heard, and the only place it’s available to the public is in Clint’s craft book, Mr. Potato Head vs. Freud: Lessons on the Craft of Writing.
Anyway, in the talk, Clint—who is a brilliant lecturer—says, “Think of the most archetypal of the old testament stories. If Adam and Eve aren’t in the garden of Eden, they’re just another bickering couple—setting establishes their stakes and lends significance to the actions of both characters. What is Noah without a flood? Just a deranged shipbuilder—it’s setting that makes him a great preserver of life.”
In my own memoir, The Part That Burns, which explores the long-lasting after effects of an abusive childhood, the child that was once me says:
I’m not in my bed or even my pajamas—I have the kind with feet now, a present from Jack Daddy. But I’m still in my school clothes, even though it’s black outside. It must be fall. It’s not winter. In Duluth, if you open the door to winter, you don’t forget. Lake Superior is the reason for this hateful weather. This lake is too big, too deep, too cold. And we are high north, almost as high as north gets. Our city is carved into rocks. The cold never leaves—not all the way.
Later, when her family uproots itself from the northern Midwest to the state of Wyoming, that same child says:
Our house in Douglas is my favorite house. White porch, little square yard of brown grass and soft dirt, tall spicy pine, and inside, wooden stairs leading up to my bedroom, with a cozy slanted ceiling and wallpaper that smells like old books. Pine boughs scratch against my window when the wind blows. In Wyoming, the wind always blows. There are mountains, too, but they are not like I imagined. They do not make the shapes of capital Ms, the way I always colored them—upside-down purple triangles with white caps of snow. Instead, these mountains roll up and down like waves.
Not everything looks perfect from far away.
In both of these segments, my aim is for place to assert itself in the aboutness of this character’s life, in the story through which she is traversing, just as place asserted itself in the life that I lived. Except that on the page, I get to choose and shape and carve those assertions and bend them to intersect with meaning wherever I possibly can (limited only by the constraints of the story I am telling and my capabilities for telling it).
In his craft talk, Clint reminds us that setting is “never just a static backdrop against which a story plays out. It is active participant in the story, a dynamic element. A quick scan of the TOC of short story anthologies will reveal titles that include settings.” Setting, Clint says, should “not be in the background, it should be something a character has to contend with.”
Clint also speaks incisively about the urgent importance of concrete specific details to bring place to life, to make it memorable. Something I’ve written about before. If you want a review of this powerful, consistently crucial tool, you can find that in the first post of the Essay Challenge, The Things Themselves, with its shimmers/shards exercise, or in the Eleven Things post here.
Clint minces no words on the subject when he puts it this way: “The simple fact is that abstractions evaporate quickly from a reader’s mind; if you want your ideas to last, you need to house them in something concrete, something the mind can picture, because if the mind can see it, the mind can hold onto it. Concreteness is the strongest housing for a principle or idea, and abstraction is weak… even when it’s right.”
Consider the immediate concrete details of place with which Elizabeth Strout opens her Pulitzer-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge, which, to my mind, could simply not have taken place anywhere other than its small-town coast of Maine setting:
For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summertime roads, when the wild raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy. Retired now, he still wakes early and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right, then the pines, tall and slender, and almost always he rode with the window partly open because he loved the smell of the pines and the heavy salt air, and in the winter he loved the smell of the cold.
In Strout’s work and in all the best writing, setting is an actor, not just a container. Setting, as Clint reminds us, must apply pressure, apply force. He says, “Think of it as an extra-conscious presence in the story, one which exerts its will in every direction upon every player on the stage. It is a secret force, and omnipresent means through which the writer may wield a controlling hand.”
I think of a book like Station Eleven, written well before COVID-19, but set in a post-pandemic world. Just revel in the way Emily St. John Mendel uses the dynamic forces of place and time (setting) to shape character, to reshape familiar settings into less recognizable ones. In this scene, the protagonist is in a grocery store speaking on the phone to his girlfriend just as the virus has begun to spread:
“Laura,” he began. “Laura.” He thought it better to speak to her directly and it was already almost eleven fifty, there wasn’t time for this. Filling the cart with more food, moving quickly through this bread-and-flower-scented world, this almost-gone place, thinking of Frank in his 22nd floor apartment, high up in the snowstorm with his insomnia and his book project, his day-old New York Times and his Beethoven. Jeevan wanted desperately to reach him. He decided to call Laura later, changed his mind and called the home line while he was standing by the checkout counter, mostly because he didn’t want to make eye contact with the clerk.
“Jeevan, where are you?” She sounded slightly accusatory. He handed over his credit card.
“Are you watching the news?”
“Should I be?”
“There’s a flu epidemic, Laura. It’s serious.”
“That thing in Russia or wherever? I knew about that.”
“It’s here now. It’s worse than we’d thought. I’ve just been talking to Hua. You have to leave the city.” He glanced up in time to see the look the checkout girl gave him.
“Have to? What? Where are you, Jeevan?” He was signing his name on the slip, struggling with the cart toward the exit, where the order of the store ended and the frenzy of the storm began. It was difficult to steer the cart with one hand. There were already five carts parked haphazardly between benches and planters, dusted now with snow.
“Just turn on the news, Laura.”
“You know I don’t like to watch the news before bed. Are you having an anxiety attack?”
“What? No. I’m going to my brother’s place to make sure he’s okay.”
“Why wouldn’t he be?”
“You’re not even listening. You never listen to me.” Jeevan knew this was probably a petty thing to say in the face of a probable flu pandemic, but couldn’t resist. He plowed the cart into the others and dashed back into the store. “I can’t believe you left me at the theatre,” he said. “You just left me at the theatre performing CPR on a dead actor.”
“Jeevan, tell me where you are.”
“I’m in a grocery store.” It was eleven fifty-five. This last cart was all grace items: vegetables, fruit, bags of oranges and lemons, tea, coffee, crackers, salt, preserved cakes. “Look, Laura, I don’t want to argue. This flu’s serious, and it’s fast.”
“What’s fast?”
“This flu, Laura. It’s really fast. Hua told me. It’s spreading so quickly. I think you should get out of the city.” At the last moment, he added a bouquet of daffodils.
And, one last fiction excerpt, a scene from the opening of Jane Hamilton’s A Map of the World, which we also looked at in Week One of the Story Challenge as an example of a contemplative beginning. This novel centers around a narrator who must face the aftermath of a child drowning on her own watch, and as a result of her own brief inattentiveness. When you read this passage in that light, the sense of place feels inextricably linked with the book’s aboutness:
I opened my eyes on a Monday morning in June last summer and I heard, somewhere far off, a siren belting out calamity. It was the last time I would listen so simply to a sound that could mean both disaster and pursuit. Emma and Claire were asleep and safe in their beds, and my own heart seemed to be beating regularly. If the barn was out the window, clean, white, the grass cropped as close as a golf course, the large fan whirring in the doorway, then my husband Howard was all right. I raised up to take a look. It was still standing, just as I suspected it would be.
Finally, as Dorothy Allison says in her iconic essay on Place, first given at the Tin House workshop and later published in The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House:
Place is people.
Place is people with self-consciousness.
Place is people with desire.
My major reason for reading stories is that I get off on knowing other people’s secrets. On every level, I get off—I tremble from the power of the sexual charge of the secret and the electrical excitement of suddenly discovering the connections I never made before. I want to know everything and so I need an actual person walking the landscape, responding to it, telling me, in fact, how he or she wound up there. What was the decision-making process? Who is that person in this place? I need to know the person walking the landscape, seeing the landscape, remembering another landscape, putting that landscape on top of this landscape. Then suddenly I’m not in one place, I’m in two places. And there’s a narrator, and the narrator is making language choices, and that’s a landscape. It’s a landscape on the page.
So, okay, so let’s write some place and give it some teeth (and if you don’t know, here’s what I mean by teeth!). This is a seven-part structured exercise to launch you into what I hope will be an arduous, breathtaking, illuminating and ultimately fun experience of place on the page.
Writing Exercise: The Power of Place
Well, that was a long craft essay! So let’s dive right into the exercise: