The Geography of One Moment
When a moment in time becomes so immersive it is locatable, as if you could walk into it
Ah, today is the last day of what has been an extraordinary six-week place writing intensive. So hold tight; I have a few things to say about the place intensive and our intensives in general before we take on our last place writing adventure (for now, anyway).
During The Power of Place, we’ve devoted to learning how to ground our work in, and infuse it with, a sense of place so vivid, so rich, so real that it becomes (much) more than the sum of its parts.
We’ve looked closely at how place asserts itself in a story, how it acts as a force that shapes plot and directs momentum.
We’ve examined how place conveys emotion—how when we externalize the internal through carefully and precisely chosen concrete specific details of place, we dramatically deepen and amplify the emotional resonance of our stories, without ever resorting to melodrama, treacly overwrought prose, or simple heavy handedness.
We’ve also looked at how details of place can powerfully foreshadow future events, both accurately and through deliberate misdirection. It’s extraordinary, this one. Because how often do you think writers (outside of mystery or sci-fi or some other kind of heavily plot-driven fiction with a strict set of conventions) really, truly take advantage of this astounding tool of place as a tool of foreshadowing? And yet, the depth and resonance that kind of intention can bring to our work!
That really is the point of the Writing in the Dark intensives, too, as long as we’re on the topic of intentionality. What we do in the intensives is look carefully at a certain element of craft or form, look closely at it, take it apart and turn it over and over by close reading excerpts of extraordinary published work, then attempt to—and here’s the important part—execute that craft element in our own work, on purpose.
During the place intensive, so many of you have told me that you’re going back to your works in progress, to your novel manuscripts and essay drafts, and rewriting in order to bring place onto the page as a vital force, a character and plot shaping force, an emotional engine. You’re also telling me how you’re seeing now, as you read published books, stories, essays, where writers are or are not making the most of place. In other words, you’re seeing more clearly, and more acutely, what language is (or is not) doing and why.
That’s how we make art. Art is fundamentally about decisions. And yes, some of those decisions are going to be subconscious. But we advance our art by bringing more and more of the decisions we’re making into our conscious awareness—
Should I convey this characters fear by telling the reader she is afraid, or by focusing her gaze on a precisely chosen set of details in the environment that hold the tone of fear, directly or indirectly?
Should I rewrite the beginning of this story or essay to incorporate foreshadowing, and, if so, should I use revelation, concealment, or a combination of both?
Which exact details of place should I portray in this scene to best intersect place with character, plot, and mood?
Imagine how much curiosity about our own work this demands of us? Art is always a series of choices, and to make a choice, to really make a conscious choice, we benefit from being curious about the consequences of one choice over another. What I like is something
’s college painting teacher once said to them, which is that we should be asking ourself, each time we are at a decisional crossroad in our work (and we’re kind of always at a decisional crossroad, whether we acknowledge it or not), what is more interesting here, this way, or that?Not, what is more beautiful. Not, what is more marketable. Not, what is more in the vein of “good writing.” No, what we want to watch out for is the path toward interest.
And yes, this is equally true in nonfiction versus fiction. Just because something happened a certain way does not mean there is only one way to tell it. There is the more interesting way, and the less interesting way. In nonfiction, the decisional dilemmas are not about the facts of what occurred but about the most interesting way to order, convey, and amplify them.
Throughout our two and a half years together at Writing in the Dark, we’ve brought these decisional dilemmas to light over and over again through our intensives for paid members, intensive after intensive after intensive since April of 2023::
Some of you have, I think, have even worked through all of these! If you haven’t, you can always jump into any of them at any time and work at your own pace. If you’re a social person (or even if you’re not) there’s more energy and accountability involved in doing the intensives in real time with other writers doing the same. But many people work on their own, quietly, on their own schedule—and many people do a combination of both, i.e., sometimes participate in the intensives as I am delivering them, and sometimes work through them on their own.
Next up for us will be a 40 day intensive to take up (and write through) a subversive gratitude practice based on Melodie Beatty’s book, Make Miracles in Forty Days.
Like always, this intensive is for paid subscribers, and we’ll be starting in August. It will be a writing intensive, as all of our intensives are, but it will also be more than writing. Okay, well, writing is always more than writing! Writing with intention leads to living with intention. Writing with clarity leads to living with clarity. Writing with awakeness leads to living with awakeness. And so on and so on and so on.
But this miracle intensive grounded in subversive gratitude is very overtly about building stronger connections—to ourselves, to each other, and to the world. Writing in the Dark is already a strong and vibrant creative community where real-life friendships have formed literally around the globe. The miracle intensive honors that aspect of Writing in the Dark and will actively nurture it because there is nothing we need more right now than more love and more connection.
So I hope you’ll join us in this beautiful, transformative process. You do not need to register or sign up or anything extra—you need only to be a paid member and the intensive posts will come to you daily starting in August (exact date TBD).
You can upgrade here anytime. Our creative community is extraordinary and we’d love to welcome you.
Okay, now for place. We’re going to do something a little different! We’re going to expand our understanding of place from the limited concept of physical places to the limitless idea of place as a container for human experience.
Think about it, how we say, “I just don’t think we’re in the same place on this …” or “I was at a place in my life where …” etc.
There are so many ways to think about place beyond literal physical locations.
Identity
Place can be the geography of the self—how our internal landscapes (memories, traumas, desires) form a kind of terrain. “I carry my homeland in my body,” as Warsan Shire writes. Place becomes inseparable from personhood.
Memory
Some places only exist in the past, or in the mind. A childhood kitchen, a lost city, a former version of a home that no longer exists. Writers often recreate these ghost-places to explore what endures and what slips away.
Emotion
A “place of grief,” “a place of rage,” “a place of longing”—these are emotional coordinates, not physical ones.
Time
A moment in time can be so immersive that it becomes locatable, as if you could walk into it. For example, Kris Harzinski’s “Hand-Drawn Map Association” archives hand-drawn maps people have made of personal places, many of them intimate: first kisses, breakups, childhood homes. The heart becomes spatial here—each experience mapped in its own idiosyncratic way.
Relationship
A relationship can be a place we return to or flee from. Some people are places—familiar, estranged, beloved, dangerous. Sometimes, for example, we might even say our partner is our “home.” And intimacy itself can form a landscape: thresholds crossed, territories mapped, no-man’s-lands avoided.
Absence
What is missing can define a place as much as what is present. The silence after someone leaves. The outline where a building stood. Negative space, hauntings, vacancies.
Perception
Two people can be in the same physical location but experience it entirely differently because is filtered through history, power, emotion, race, gender, neurodivergence, trauma, etc.
Dream or Myth
Some places exist more powerfully in the imagination than in reality—Atlantis, Eden, the house we never bought. Mythic places hold archetypal meaning and psychic resonance.
Working with this more expansive relationship to the concept of place, we’ll try this week to explore place as a single immersive moment in time. We’ll try to map ourselves into that moment, that inner landscape, according to Rebecca Solnit’s wisdom that “A map is a conversation between what is known and what is desired.”
So the premise of this week’s exercise is to wonder, what if memory is a landscape? What if a single moment from your past still exists somewhere, not as time, but as place? This exercise invites you to re-enter a formative moment not through analysis or narrative, but through spatial immersion. You will walk through it as if it is a place that still exists—because in you, it does.
Exercise: “The Geography of One Moment”
Step 1: Choose a Moment
Select a single, specific moment from your life. You know that I almost always