The Power of Place Writing Intensive Starts Now! Write With Us!

The Power of Place | Week One | It's A Town Where ....

It’s here! Our Power of Place writing intensive is finally here—I’m so excited!! And I know lots of you are excited, too!

If you’re not a paid member and want to participate as we take up the challenge of making the places in our writing more vivid and real and urgent, you can upgrade your membership anytime here. We would love to write and learn with you!

In this intensive, we’re going to electrify our work with the texture and shape of place, with the force of place, because in our stories (and our lives), places are not settings; they are pressure systems. They shape how people speak, what they dare confess, what they keep hidden.

To write with a true sense of place is to understand that geography is not neutral. It exerts force on the story. A drought changes the nature of forgiveness. A blizzard alters the speed of grief.

Characters are porous. They absorb what surrounds them. A boy raised in a mining town carries silence differently than one raised among redwoods. A woman in the desert thinks differently about water and time than a woman living on coastal cliffs. When you write vividly about place, you are writing about what people are afraid of, what they hope for, what they believe is possible.

And the work of writing place is not just about sensory detail. It’s about consequence. What does this place do to the people in it? What wounds has it witnessed? What secrets does it keep in the basement of its weather?

When writers neglect place, they unmoor their characters from gravity. But when they root their stories in a place that breathes and bleeds and ages, a place with its own ties to history, they gain access to the kind of storytelling that feels lived.

We write from somewhere. And to write well, we must learn how to bring that somewhere fully into language—not just so the reader can see it, but so they can feel how it shapes everything that unfolds.

And that’s what we’ll all be aiming for these next six weeks.

Let’s start with this idea of place being more than sensory detail—because it is, and yet, it starts with an ability to see and convey concrete specific detail with precision and fidelity, which can be more challenging than it seems because, as with everything else in writing, it begins with an ability and willingness to pay very close attention to what is right in front of us (literally or in our mind’s eye), and render it as it is, not as we interpret it to be (there is room for interpretation, but the literal observation must come first).

Just yesterday, a writer asked a question about this relationship between attention and concrete specific detail. She said:

I'm new to this community and have questions about the paying attention exercises. I've read the first 5 exercises in the curriculum and have endeavoured to understand them and have been practicing almost daily. I think I understand the difference between the external and internal, but I'd like to confirm these two things:

1. this morning I wrote: the shrill voice of my five year old neighbour

I find his voice shrill, just like the voices of most young children, so does this mean my observation is partly internal experience? Because I've assigned this quality to it instead of just writing "the voice of my fiver year old neighbour"?

2. the other day I wrote: fluff from cottonwood trees floating in the wind like a ghost

When I saw the fluff floating that's what it reminded me of, a tiny ghost. Does this mean I added a simile to my observation and should have stopped at "fluff from cottonwood trees floating in the wind"?

I wrote back to this writer to say that these are amazing questions drawn from excellent instincts. Because, again, while there’s nothing wrong (and a lot right) with weaving subjective observations and metaphorical imagery into our work, we cannot in general do so in the most powerful, effective, compelling, and true ways until we can first look directly at what I call “the thing itself,” and see it only for what it is and nothing more.

Then, once we can look at “the thing itself” in that clear-eyed way, we practice writing it that way almost clinical way, without adornment or interpretation. At first, this can feel so restrictive it’s almost boring. But as we practice this discipline, we that the constraint of staying with what is exactly as it is, and not going internal or metaphorical, starts to have a very powerful impact, wherein the things you are observing show you their own deeper meaning. They express their own deeper meaning just through being what they are—like a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

And when our images express their own deeper, inherent meaning without us imposing meaning on them, that inherent meaning is often more arresting, more compelling, more strange, and more lasting than any metaphor or subjective descriptor you might initially apply.

This is because the best, most gripping metaphors are often the ones unspoken, the ones where the literal/exterior image speaks so clearly for itself in the context in which we place it (ie, in the larger narrative) that it requires no subjective descriptor or applied metaphorical language.

These literal/external images—these shimmers and shards, as we call them here—are intriguing on their own, often very “sticky” and interesting, and they teach us to pay attention without imposing ourselves, which is a writing superpower in itself. But when we place these images in our writing at large, they can take on incredible depth of meaning due to the story that surrounds them.

So, to the writer’s specific examples, I said that if you wanted to be strict, you might say, "high-pitched” or similar instead of shrill, because “high-pitched” is