Imagine Being There

 

Place in a story is vital to ground where and why characters react to or create situations which drive the plot of a story. Within identified locations, characters become loved or despised for the actions and reactions they indulge in.

People connect to a place for an array of reasons because it holds the memory of:

• a brilliant childhood/not so brilliant childhood
• first love/first break-up
• marriage/honeymoon/divorce
• travelling to landscapes or geographic locations where culture, cuisine, architecture, history or local people either inspire or horrify
• favourite authors/celebrities who lived in those settings
• the stories heard or read about  places making them part of one’s experience
• loss and grief
• spirituality
• the devastation of war and politics
• personal heritage associated with a place
• the comfort of home, a bedroom, a garden, study

The reasons are endless making it necessary when writing a story to anchor it in a specific place or a few places to create a sense of physical reality for the reader. Place, in fiction, does not have to be grounded in a real geographic location, the sights, sounds and smells –  odours or aromas of a place will bring it to life for the reader based on how effective the sensory imagery is in connecting the reader to the context of the action.

 

 

The lines below portray an inescapable landscape that confines and stifles. The narration indicates familiarity with a place which makes it experiential for the reader through the author’s specific framing of location. Here, the place is named creating the reality the reader craves, when a place remains unnamed, evocative sensory imagery creates a link in the reader’s imagination.

The heat in the street was terrible, and dust was all about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in summer –Author, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.

 

 In the creation of a fictional place the writer is the creative camera lens, beginning with a wide view, then zooming into backstreets before giving close up consideration to:

• Demography – who will be created in this terrain- will it be a multicultural environment? What morals and values might come to light,  is there an alternate way of thinking endorsed by a group?
• What is the socio-economic dynamic of this place?
• What’s the weather like?
• What sounds are heard in this place?
• Is this a city or rural setting- what other aspects will you include to define this landscape?
• Is it a busy or laid back place?
• Is this a contemporary world or a lost and forgotten world?

Let the reader reach his or her own conclusion but be sure to add drama to most scenes and emotions that characters go through- this will allow the reader to speculate why particular locations elicit human reactions the way they do.

I leave you with these lines that reveal the human condition through the words of Alan Paton in his  novel, Cry the Beloved Country:

The great red hills stand desolate, and the earth has torn away like flesh. The lightning flashes over them, the clouds pour down upon them, the dead streams come to life, full of the red blood of the earth. Down in the valleys, women scratch the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man. They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children. The men are away, the young men and the girls are away. The soil cannot keep them anymore.