Place is character. And all writing is regional. — John Dufresne.
By PJ Parrish
When you read this, I will be somewhere in northern Italy. I might be in the woods following a truffle-sniffing dog. I might be sipping an aperol spritz overlooking Lake Como. I might be on a train heading toward Switzerland.
Ha. Got your attention? Sorry, I am not taking up your valuable time bragging here. Just a note that I am lucky to be on vacation this week, so forgive me if I can’t answer your comments. Wifi is spotty up here. (First world problems)
But this vacation gives me a great opportunity to nag you about paying attention to SETTING in your novels. Whenever I travel outside my small Tallahasse-Michigan world, I become ever more acutely aware of how much setting can add to a story.
And it really hits home because I always insist on taking the right book-companion with me when I travel.
A long time ago, when I was in my twenties, I was invited to a friend’s home on Abaco Island in the Bahamas. Haunting his bookshelves I happened upon James Clavell’s Shogun. Now there was not a lot to do on Abaco back then, so I spent most my days out on the deck reading. What a captivating book! I was transported to medievel Japan, imaging serene Japanese coves where tiny islets floated out in the sea like somnulent turtles. (The photo below is very close to my view back then)
This is a vivid memory: I was on the deck around dawn, deep into the novel. I wasn’t in Abaco. I was in Anjrio. At that moment, a tiny bird swooped down and landed at my side. It hopped up on my finger, looked at me, and was gone. My host later told me it was a rare Bahamian Nuthatch.
During Covid, when we couldn’t venture beyond our driveways, novels satisfied my deep wanderlust, taking me to far away places with strange sounding names. Nina George took me to favorite old haunts and beyond in The Little Paris Bookshop. Georges Simenon took me to a Normandy fishing village in Maigret et la Vielle Dame. Stuart Neville took me to northern Ireland in The Ghosts of Belfast.
I think sense of place is often neglected by writers who are just finding their feet. Maybe they believe that like description, it slogs down the plot. I believe, however, that if you don’t ground your reader in a sense of place, the characters never truly come alive.
I was lucky to share a Miami Book Fair panel once with John Dufresne. He spoke passionately about how important setting is. From his non-fiction book The Lie That Tells The Truth:
Place connects characters to a collective and personal past, and so place is the emotional center of story. And by place, I don’t simply mean location. A location is a dot on the map, a set of coordinates. Place is location with narrative, with memory and imagination, with history. We transform a location into a place by telling its stories.
No place, no plot, nowhere man.
For our stand-alone A Killing Song, Paris was the macro-location. The mini-location was the creepy network of catacombs beneath the city. We also took our readers to the Arab enclave called La Goutte d’Or, the strange park Buttes-Chamont, a dive bar tucked behind the Pantheon called El Melocoton.
We didn’t take our readers to the Eiffel Tower, the Tuileries gardens, or Cafe Deux Magots. Why? Here is the best piece of advice I can give you regarding creating a sense of place: Never settle for the obvious. Steer clear of all clichés. The more well-known and iconic your setting is, the harder you have to work to find within it the telling details that make it come alive in your reader’s imagination. Make your setting FRESH.
Writing about New York City? Take me places I haven’t seen in TV. Writing about Hong Kong? Give me the smells and sounds that movies cannot. Miami? Stay away from South Beach and Little Havana. San Francisco? No Wharf, Alcatraz, cable cars and go light on the fog. Stay away from tired place memes that are over-used so much they lose all emotional impact.
Write what you know. This does not mean you have to visit all your locales. It helps. Boy, does it help. I’ve got a very good working knowledge of Paris but I had never been to La Goutte D’Or. I traveled every inch of its streets via Google Street View. But you can create a great location if you do your research on the people, language and culture. Remember: What may be colorful and exotic to you as a writer is just normal life to the people who live there.
Compare and contrast. If your character is a stranger in strange land, use his experiences and memories of his normal world and contrast it with what he is observing. I did this often in The Killing Song with protag Matt, a Floridian who had never been abroad. I tried to use his naivete, frustration, and fears to invoke the same feelings for readers.
What is the scene about? You need to pin this down before you begin piling in details of location. Don’t just say to yourself: I’m going to set a scene at Muir Woods because I was there once and the old trees were cool. Figure out what needs to happen to your character FIRST and then make the setting enhance the plot and the mood. Watch the great scene in Vertigo where Kim Novak wanders among the ancient Muir Woods trees, saying she’s thinking about “All the people who have lived and died while the trees went on living.” The haunting setting reflects her confused mood.
Okay. Questo è abbastanza! That’s all from me today. I am going back to my vacation, my limoncello sprtiz and my book companion: Adriana Trigiani’s The View From Lake Como. It starts out in blue-colar Lake Como, New Jersey and ends up in blue-lagooned Lake Como Italy. I’ll let you know how it ends.
Asterisk: My headline today is from John Dufresne’s book. It was too good not to steal.
While writing a book is largely a solo effort, movie making is a collaboration among multiple contributors with different skill sets.
During screenwriting class sessions, Holly emphasized the importance of stakes. Put the hero in a moral dilemma to reveal their character. Force them to make difficult choices. What are the consequences of their actions?
