What's in a Place?

As my husband drove our gold Ford F150 Lariat out of Lexington, Kentucky turning off Man O' War Boulevard on to Winchester Road, the landscape changed from stores and businesses to horse farms with black fences and pristine green pastures fronting beautiful homes - the kind of homes reminiscent of the glory days of Kentucky horse farms, large and stately. Horses grazed lazily in the fields swatting flies from their backs with their tails. Humidity laced the air causing our air condition to work harder. I opened my window just a little expecting the scent of overheated horse and manure to waft toward my nostrils. For just a moment, my mind tricked me into believing those odors were there. Those were the smells I remembered from this area. Instead the smell of exhaust mingled with hay and trees. I could no longer taste the freshness of newly cut clover on the air. Traffic whooshed by us interrupting the stillness of the farm community reminding me that progress exists everywhere. In that moment, a deep empathy blindsided me. It would break my heart to see those horse farms disappear to housing developments and businesses.

I wrote an earlier version of this article, as my husband and I drove from Boise, Idaho to Tollesboro, Kentucky to visit my family several years ago. The trip had a second purpose because the book I was writing was set in Lexington, Kentucky,

and I needed to see how the city had changed since I lived there several years earlier. The above scene reminded me how important it is to know a setting intimately when writing about it. Not only was I able to see what was in front of me but feel my emotional connection evoked from the memories I associated with the area.

Determining where to set a book can be a matter of personal preference, imagination, or practicality. Many authors incorporate their hometowns or their travels into their books as settings. Using a place as a setting in a book can be a great way to honor a beloved place, remember a place longed for, or share a place of interest. Places you visit can inform writing and inspire creativity even if that's not the intention when planning a trip. Authors who cultivate a keep awareness of surroundings can use those surroundings in their work. 

Visiting a place is always helpful to write setting well. Take notes, snap photos, pick up local arts and dining newspapers and magazines, eat at restaurants. Notice local cadences, colloquialisms, and mannerisms. Pay attention to how the locals dress, the automobiles people drive, and the rhythm of the area. Setting is more than a description of landscapes, cityscapes, and waterscapes. It is the food the locals eat, the music they enjoy, and their interactions with each other and outsiders. It is the dust on the shelves in the grocery store and the unexpected white table cloths in the hole-in-the-wall restaurant. It is the waitress's red teary eyes as she brings your drink with a smile on her face.

A reader who is intimate with the place where a book is set will expect the basic details to be right. Making up names of restaurants, stores, and other businesses is acceptable especially if something bad is going to happen in the establishment. Don't have existing streets that run parallel to one another intersecting. Don't make a one-street, a two-way street. Don't make an existing small city park the size of New York's Central Park. Don't have a character order pork in a Middle Eastern restaurant. Know your facts before you write. Try to be as real with setting as possible to create authenticity.

Some of this work can now be done using Google maps or through menus provided by online restaurants. Visiting city's websites and reading books can all help with creating a genuine setting, but there is nothing quite like visiting a place to really get the feel of it, to get down to the nitty-gritty of it. To see the areas of a town that are wealthy and those that are poor. To see how these two areas connect or are disconnected.

A well written setting becomes a character in the book. I have long enjoyed books that transport me into the world where the book is set. Think of Los Angeles in Robert Crais's books, Paris in All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, Great Britain in Rosamunde Pilcher's books, the fictional, Opulence, Kentucky in Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson, and so on. I still remember deciding, as a teenager, I not only wanted, but needed to live in Berkeley, California, after reading a Danielle Steele book set there even though I can no longer remember the title of the book. I held on to that goal for years even though I never moved there. I now wonder just how authentic her descriptions of Berkeley were. My one drive through the area made me doubt them, but oh the Berkeley of that book...

Authors who write setting well transport the reader to the place by affecting all the senses. The reader touches, tastes, hears, smells, and sees the place. The reader feels like they know the place intimately as they are reading.

As I wrote this, I kept hearing the song I Am a Town from the album, Come On Come On by Mary Chapin Carpenter play in my head until I had to finally listen to it. I Am a Town is a perfect example of how words can transform a place to a character. The listener is transported and connected to that small, unnamed Southern town just by listening to the words. The listener feels like they know the town even though it's never given a name, and they could surmise it is any number of towns.

I am peaches in September, and corn from a roadside stall
I'm the language of the natives, I'm a cadence and a drawl
I'm the pines behind the graveyard,
And the cool beneath their shade,
Where the boys have left their beer cans
I am the weeds between the graves.

Sometimes when I feel like stymied writing setting, I listen to I Am a Town or I read authors who write setting as if it's a character in the book.

By interspersing aspects of setting throughout the book, the reader feels more immersed in the setting. Setting should always feel alive and part of the story but should never interfere with the the story.

Passionately well-written setting will inspire the reader while transporting them to place they're never been or helping them see a familiar place in a new light.

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