Home Place

Here and there, then and now. Revealing story through place.

In some books, say Washington Square or The House on Mango Street, houses feel like characters. In other stories, seminal places include saloons (Davy Byrne's in Joyce’s Dublin, or The Sailor's Grave in Pynchon’s Norfolk, VA), offices (“Bartelby”) or ships (the Pequod). Places are central because of the way they inform us about the characters who inhabit them, but they can occasionally feel static.  

PROMPT

A variation on the usual setting prompt is to compare two places inhabited by a character at two different times in their life. Juxtapose them against each other or space them out, as the scale and the story demand, but think about two rooms or places your character spent time in, at two different periods in their life. Two bedrooms, two kitchens, two manor houses, two hallways? How do they differ? How are they the same?

A stunning example of this appears in the 2009 edition of Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, which begins with an introduction that describes the apartment she lived in when she wrote the book, and also her journey to that place. Then the novel-in-stories begins, and we are treated to a survey of the many homes our protagonist lived in, up to and including the eponymous House on Mango Street. By the time we finish the three short pages of the first story, we are thoroughly in the world of the novel — and the author herself — thanks to this intense scene setting work.