Place

The Walk Through

I took a little summer vacation this year, visiting several terrains — a beach, a lake, the mountains — and it was immensely restorative. The different places had their own soundscapes: water lapping, waves crashing, wind gusting, each of which in its endless repetition reminded me of one of the most tranquil visions I’ve enjoyed, Tibetan prayer flags flapping in the wind at 16,000 feet in the Himalayas. Maybe the thing that was the best about those flags was that they meant we had reached the highest point of the mountain pass we’d set out to cross. We had made it! Alive. Now we could rest, and then descend. That was years ago, and despite some narrow precipices, nothing else too dramatic happened that day. That’s probably why it’s a memory I am happy to relive but haven’t really written about.

While I was away, a great piece of mail arrived at my home in Brooklyn: the Summer issue of Epiphany magazine, titled “Stay,” with my story “How Not to Run Away from Monsters” right there at the front and sharing the privilege with great writers including Jai Chakrabarti. My story in the Stay issue is deeply imbued in place, specifically the Brooklyn neighborhood where I grew up and still live, where a great deal of life has happened to and before me. I wanted to remain rooted there, in that piece, but sought narrative energy by traveling around in the temporal space of the many decades I’ve lived there.

So, I’ve been thinking about how writing about place can work. In my mind, the greatest pitfall one can encounter here is writing scenes that feel static. A flapping prayer flag is not a story. A venue is not a party. A setting is not a narrative. Place should always be about story or character as well. I love writing about place but I do my best to to make my settings dynamic. So here’s a prompt that may help you turn a setting into an engaging narrative.

I'm just going to randomly grab a few memorable literary settings from my mental library — Yoknapatawpha County, Manhattan, 124 Bluestone Road. These places, as rendered by William Faulkner, Elizabeth Alexander, and Toni Morrison, are not just surfaces, smells, or ways to evoke a mood. They are settings in which stories and lives unfolded. We may see them in our mind's eyes, but we remember them because of what happened there, not because of the still shot. Beloved opens with the house itself (as haunted by the baby ghost) driving people away from it with burnt chickpeas, shattered mirrors and ghostly handprints. We know from the outset that those who remain are survivors — though not yet of what.

PROMPT: To create a muscular setting, have your character do a mental or actual walk-through of a space that has history for them, and make sure every single element that is named or described is included for a reason, not just for set dressing. This is a powerful tool for opening a story or chapter because it forces the inclusion of place, character and setting, all entwined. Rather than focussing on the visual, focus on history, recalling past incidents and telling in micro flashbacks stories that reveal new facets of your main story. Setting without story is an empty room. Fill yours with, life, even death -- but anyhow actions rather than objects.

Further Reading: "Manhattan Elegy" by Elizabeth Alexander

P. 1 of Beloved by Toni Morrison

How Not to Run Away from Monsters by Elizabeth Gaffney