On Writing Settings that Crawl Under the Skin

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I once attended a writing seminar that claimed the landscape of your childhood home informs the way you move, think, and talk. A rocky, mountainous place might shorten your sentences into a rhythm that makes room for quick bursts of speed; a hot and humid landscape might lead you to consider your thoughts slowly, without straining yourself.

Embarrassingly, I have forgotten exactly who led this discussion (if you’ve attended something similar, please tell me!), but the idea has never left me—that, in the same way some people wind up looking exactly like their dogs, the place where you live can infect you to a deeper degree than you might have realized.

It’s by turns a comforting notion, and a disturbing one. What might you be carrying with you, subconsciously influencing your choices? And what if your relationship to those childhood landscapes isn’t altogether positive? I think of my grandmother, who, when asked about this concept at a dinner not long after, visibly recoiled from the question. Her early memories of Mississippi river flats and anything that land might have imprinted on her were not welcome at our table. She spent much of her life traveling, finally landing in New York, and only conceded to move as far south as Virginia because my brothers and I were children there.

My own work is deeply influenced by places I’ve lived and the way I felt being there, from the rolling fields and deciduous forests of the Blue Ridge foothills where I grew up and where my first book, What Grows in the Dark, is set, to the secretive wetlands and snow-capped peaks of the Pacific Northwest where I live currently.

In the case of Virginia, I haven’t lived there in fifteen years but I could still tell you exactly what a hay barn smells like on a muggy summer day, or how it feels to walk barefoot on a gravel driveway; I could describe the silvery pain of getting a paint chip under your thumbnail while you sit on the roof of a run-down house while crickets chirp and fireflies dance. Or I could tell you how thick the woods feel at night, how those trees mat together, even in winter when they’re skinned and powerless. And I could certainly talk about how it felt to wonder how people were looking at me in high school, what they thought after I shaved my head that time in the park—not whether they thought I was losing it, but whether I was safe.

For that first book, I drew on all of the above. Any precision of place I achieved came first from what had already worked its way under my skin.

Think now of the snow crunching beneath Jade Daniels’ boots in Proofrock, Idaho, the setting of Stephen Graham Jones’ Indian Lake trilogy, a beautiful, isolated petri dish turned pressure cooker for violence that hides in plain sight—and for bold swings against all flavors of evil. Or the parched, sun-baked expanse of Texas across which Julia Heaberlin’s thrillers unfurl, her characters lonesome and defensive, generally running to nowhere and eventually realizing just that.

Here, “setting as character” takes on additional meaning: not only are these places specific and unique, able to transmit emotions and ideas to the reader as clearly as the best dialogue exchange, but they also infiltrate the people we’re reading about. When bad things happen and those people react with panic or confusion or in their own burst of violence, it’s not only the character work that makes us believe them, it’s the sense of place that sneaks past our defenses and tells us, “You can imagine what it’s like to be there, so come on. What would you do?”

That kind of empathy is the bread and butter of horror authors. You can’t scare someone until you’ve made them think, “What if it was me?” This is not to argue that this is a new and exciting idea, or that only dark fiction authors benefit from immersive settings, but I am a horror author writing this, so here we are.

Writing a setting that crawls from under your skin to under the reader’s requires the same dedication to specificity and nuance as good character work. It’s not just about visual description, but the smells, the way the air feels against skin—and of course, it’s about what fills that space that isn’t so tactile.

What are the class dynamics that inform which part of town your basement monster lurks beneath? Who paid for the fancy alpine lodge someone’s about to get murdered in, and who was forced out to make room for it? What kind of laws were recently passed to protect (or remove protections from) whom? You don’t need to be from somewhere to consider these aspects, and if you’ve never visited your setting, I definitely recommend going hard on the research: find videos, read blogs, talk to people.

Once you’ve answered those questions, imagine a few individuals: not your main characters just yet, but the tertiary people who make up their backdrop. Their grandfather who still lives in the same house he was born in; their high school classmate who’s famous in small circles for bucking the social norms. What about the barista they briefly encounter, or the guy who never pays his bar tab? How does living in this exact place change and define them? What fears does it engender in them, and what do they love about it?

Of course not all of this will make it onto the page—but it’s the smallest, most precise details that will shift your setting from inert to alive. As a reader, I find atmosphere far more effective if I can imagine a place’s beauty along with its terrifying potential; this goes for secondary worlds and science fiction settings that are inherently unfamiliar as well. As a writer, I love to use that juxtaposition to explore the uncanny: make the reader feel like they know a place, and twist it just enough to steal their balance.

Crucial to that twist are, finally, the main characters of your story. Just like those tertiary people who help make up the fabric of your setting, your main characters were either shaped early-on by this place, came to it later in life and brought their own experiences to it which were then infiltrated and morphed, or are experiencing it for the first time and are ready to be a window for the reader—both into first impressions, and into how staying in any given space for too long opens you up to its influence.

These three broad buckets leave you with plenty of room to play around and bring your characters’ personalities and traumas into the mix, and allow place to inform how their mental state evolves over the course of the book. This can lead to a deeper, more immersive experience for the reader, which in turn gives you as the author an easier in when it comes to scaring the pants off them. After all, people come and go, but places last. So do whatever horrors they house—which, if you’ve done your job as an author, now live inside your reader as well.

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