The Importance of Place

[Walter Cummins]

Much writing advice often ignores place, but I agree with Eudora Welty, who stresses that place is as central to fiction as character and plot. She wrote the most important essay on the subject, “Place in Fiction,” in 1955, and it is still crucial. For her, place is a "named, identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced …”

In our lives where we are when something happens involves a myriad of associations. So it should be in our fictions. The fundamental difference is that in life we have years to gather those associations. When writing a story, we have only a few pages to suggest the relationships of a place to people and their actions.

While references to the place setting can occur throughout a story, I’m going to focus on specific paragraphs that establish place in selected stories and consider their method of doing so. Note that in each one the place isn’t merely described. The paragraph reveals an attitude toward it and something about its role in the action of the story.

Alice Munro, “Runaway”

 Up until three years ago, Carla had never really looked at mobile homes. She hadn’t called them that, either. Like her parents, she would have thought the term “mobile home” pretentious. Some people lived in trailers, and that was all there was to it. One trailer was no different from another. When she moved in here, when she chose this life with Clark, she began to see things in a new way. After that, it was only the mobile homes that she really looked at, to see how people had fixed them up—the kind of curtains they had hung, the way they had painted the trim, the ambitious decks or patios or extra rooms they had built on. She could hardly wait to get to such improvements herself.

In this case, the mobile homes—trailers—are presented as more of a concept, objects named rather than described. What we learn about Carla is that in choosing to be with Clark she has experienced a radical life change. Yet her eagerness for improvements indicates how much she wants to recapture aspects of her old life. The issue of the story revolves around whether she will.

Tessa Hadley, “Because the Night” 

Kristen stepped backward out of the light, into the shadow of the oil tank: no one saw her vanish. From her new perspective, the purple clematis flowers growing thick on the trellis loomed suddenly momentous against the party glow; the grown-up talk dropped into blurred, lively noise, as if she had crossed a frontier. On her side of it was the night quiet, a bird blundering in the bushes, a dank breath of earth, a rattle when her skirt caught on the shiny laurel leaves. She hadn’t brought out her torch; when she turned to follow the path back past the bike shed into the wood, the blackness at first was like a wall preventing her. After a few moments’ staring, it melted into grey, seeped into by the light of the party behind. Imagining being blind, with her eyes strained open and her hands feeling out all round her, lifting her knees high in case she stumbled, she made her way cautiously past the shed and then on into the denser dark of the wood. Tom would have remembered the torch.

Unlike the Munro paragraph, the Hadley is visualized quite closely as an actual experience in a very specific setting of objects, shadings or color, and movements of a person in that setting. But like Munro’s Carla, though the circumstance remains to be explained, Kristen is also changing her life, if only temporarily (we don’t know), by choosing to abandon the glow of the party and seek the nighttime darkness of the wood. The fact that Tom would have approached the situation very differently suggests that Kristen is getting away from him too. What is she looking for? What will she find?

In the following examples the characters are also experiencing new realities but rather through circumstances rather than a form of choice.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, “Audition”

He was telling me where to turn. Turn here. Turn there. Left. Right. Right. I was entering territory with which I was unfamiliar, because I’d grown up cushy. We drove beneath an overpass that led into a down-and-out neighborhood of weather-beaten, two-story, redbrick homes, a hundred of them in a row, every one identical, just as the houses in my father’s subdivision were identical, but at the other end of the economic spectrum. This was a neighborhood of odd jobs and no help, where people shopped for dinner at the convenience store.  

Here is another example of a character experiencing a new reality through a new place. In contrast to Carla and Kristen, this unnamed narrator has not made a choice in advance but rather is under someone else’s guidance. In this unfamiliar neighborhood the homes and lives are still identical but in a very different manner from the narrator’s home. All three characters are principals in stories that uproot them from the familiar and thrust them into new situations that turn out to be a form of test.

Ursula K, LeGuin, “Pity and Shame”

“His first afternoon in Goldorado, he was not feeling encouraged about his stay there. Ross, the company’s local boss, was a buttoned-up, all-business man. The kid they’d found for him to rent rooms from was unfriendly. The town had popped up on the strength of a couple of shallow-lode mines and was giving out along with them; the four mines he had been sent to inspect were almost certainly played out or barren holes in the ground. A lot of downtown windows were boarded up, bleak even in the blaze of midsummer. A hound dog lay dead asleep in the middle of Main Street. It looked like a few weeks could be a long time there.”

The man, it is clear, is in this town for work and is in the process of discovering what it is like, an impression being developed through an accumulation of reinforcing details—unapproachable people, barren mines, and a failing downtown, symbolized most concretely by the dead asleep dog. Unlike the previous paragraphs, this one provides little about the character who has been sent here, other than his apprehension. The clue of the final sentence suggests that he is about to face something unexpected in this dead, and perhaps deadly, place.

Weike Wang, “Omakase”

That was something the woman had to get used to about New York. In Boston, the subway didn’t get you anywhere, but the stations were generally clean and quiet and no one bothered you on the actual train. Also, there were rarely delays due to people jumping in front of trains. Probably because the trains came so infrequently that there were quicker ways to die. In New York, the subway generally got you where you needed to go, but you had to endure a lot. For example, by the end of her first month the woman had already seen someone pee in the corner of a car. She had been solicited for money numerous times. And, if she didn’t have money, the same person would ask her for food or a pencil or a tissue to wipe his nose. On a trip into Brooklyn on the L, she had almost been kicked in the face by a pole-dancing kid. She’d refused to give that kid any money.

 Here too place is established by contrast, although the LeGuin just implies that the man is used to something very different. Wang’s women, also in a new place, is able to know it by enumerating all that is the opposite of the old place, specifically the nature of the two different subway systems. Her memory of the one in Boston is of a directionless calm; New York is purposeful but disturbing and threatening. Although the Wang paragraph does not specify details of the woman’s personal situation, it suggests dislocation and fearfulness, and perhaps an impending confrontation.

Sigrid Nunez, “The Plan” 

Where they lived people didn’t walk. He was sure he’d never seen anyone in his neighborhood out walking unless it was with a dog. Again, a lone man would have stuck out. He would have felt too conspicuous strolling through the streets. The town had a park but it was small, and since lately it had become the turf of drug addicts it was often cruised by the cops. In the city, on the other hand, you could walk forever, invisible, unhassled. It was a mystery to him how all the bustle only made it easier for him to think.

Although the locations of these streets are in an unidentified own and city, the walking situation is similar to the contrast of the Boston and New York subways. But unlike the Wang where the city is threatening, in the Nunez the man feels safe and free in the city, able to think as he walks. It’s the empty neighborhoods of the town that give him unease. The Nunez paragraph suggests that he will encounter a test, perhaps a dangerous one, here.

Although I chose these examples of establishing place at random, I was surprised when I read them closely to discover that each uses a contrasting place—indicated or implied—to help specify the nature of the new place a character is in, with a contrast that is essential to the plot of the story. 

I’m reminded of John Gardner’s simplification of all story plots , that they boil down to two variations: 1. A hero goes on a journey, 2. A stranger comes to town. Some have argued that they are opposite sides of the same coin, depending on the perspective. The heroes of all these place paragraphs are going on some variation of a journey, and they are strangers once they get there. That provides the basic tension of their stories.