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"A Sense of Place"
Oct. 30th, 2008 01:43 pmOver on POD People, I reviewed R. W. Hogan's novel The Serial Box. Don't get me wrong - The Serial Box has its moments, but it lacks something I referred to in the review as a "sense of place."
When, in writing my novels, I find a need for a specific city as a setting, the city is Chicago. There's a simple reason for this - I'm lazy, and it's easy for me to create this "sense of place" using an area I'm familiar with. Of course, I'm lucky in that, unlike say, Ottumwa, Iowa, Chicago is big enough as to plausibly support say, an interplanetary freight company.
So, what is a "sense of place?" I define it as the illusion that the location being described is real and specific, not just a generic Anywhereville. Consider two examples:
1) "I took the expressway downtown, parked in my usual spot, and had a sandwich for lunch."
2) "I took the Stevenson into the Loop, parked at the Union Station Self-Park on Canal, and picked up an italian beef for lunch."
They both mean the same thing, and both could advance the plot of a story equally well. But sentence #1 could be said in any town, anywhere. Sentence #2 only makes sense in Chicago. I would argue that if you're going to use a real place in a story, if you can't write the local equivalent of #2, you have a problem. Strike that - even your fictional places need to be developed sufficiently such that you can write at sentence #2 level.
One solution to the problem is what I typically do - set stories in places you know. A second solution, which might work for lightly-visited areas, is to get what you can from Google and try to bluff. But if your story is set in Chicago or Cleveland, at the very least you'll have to get a tourist guide book, or contact the local Visitor's Bureau / Chamber of Commerce and get some local information.
"But I don't want to do any of that!" I hear you say. Alas, one of the quickest ways to throw people out of the story is to make a mistake that a person familiar with the area would catch. Do that often enough and they'll quit reading.
A slightly slower way to kick people out of your stories is to set them in a specific place (say, Paris, France) and then never show the reader any of the place. I occasionally review erotica for TCM Reviews, and that's a pretty standard problem in that genre. (I tend to grade erotica on a bit of a curve, so it's usually not mentioned in reviews. Folks are reading erotica for, well, other reasons.)
Don' get me wrong here - some of this is "do as I say, not as I do." Many writers have this information in their mind, but it never makes it to the page.
Enough with my deep thought of the day. I'm taking a vacation to Washington, DC- it should be safe - the politicians are out of town trying to get elected! The primary reason for my visit is to see the Air and Space Museum. The laptop is going with, but posting may be light, primarily because I hope to get some writing done.
When, in writing my novels, I find a need for a specific city as a setting, the city is Chicago. There's a simple reason for this - I'm lazy, and it's easy for me to create this "sense of place" using an area I'm familiar with. Of course, I'm lucky in that, unlike say, Ottumwa, Iowa, Chicago is big enough as to plausibly support say, an interplanetary freight company.
So, what is a "sense of place?" I define it as the illusion that the location being described is real and specific, not just a generic Anywhereville. Consider two examples:
1) "I took the expressway downtown, parked in my usual spot, and had a sandwich for lunch."
2) "I took the Stevenson into the Loop, parked at the Union Station Self-Park on Canal, and picked up an italian beef for lunch."
They both mean the same thing, and both could advance the plot of a story equally well. But sentence #1 could be said in any town, anywhere. Sentence #2 only makes sense in Chicago. I would argue that if you're going to use a real place in a story, if you can't write the local equivalent of #2, you have a problem. Strike that - even your fictional places need to be developed sufficiently such that you can write at sentence #2 level.
One solution to the problem is what I typically do - set stories in places you know. A second solution, which might work for lightly-visited areas, is to get what you can from Google and try to bluff. But if your story is set in Chicago or Cleveland, at the very least you'll have to get a tourist guide book, or contact the local Visitor's Bureau / Chamber of Commerce and get some local information.
"But I don't want to do any of that!" I hear you say. Alas, one of the quickest ways to throw people out of the story is to make a mistake that a person familiar with the area would catch. Do that often enough and they'll quit reading.
A slightly slower way to kick people out of your stories is to set them in a specific place (say, Paris, France) and then never show the reader any of the place. I occasionally review erotica for TCM Reviews, and that's a pretty standard problem in that genre. (I tend to grade erotica on a bit of a curve, so it's usually not mentioned in reviews. Folks are reading erotica for, well, other reasons.)
Don' get me wrong here - some of this is "do as I say, not as I do." Many writers have this information in their mind, but it never makes it to the page.
Enough with my deep thought of the day. I'm taking a vacation to Washington, DC- it should be safe - the politicians are out of town trying to get elected! The primary reason for my visit is to see the Air and Space Museum. The laptop is going with, but posting may be light, primarily because I hope to get some writing done.
