Location, Location, Location

by Alison Janssen

Happy Thursday, everyone!

Obligatory LOST reaction (which I totally neglected to include last week, whoops!). Naturally, spoilers like whoa: You guys. YOU GUYS. This show is incredible and I love it. I'm still mad about Charlie dying way back a couple seasons ago (honestly SWIM OUT THE HATCH, CHARLIE! YOU CAN HOLD YOUR BREATH LIKE A MILLION MINUTES! Your skinny butt could totally have fit through that portal!), and Eko dying (his character was so interesting!), but MAN, this season is awesome. The lighthouse and the cave and the penciled-names and fake Locke and broken (but totally still capable of conning, I'm positive) Sawyer, and people being candidates and theories of reincarnation and the sideways-verse. I think we're supposed to be happy for the characters in the sideways-verse, in that they're clearly different from their Island-verse counterparts, and in many ways react "better" to situations that would have derailed their Island-selves ... but when watching sideways-verse scenes, I find myself getting really sad and missing the characters' flaws. The whole "they're learning from the mistakes they made in their first lives (pre-Oceanic-crash), and if they choose correctly on the Island (a tropical representation of the Bardo states) they can be reborn into their new lives (the sideways-verse)" theory ... I dunno. Is it weird that I want them to stay the same and change both at once? I am so glad this show exists. Thank you, JJ Abrams.

Alright, now, let's talk about writing, huh? Today I want to address setting and place.

How much do you describe place? Do you devote a couple paragraphs to the grid-like streets of your small-town setting, plopping down the drug store on this corner, the one-screen movie theater on that one, delineating the downtown from the residential area by some east-west running train tracks, and splashing in a river that runs around the northern border of the county? Do you have a clear map of your book's setting laid out somewhere -- either made up by you, or using Google Earth -- so that your characters don't accidentally head off in the direction of the setting sun, only to run into a building that was earlier described as being to the east of them?

I'm going to be honest here: I struggle with setting while editing. I am not a person who is good with spacial relationships and directions. Ask my family about the time in high school that I got lost for a couple hours. IN MY OWN HOMETOWN. My iPhone is a total life saver, because when I inevitably do get lost, I at least have a tool with me that can help me figure out where I am, if not grab my hand and drag me back to where I wanted to be. So when I read a passage in a book that focuses heavily on place and setting, I tend to tune out. Or, if it's a book I'm working on, I have to pay special attention and work hard to try to keep a picture of the place in my head. I guess I don't really read for spacial relationships, I read for interpersonal relationships.

(Perhaps paradoxically, I LOVE YA fiction that includes a map at the front. I think because I feel safe knowing that reference is there, and I don't have to try to keep track of where the Meandering Mountains of Magic are in relation to the Squishy Swamps of Squabbling.)

But I know that my way of reading isn't the only way of reading, and I'm sure that some of you out there really like writing that focuses on creating a clear, three-dimensional space. And when I'm talking about place-setting, I'm not talking about the *amount* of place description, not the detail with which a particular scene is encumbered. Both of these set the place, but with varying degree of minutia:

Calvin's house was set on the highest hill in town, and it had more stories than even the local library. The first floor was where he saw his music students, and so was one open space lined with instruments of all kinds. The second floor contained his offices in the west wing, and his kitchen and living rooms in the east. His bedroom was on the third floor, and the fourth and fifth floors remained mysteries to everyone in town. Everyone, that is, except of course Calvin himself ... and one unlikely ally: the mayor's daughter's new puppy, Alistair.

Calvin's house, surrounded by just-budding lilac bushes, was set on the highest hill in town. The hill measured forty-two feet at the peak of summer, when measured to the tippity-tops of the lush grasses that covered it. Calvin's house, sided with a vinyl siding which would, if ever it caught fire, create a noxious gas that could cause great illness to anyone living in a one-mile radius (four families' small dwellings fell into that fateful ring), stood five stories tall. On the first floor, once past the ornate oak double-doored entryway, his music students encountered a vast open space, waiting to be filled with trills and scales and upbeat tempos. Shiny brass trumpets hung from shiny-er brass hooks on the west wall; cellos leaning sturdily in brightly-painted cabinets lined the north. The students only ever visited the first floor, though they knew that high above them, up what they imagined to be dusty, never-used staircases which longed to creak underfoot, the fourth and fifth floors sat, a complete mystery. The student's parents often visited the west wing of the second floor, when delivering checks to Calvin for their childrens' musical rearing, and it was an odd parent indeed who didn't stall at the base of the steps to the third floor, wondering if they couldn't just dash up, through what everyone assumed to be Calvin's bedroom, onto those never-seen fourth and fifth floors, to behold whatever it was that the town was sure Calvin was hiding. Little did they know that a puppy named Alistair had seen what they all so badly longed to see...

Both paragraphs accomplish describing Calvin's house. Sure, one is more flowery than the other, but it still gets across the basics of each floor -- they set up the space of the story that's about to be told. And both are paragraphs that would send my mind reeling, trying to keep track of which room was where and which wing faced which way.

I just have very little capacity for keeping those types of details straight. But what about you? When you write, do you focus on place and setting? When you read, do you savor those directional details? Do you notice if an author accidentally changes which bank of a river a certain tree is on, if the scene is about the main character rushing across the rapids to safety? Have you ever stopped reading a book because of poor scene setting, or poor setting consistency?