Writing a Sense of Place
- Cully Perlman
- Aug 1
- 4 min read
Setting. It’s where your novel takes place. It’s the country, the city, the town, the neighborhood, the coffee shop, your narrator’s bedroom, the attic. For Faulkner, it was Yoknapatawpha County. Yoknapatawpha in Chikasaw means “split land,” and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County is based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner lived. J.M. Coetzee, who won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Booker Prize twice, and many other awards, was born in Cape Town, Union of South Africa to Afrikaner parents. He sets much of his fiction in South Africa, where he was born (though he moved later to Australia). Milan Kundera, whose novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (one of my favorites), sets his fiction in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) and Paris. If you’ve been to either place, you know the history and beauty of both countries, but also their pasts, which make for great fiction and great settings.
Place is just the where. Or is it? When writers write their stories, their stories must take place “somewhere,” but that somewhere isn’t just a location on a map, at least not to me (or, apparently plenty of other writers). While the definition may be slight when it comes to writing, “setting” and “place” are nuanced in practice, at least in how I perceive them. If you look for a dictionary difference, setting and place can be interchangeable. But they can also be different. Confusing? Yep. And their definitions can drive a writer mad.
According to Writers.com, Setting has five (5) functions:
It locates your scenes
It creates atmosphere
It reveals and develops your characters
It creates symbolism
It develops theme
According to Fija Callahan, writing for Scribophile, Place in fiction “is what makes a reader believe your story.”
Your story or scene, according to Ms. Callahan:
needs to feel like it could not have happened anywhere else.” Her take on place is more in line with what I view as “place,” i.e., the location of the story without necessarily taking into account everything that “setting” includes. Per Wikipedia, setting “may refer to the social milieu in which the events of a novel occur. The elements of the story setting include the passage of time, which may be static in some stories or dynamic in others with, for example, changing seasons.
A setting can take three basic forms. One is the natural world, or in an outside place. In this setting, the natural landscapes of the world play an important part in a narrative, along with living creatures and different times of weather conditions and seasons. The second form exists as the cultural and historical background in which the narrative resides. Past events that have impacted the cultural background of characters or locations are significant in this way. The third form of a setting is a public or private place that has been created/maintained and/or resided in by people. Examples of this include a house, a park, a street, a school, etc.” (bold text is my doing).
Ms. Callahan provides examples of the strong sense of place in certain novels, such as are exhibited in Neil Gaiman’s the Graveyard Book, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Ira Levin’s the Stepford Wives. Callahan:
When writing fiction—or when crafting any form of prose narrative—place tends to get treated as a vehicle for an idea, rather than an essential part of the story. But as we’ve seen, place can have a huge impact on the lives of your protagonists and make them that much more real in the reader’s imagination.
This for me is the subtle difference where writers seem to disagree or differentiate place versus setting. Where would Dennis Lehane’s the Given Day be without the political and social unrest of the nation after WWII? Yes, it’s set in Boston, but the political and social unrest in Boston at the time drives the novel and its characters. This is setting; Boston is place. John Updike’s Rabbit Run takes place in the fictional town of Brewer, Pennsylvania, and its suburb, Mount Judge. The city is based on Reading, Pennsylvania, where Updike grew up. But the setting includes the fact that Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s struggles with his feelings of being trapped in a life of middle-class American life during a time of an America becoming something other than what it had become and what people were used to.
When writing a sense of place, do your research. If you can, visit your place and focus on the colors and architecture, the flowers in bloom in spring, the way people dress, the rivers, the roads, and so on. If you’ve never been to southwestern Nebraska, go. Or at least google what it smells like there, what the landscape looks and feels like, what restaurants and parks are located outside of Gering or Scott’s Bluff.
When writing your setting, learn about and research the culture intimately. Who lives there? What are their struggles and the local issues? Any political issues affecting the local economy? Do the residents of these cities use particular jargon? Anyone’s shadow historically overpower the communities and neighborhoods in town? Does race or ethnicity or class impact how peoples who live there interact with each other? You must know these things in order to make your characters and the setting realistic, because if you don’t, the people who know these places will be turned off and dismiss your story as being superficial, and thus not credible.
Place and setting are closely related, but they are not the same thing. Know the difference. Write your fiction understanding the difference, and your fiction will be that much more credible, detailed, and hopefully enjoyable. There’s a balance between creating a sense of place and then overdoing it. Sometimes a little goes a long way. Hemingway’s descriptions of place are much less robust than, say, those in Richard Powers’ Overstory. But I bet you have a pretty good idea where you are in a “Well-Lighted Place” and what it looks like where Powers’ air force loadmaster falls into a banyan during the Vietnam War.
Cully Perlman is author of a novel, The Losses. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com
That is a great distinction and one I never considered. It is very hard to write about a place you have not been to, breathed in. Place, even fictional ones, is a character. I think the one exception in my canon was a Sherlock Holmes story I wrote for an anthology because he is so much a part of our common frame of reference (who cannot picture his apartment?) that it was relatively easy to pull off. But again, with so many movies and shows set there, we all have our own vision of Victorian London, both romantic and gritty.