Setting Versus Sense of Place

By Lisa Alber

The other day I posed a question on Facebook:

Hive mind question--I'm curious: What do you mean when you use the terms "setting" versus "landscape" versus "sense of place"? To what extent are they interchangeable?

I had been invited to be the author of the evening for a monthly series called "Wordscrafters and Wine on Wednesdays." As the guest, I was expected to talk in a teacherly fashion, which is to say impart craft wisdom, tips, tricks, how-tos to other writers.

I said "yes" to the event because a friend asked, because I support the nonprofit that hosts the event, and because I try to say "yes" to things. But ... I'm not a teacher, never have been, and I don't have natural teacher skillz -- and besides, what craft knowledge did I think I could impart anyhow? I'm the perpetual student of writing craft.

I decided to talk about an aspect of writing that I love, which is an aspect of the craft that also confounded me at the beginning of my writing journey: "sense of place."

What is that reeeealllly? Isn't it the same thing as saying "setting"? (And then there's the term "landscape" -- but I set that topic aside for my talk.)

As I learned when I posed the question on Facebook, people think of "setting" versus "sense of place" (versus "landscape") in slightly different ways, much of this being a question of semantics. Perhaps we writers think about these terms in ways that help us write the best stories we can. For me, this means that "setting" is not synonymous with "sense of place."

When I was starting out, I didn't understand what the fuss was about when it came to "sense of place." I was writing a novel set in western Ireland circa 2008, and -- duh -- the way to render this setting for readers is through specific detail that uses all five senses.

Ta-da -- "sense of place."

Yeah -- NOT. I was missing something in my understanding of the craft of sense of place, but, of course, being a beginner, I didn't know what I didn't know. This is where workshopping and feedback come in handy, where the revision process enhances our understanding of craft.

What I didn't realize was that beautiful, specific settings don't become "sense of place" until you infuse them with character. Without using your POV character as the filter through which you render the world, all you've got is description that's static. No emotional resonance. No soul. No heart.

You know when you hear readers say that they skip the descriptions? I would bet in most cases, those descriptions are static -- just the author describing the environment around the character rather than describing the environment through the character. I think of this as "pertinence." Is the description pertinent to the character at this moment in the story?

So, to me, "sense of place" is setting + characterization. Sense of place is the whole world the character inhabits, the outer world plus the POV character's interior landscape (there's that "L" word again--but I like using the word in this context), which includes her inner conflicts, agendas, goals, mood, aches, emotions, cultural context (say, for example, being a newcomer to the place versus a native), etcetera.

Imagine a kitchen window above a sink with sunlight coming through it, highlighting dew on a spider web. That's nice, but so what? Easy enough to be specific, but is this description also pertinent?

Adding character, let's pretend you have a grieving mother of a dead child: Perhaps the spider web dangles in tatters as the spider huddles off to the side, not even trying to repair it. The sunlight highlights the fragility of the spider's little world, so easily torn.

Or, a rebellious teenage daughter: Stuck like the frickin' spider, always the same web, and it maybe looks beautiful, all perfect and symmetrical and pleasing to the eye, but that spider is a prisoner--it just keeps doing the same thing day in and day out until it dies.

These are simplistic examples that touch on what I mean when I think of "sense of place." You may ask, What about so-called "literary" novels that are known for their long descriptive passages? I maintain that the ones that really work, the ones where you don't skip reading those passages, are infused with character. The character's voice and attitude coming through in how they perceive their world--and so those scenes still have forward momentum. Whereas, static description halts the story, or at least slows it way down, and sometimes reads like <gasp> authorial intrusion.

And if that pretty picture of the sun-glistening spider web isn't pertinent to the character in that moment? CUT IT. Find some other way to render the character's environment that provides emotional resonance. Sink full of moldy dishes to help show that character is terribly depressed? One chipped antique teacup to show the character's genteel but impoverished circumstances?

Specific and pertinent. (Also, remember the other four senses--not just visual.) I can't tell you how long it took me to get a grip on this. I was great with description/setting, but I sucked at sense of place.

There's so much you can do with sense of place. You can pan out to an omniscient POV to set a mood or tone (gothic novels are great at this) and then when you pan-in to the character POV you echo that mood or tone with the way the character filters her surroundings. Using sense of place is a great tool for foreshadowing, increasing suspense, and showing character in general.

Whew! So, come to find out that I did have a lot to say about this topic, and, in the end, the participants of the event (which was held in a winery--so, yes, wine!) engaged in a rousing discussion that went beyond my take on "sense of place."

Do you skip reading the descriptions? What do you mean when you use the terms "setting" versus "sense of place"?

The Where of a Story

Cricket McRae

One of the definitions of cozy mysteries is that they are set in small towns, or at the very least communities small enough to limit the number of characters. Think retirement homes or resorts.

My books, whether I like it or not, are classified as cozies. I insist on calling them contemporary cozies so I don't feel guilty about the occasional bad language or sexual reference. I also address issues like suicide, depression and alcoholism, which once caused a potential blurber to offer me his (polite) refusal rather than the hoped for pithy cover endorsement.

Now, I'm not interested in addressing the whole question of whether "cozy" is a negative appellation or how to define the subgenre. That's been covered ad infinitum on other blogs, DorothyL, etc., and I don't need to add to that particular fray. In fact, this is the last time you will read the word cozy in this post.

Thank God.

Because today I'm thinking about how setting affects story. And here's why: My books are set in the small town of Cadyville, Washington, which is based on the real town of Snohomish, Washington. But my protagonist is originally from the town I now live in which is located in northern Colorado. Well, a fictionalized version of that town. And in the fourth in the series, Something Borrowed, Something Bleu, I bring Sophie Mae back home for a visit.

I thought it would be easy. After all, I live here. How hard could it be?

Pretty darned hard, it turned out.

In the triumvirate of character, plot and setting, setting generally comes in last despite its importance. You can't have a story without a plot, or without characters to enact that plot. Can you have a [good] story without setting? I won't say absolutely no, but it would be quite rare.

Think about the movie Deliverance. Not for too long because I don't want you to get creeped out and move on to the next blog on your list. Could that movie be as effective if it were set in an English village? Or Miami? What about Lord of the Flies set in a sleepy mid western town?

Maybe. Dropping character and plot into an unlikely setting is a way to shake things up or make a point. Romeo and Juliet has been told in countless ways in different settings. And with different characters, for that matter. Hamlet as well. But The Tempest requires the original setting. Midsummer's Night Dream does, too.

I've always enjoyed weaving setting into a story. Description adds depth and atmosphere and evokes the senses, and I love finding just the right telling details. Perhaps writing a series allowed me to get lazy, though. Not in terms of describing setting, but in terms of having to define that setting over and over. The house, the weather, the town of Cadyville -- all are so thoroughly ingrained in my psyche by now that I no longer create details, I merely share them. Of course there are new and different settings in each book, but the basics have remained the same for the first three.

As a reader, consistency of setting is comforting. I'm instantly grounded. Plop me down in Nero Wolfe's brownstone, and I can find my way around. Take Jessica Fletcher out of Cabot Cove and start jetting her around the world, and the show jumps the shark. (Yes. I watched Murder She Wrote. It was about a mystery writer, and I'm not apologizing.)

So it was tricky, getting that sense of the familiar in an unfamiliar place to work in Something Borrowed, Something Bleu. I think I pulled it off, but time will tell. Or rather, my readers will, when it comes out next spring.

What role does setting play in your writing -- and reading?

Serendipity and Destruction

Cricket McRae

Never start a book with the weather, Elmore Leonard tells us, and it's a dictum I adhere to religiously. I do, however, have two notebooks full of observations about nature that I mine in order to lend credence to the atmosphere of my novels. Things like what the air smells like at night in the middle of October, or after the first rain in August or all the damn time in January. How snow behaves, what's blooming when, how the air feels against your skin, how the birds sound at four a.m. in the spring versus the fall. Mostly tiny things, mere seasoning for the primary flavors of plot and character.

But my nature journals are all from the Pacific Northwest. My current work in progress is set in Colorado, where I live now. In the final climactic scene(s), one of the rocks I'm throwing at my long suffering protagonist is weather. Really bad weather. I've researched the air flow patterns, what happens inside the kinds of clouds common to the area, what circumstances create hail and tornadoes, but I lacked the little, unusual details that make a storm a specific storm.

Sunday morning I'm working in my office. The room darkens. The sky has turned to mercury. Huge, isolated drops of rain splat against the pavement outside. Then the deluge hits, accompanied by an almost conversational rumble of thunder. I abandon my computer, make a cup of tea, and go out to the covered front porch.

The lightening is constant. A yellow streak zigzags overhead, and the thunder roars like a jet engine moving from west to east for a long three seconds. Another flash sounds like a rifle shot, complete with the dopleresque zchwinggggg of an old-timey western. The rain turns to hail.

The ground squirms with quarter-inch ice pellets. I walk out from the overhang to see if they hurt. Not too bad. My neighbor, the mechanic, runs out with an umbrella to cover the rose bush his wife just planted. He sees me and stops. I wave. The hand he lifts in return is tentative. That's okay. They've wondered a little about me ever since I asked him how to cut a brake line without getting caught.

The hail increases to half an inch in diameter. At that size it officially stings like hell. I run inside to grab a notebook. When I return to the front porch a wave of crisp fragrance hits my nose. First I identify mint. The hail has pummeled the patch of spearmint into the ground, muddling it as if for the world's biggest mojito. A wisp of licorice joins in, from the sunset hyssop bushes by the driveway. Then the lavender scent of the smashed bee balm leaves. I run through the house and throw open the door by the garage to look out at the herb garden. Again, the smell of destruction is amazing: oregano, tarragon, sage, rosemary and thyme fill the air.

I inhale deeply until I realize I'm going to hyperventilate if I don't knock it off. It's wonderful. It's terrible. The sound of my pen scribbling is lost in the rattle of the ice pellets that continue to fall.

There will be a lot of work, cleaning up and replanting. The huge pink peonies are lost, their dowdy, blowzy blooms lying like dead fish in the bark mulch. And I won't have to worry about eating salad for a few days; those delicate leaves have been reduced to green mush.

For now. It's early in the season, and I cling to the hope that with a little help, nature will bounce back in her inimitable way. In the meantime, I've got some of those telling details that I wouldn't have otherwise. Will I use all of them? Of course not. It's not a scene about a storm -- it's a scene about someone trying to get away from a crazed murderer.

And when it comes to the tornado? I'll just wing that one, thankyouverymuch.

Plot, Place, Character?

In searching for a subject for this morning's blog post, I was glancing through Speaking of Murder—Interviews with Masters of Mystery and Suspense published by Berkley Prime Crime, way back in 1998. I stumbled upon an interview with Elizabeth George where she speaks about her deep "psychic" connection to England. She goes on to say how she starts with the merest kernel of a plot then spends about a week at the location of choice (a spot in the U.K.) to allow the seed to germinate. She often goes back later, as the story develops, to soak up more of the region.

She particularly likes writing about a foreign country because she notices every detail. She goes on to say that when writing about U.S. locations, she doesn’t pick up the same info on her radar. The nuances of every day life, like the type of raincoat a person wears, the food one orders, the newspapers one reads, all are so familiar, the tiny things get lost in the shuffle.

So this started me thinking, how much do you think a sense of place has to do with your story?

I know that most of the authors that post regularly on this blog write series mysteries, so the question of place is often answered in advance. Not always, though. And sometimes, just like similar plots or the same core characters go stale without a new twist, a writer needs to shake things up a bit with their sense of place.

I believe this is why, as a series goes on, we often see characters from a small town take a trip. You see it all the time on TV.

Lucy and Ricky and Ethel and Fred loaded up the car and went to Hollywood. Later in the series, they even bought a country inn. And then, look at "Murder She Wrote." Cabot Cove having beaten out Detroit and Washington, D.C. as the town with the most killings per capita, Jessica Fletcher split for greener (or more bloody) pastures just about every week. But, I think it's safe to say, by that point in the series, the sense of place established by the series traveled with her. Maine in that big black purse, ah-yup.

And take a look at the CSI TV shows, talk about a sense of place! NY, Las Vegas, and Nevada, ne'er the twain shall meet. (Except that one time when Horatio flew to N.Y. He seemed so lost without his shades, but don't get me started!)

When Midnight Ink first considered my book, BrigaDOOM, they asked if I would move the Kate London Mystery Series from the western Michigan coast to Cleveland. Cleveland??

After I finished gasping and got up off the floor, I took a deep breath and explained how inextricably linked a small, blighted town on Lake Michigan's shore was to the characters' sense of self, the stories, and the series in general. The frustrations of an 'almost tourist town' that is unique to that part of Michigan, the feeling of a peninsula, the shortest of summer seasons, the dunes, so many things would change or be lost. I grew up not far from Cleveland, and a person not from Michigan might argue that they are close enough, take it from me, they're not.

Midnight Ink, thankfully, agreed.

So, how strong is the sense of place in what you write? In what you read? What would happen if you moved your protagonist to another town?