marksutzI have set stories in many places, all of which, now that I think of it, I have either visited, lived in, passed through or been introduced to by friends who have either visited, lived in, passed through or been introduced to by other friends. All, without any notable exception that spring to mind, I have had some personal connection with, if a degree or three removed.  In noting this, my statement seems a bit glib — after all, doesn’t every writer just somehow reconfigure a place that is somewhat familiar to her, however slight that may be, and just stick the characters in? — but I don’t mean it to be.  I couldn’t set a story on Mars or in Atlanta.  No connection. Perhaps I should elucidate by telling you how I don’t work with setting.

Though I would like to, I haven’t set a story in Sao Paolo.  I don’t feel close enough to it because it meets none of the criteria I seem to unconsciously use when setting a story:  no friends there, never been, never chatted someone up who’s blown through.  Things I’ve read about Sao Paolo, pictures I’ve seen and its weirdness intrigue me:  the busy air highway of helicopters that the rich use to avoid the daily kidnappings that go on in the streets below; the billboards advertising bulletproof glass for the urban businessman and promising the lowest price, if not guaranteeing the life behind the glass; the plastic surgeon who’s made a career singularly from reattaching the ears of kidnap victims.  This odd and curious hunger for the world I have goes for Alaska, Detroit, Seattle, Moscow and dozens of other places I’ve wanted to set a story in but find myself too paralyzed to do so.

I have, however, set stories in Arizona, from top to bottom; the black and white beaches of Hawaii; Chicago and her delicious tree-lined suburbs; the marred rural halfway homes in the forests of Maryland where old drunks sip orange soda and smoke thin menthols; a Toowoomba pub; the schoolyards of Switzerland where ski jumps litter the grounds like baseball fields do here; myriad locales in eastern Europe that I can recall like photographs fifteen years after; Alaska fishing boats that have been described to me by friends so dear I have phantom pains from them nearly losing fingers or hands; rest stops along the I-10 in vague, dusty in-between places; the immediate space above Hemingway’s Ketchum grave; the sad motel room and bar of a Rockville, Maryland motor hotel where a woman was raped and never shared her story; my boyhood housekeeper’s bedroom, wrongly remembered, no doubt, but still spooky with its assorted wigs on styrofoam heads high and lined up and hidden in the long closet.

I’ve set stories in a great many places and have a many more locales that I’m familiar with which I haven’t yet used.  So, I guess for me, the elements that prescribe my settings are:

  • that I feel I could somehow truly pass it off to a native who reads my story and
  • that the setting gives me a little chill in the possiblility it is the only place on earth I could tell a particular story.

These last points are interesting to me in that I’ve never really though about setting that way.  But the composition of this essay has convinced me, though I seem to understand it intuitively, that setting  is of primary importance to the thrust and ultimate success of one’s story.  It seems obvious, maybe the kind of observation only a child writer may make, but in thinking about the settings of my own stories, the stories of others that I love and the stories of writers who are abysmal, that if setting is of secondary or tertiary concern, the story fails.  So many writers, who I won’t name here for fear of offending anyone who might be a fan, could set their stories in a gargantuan bag of sand, the surface of the moon or a Venetian gondola and it wouldn’t matter.  They’d still be unable to transmit any emotion through their words.

 

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