Place

Dorothy Allison wrote an essay called "Place" for The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House.  In it, she describes place not as a description of the setting, but as an experience for the character.

"Place requires context.  Is it responsive?  Does it notice me?  Or is it porcelain, pristine, and just ignoring my passage through?  Are there people on the street who flinch when I smile at them?  Is there a reason they do that?"

 "What I'm trying to say is that place is not just landscape--a list of flora and fauna and street names.  That's not place, that's not even decent research."

"I want a story that is happening in a real place, which means a place that has meaning and that evokes emotions in the person who's telling me the story.  Place is emotion."

 She compares the place of a hotel room, which is exactly like all other hotel rooms and has no emotional resonance with the character or the reader with the place the character was when her boyfriend said he didn't want her and the place where the character's mother slipped a cookie into her luggage for her to find when she got to that hotel room far away and unpacked.

This relates to something my friend, Eric, has been talking about for quite a while.  He hates description and makes the point that great description tells us about the character, about their emotional state, their habits, or their background.  For example, if a character who just lost her mother describes her kitchen, everything will relate back to her mom and the description will slip into memories, and Eric likes memories.

If you have a non-omnipotent narrator, the things they mark as worth mentioning in a description, where they choose to point the camera, are the things they think are notable--things that remind them of memories or the things that are out of place or strange or wondrous.  They note things they haven't yet taken for granted.  So in a way, any description will tell you about character, about their experiences and their understanding of their environment.  But I think Dorothy Allison and Eric want it pushed further, they want you to lean into those emotional moments and make the connections more explicit.  "I remember my mother standing at our electric stove-top, cursing over inedible spaghetti."

Allison's advice is also related to Jay Asher's advice.  He says that there's no point in describing a 7-eleven or a grocery store, because everyone has experienced those places and knows what you're talking about.  You don't usually have emotional memories of 7-eleven, so going on about how the character feels about a fridge full of Dasani would be a stretch.  I'm not sure if Allison would argue not to set a scene in one of these settings, or if she would argue that they just aren't a place, that the character brings "place" with them.

Allison also mentions that a writer has no idea who their audience is, where they are, or what they've experienced.  So is it presumptive to assume that your reader knows what a 7-eleven looks like and considers them non-places?

Then there's something to be said about non-places.  Just as you can learn about a character through what they choose to describe*, you can learn from how they feel about being in a non-place.  Do they like it?  Are they used to it?  Is it uncomfortable?  Are they in a non-place physically because they're in a non-place emotionally?

"If you're lucky, Oprah is on at eleven-thirty at night.  And you can check out what she's done lately.  Try, try, try not to start channel-hopping and watching the ads.  You can't afford any of that stuff anyway.  It's the middle of the night, three o'clock in the morning, and you're in a room in which the art on the wall is a stylized painting of a flower or an unknown landscape.  And I do mean an unknown landscape.  Someone is doing these paintings and making money, but it's not an actual artist and that landscape is nowhere you recognize.  Also, the mattress is kind of soggy, and you've got one of those covers that you are too hot if you have it on and too cold if you pull it off.  You're awake at three o'clock in the morning and you are nowhere; this is not a place."

This section is her own most damning counter argument.  It is so much more engaging than the scene after a breakup that she describes.  Why is the "you" in this passage awake at 3 AM?  You're clearly having a miserable time.  Is it the fact that emotion slips into what she intends to be a boring setting, a non-place, that shows you bring place with you?  And the details she uses are so relatable.  Oprah on at a weird time!  The comforter that doesn't work!  Yes!  I've been in that hotel room!  That's exactly what it was like!  But Allison reads to learn new things, and I read for escapism and for those moments of resonance, those moments of things I've experienced put on paper where I know I'm not alone.

So maybe there's some middle ground in all this.  You don't need to describe the 7-eleven, but if you describe the lighting as "Mountain Dew colored" hitting a resonance point and a witty detail, and saying it aggravates your hangover (pulling the character's situation and emotional state into the setting, then that works for me.



*This is short hand.  I know a characters are fictional and have no agency to choose anything and it's all the writer making decisions.  [loud raspberry noise]