Today’s guest post is by Yasmin Chopin.
I am often asked, ‘What is place writing?’ As a field of study, it is frequently linked with the more familiar genres of nature writing, memoir, travel writing, and autobiography. Place can be home, or somewhere you visit, or somewhere you’re traveling through.
Writing place in fiction is a skill worth developing. When place is an essential part of the story, it should be as authentic and whole as any protagonist. When place is more than a backdrop, it takes on a symbolic role that can be portrayed in a variety of ways, from the naming of place to its architecture and weather.
Writing place is most successful when the author has had personal experience of it. Then it can be adapted for the story, embroidered, and renamed under the creator’s pen.
Spend time on the page to accentuate difference. Sometimes it is difficult to find an entry point, so look for a detail in the big picture and expand from there. Treat places like personalities, learn to love them, see them clearly in your mind’s eye, dress them, give them conflicting characteristics, and put them through hell and back.
Maps have become familiar paratextual material; believability is enhanced by geography. As any fan of Thomas Hardy knows, a map can be a helpful device for the reader to keep track. In fact, Hardy drew his own as a way of managing his complicated plots. When he finished Return of the Native, he posted his sketch to the publisher and insisted it be included in the printed volume.
He was not the first to use cartographic drawings to sell a book, and I am not suggesting that you must practice illustration or that your characters should follow a map in their story, but if you develop place to a significant degree in your narrative, the reader might enjoy the opportunity to dive a bit deeper and dwell in the mystery of a graphic depiction. Continue Reading…
