The Significance of Space

When I first set out on this journey choosing the place in which the story would unfold was perhaps the easiest decision. I wanted to write about a place I knew, a community I knew, experiences I knew. Naturally, then, the setting for my story is a small, dry desert city on the verge of becoming something more prominent. The difficulty then became figuring out how the setting affected my characters—their stories, histories, decisions and interactions. I found some great advice at WritersDigest.com (yes, I do LOVE this website!) from Nancy Kress. She explains that two settings can be helpful in understanding who a character is: where he (or she) lives now and where he (or she) grew up. Nancy writes:


Where a character lives now:

“If your character chose his current setting, that tells us something about his tastes and values. The man who chooses the energetic grittiness of Manhattan is a different person from the man who chooses life in a small Midwestern town. The New Yorker may be ambitious, want more anonymity or seek greater sophistication. The choice of the city life won't, by itself, tell us which of these is true—but it'll give us a start on understanding him.

The same is true of the more intimate setting of a character's home. What kind of neighborhood has he selected? With what has he chosen to furnish and decorate his dwelling place? Walls of bookshelves? Expensive antiques? Salvation Army left-overs? Nothing except what was already there? Such choices are revealing of basic personality.

Of course, many people don't choose their city or apartment. They live in New York or Houston because that's where their jobs are and in their current dwellings because that's what they can afford. Here's where a character's attitude becomes important.”


Where a character lived then:

“Although not chosen directly by any of us, a childhood home can still convey a great deal about a character. This is most usable if your character still lives at, or near, wherever he grew up, as is true of the three sisters of Jane Smiley's prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres. Ginny, the narrator, is shaped by, warped by and ultimately destroyed by the farms of the Midwest. Without this setting, nothing in the novel could've happened at all.

A second way to use a childhood setting is to have your character revisit it as an adult. This allows you to both demonstrate what shaped her values and show us how she feels about that place now. Two contemporary novels that have used this structure with great success are Rebecca Wells' Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and John Grisham's The Summons. In both, childhood settings become the means to resolve the conflicts of the past.”

I have two main characters. One has grown up in the town that is the main setting. The other comes for a purpose. So now the important part of this integration is to figure out how to describe the setting through the characters. I feel like this will be one of the easiest ways for me to learn who my characters are and what matters to them. I also feel that this may be a very difficult part. I’m worried about my ability to stay true to the characters and not let my own personal reflections and ties to the setting influence too much of what I’m writing.

I’m hoping that my drive through Southern Utah tomorrow will ignite some concrete memories and emotions that I can channel into the stories my characters want to tell. As I am leaving on vacation for eight days I’m also hoping I can get some real work done and make significant progress on this novel. Send me happy and productive vibes please! Hopefully I’ll return with some progress and/or breakthroughs to write about. Maybe even some pretty pictures…!