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Getting that sense of "place" or "setting" right, can make or break a story, but too often, we spend so much time tackling our characters, making them behave and speak the way we want them to, that "place" seems like extra slog and is relegated to the "too hard" basket. Some writers think they can fudge it by adding a few props, like trees or plants, they feel will suit the story, if not the area. But that won't automatically work, either, especially if you get those plants wrong. (I know a romance writer who had bougainvillea growing in Canberra!)
If you can enable your reader to feel he was there, you allow him to become an eye-witness to the events and your story will remain memorable long after he has finished reading. It doesn't matter if he doesn't know the actual place, what's important is to make him feel he was there, and it's all in the detail.
Nobody would dispute that Wuthering Heights is set around the bleak, cold moors of Yorkshire. Emily Bronte makes us feel that invasive cold right down to our chilblains. We dread the bleakness of the house on the Heights and almost long for the warmth of Thrushcross Grange, the sheltered dwelling nestling in the valley below, just to get out of the cold.
It helped that Bronte lived in the area. Anyone who has seen the miserable graveyard beside the parsonage in Haworth, which was her home, can't help but feel a sense of place; cold and miserable as it was, and still is. But Bronte could merely have counted the number of yew trees, and headstones, given us a total, said how cold it was, and left it at that. It would still have been an accurate description of Haworth, but only that - a description, telling us what the place was like, without providing any sense of being there.
Daphne du Maurier was also good at conveying place, and it helped that she lived in Cornwall, in old, atmospheric houses. A bedsit in Bondi won't provide you with the same atmospheric surroundings, but you are in the perfect position to write that beach story. [NB: If you want to read a great book for "place" present, and "place" past, read du Maurier's The House on the Strand. It's out of print but should be in libraries]
How did Emily Bronte create a sense of place? She allowed her surroundings to engage her senses. That's the clue, it's not only what is there, that counts, after all, the reader can often get that much information from a travel brochure or off the internet, it's how those things affect you, the writer, because once your senses are engaged, you will be able to pass those feelings on to your reader.
By engaging the senses I mean just that. If the reader knows nothing of the place where your story is set, he will gain an idea of it through your experiences. You will take him on the same journey you went on when you were there. If he already knows the place well, he will still enjoy re-living it through your impressions.
Forget for a moment that you are a writer, and think only of how a place affects you, for instance:
Touch - Is there a biting wind? Is the sun burning your face? Does the sand feel deliciously warm between the toes? Have you ever trodden on a stone fish? [Trust me, it can really ruin that whole romantic sunset thing like no other!]
Smell - Are they peppermint gums? Dead fish? Rotting seaweed? And what's that heady, overpowering incense, that's making you feel slightly woozy?
Taste - Can you taste the salt water spray on the tongue? Have you ever drunk from a mountain stream? Try to imagine the taste of 19th century prison gruel, or the most seductive chocolate ever.
Hearing - The squeak of footprints in sand? The raaaaah! of rooks in a cemetery? The roar of a massive hail storm approaching? Or the revving of a convoy of motorbikes?
Sight - A squadron of F 111s flying in formation? The balletic leap of impala? A willy willy dust storm on the horizon?
Kids' authors sometimes hear teachers tell their class, "Use lots and lots of adjectives!" and the authors usually cringe because too many adjectives often results in overwriting, or padding. It's far better to use fewer, but carefully chosen, adjectives. Too many adjectives can also be a trap in writing "place", as if there's some formula, by which you use a string of exotic colourful adjectives for warm climates and miserable, grey ones for colder zones.
When I talk to I schoolkids I encourage them to keep a travel journal wherever they go, because if they record little details, like, dried beads of seaweed, tiny crab holes, gull prints in wet sand, at the beach in summer, then when they are sitting in class in midwinter having to write My Day At The Beach, they won't be reduced to saying - The sand was yellow and The sky was blue.
If you don't already keep a travel journal, start one. Keep postcards people send you for reference. Take photographs to serve as a visual record, but even photographs won't give you behind-the-scenes details, the things that happen so fast you don't have time to focus your camera. Photos won't necessarily say how cold it was, or how wonderful that ratatouille tasted, or describe the smell of an open drain in a backstreet slum. If you don't travel much, make use of daily travel - every ferry, bus or train trips. Trains have a smell all their own, as do underground stations, a kind of dusty electricity smell. And older readers may remember the smell of wet tea-leaves being broomed around underground station platforms to mop up the dust.
You don't have to lug around a thick journal that won't fit into a mini-purse, a small notebook and pencil will do just as well. And if you can't write down details at the time, store them in your head to write up later.
In 1981, I crawled up Shrapnel Gully at Gallipoli (long before the tourists went there) and I kept coming across bits of shrapnel (naturally), but also, the pottery top of a Turkish water jug, barbed wire, bullet clips, a Commonwealth Forces trouser button, and even the occipital bone of a skull, all of it washed down by winter rains.
And don't forget signs, they can help in creating a sense of place. There is a WWI cemetery in France with a boulder at the entrance and on it is this plaque:
The Devons held this trench. They hold it still.
You realise that the whole area was within direct firing range of a German bunker up on the hill and virtually all the officers and men of the Devons are buried in two parallel rows, with headstones (and boots) face inwards.
I've stood on a Normandy beach in foul weather and seen where in WW II, the D-Day landings took place. I had a clear view of the massive concrete pill-boxes behind me that, at the time, were manned with German troops and machine guns.
Moments like that can't be invented. To say the beach was very long, the sand grey, the sea even greyer and the concrete pill-boxes also grey, whilst accurate, is not going to convey a sense of place. You have to feel the history behind it, picture the scene as thousands of lives were lost, the frantic scramble to get the pre-fab railway tracks, railway cars, Sherman tanks, men, guns and trucks ashore under full fire. Only then does the place start to come alive. Otherwise it remains a grey beach on a grey day.
It is imperative for historical novels to have a sense of place and the setting may not look now, as it did then. There may be an office block on the site where once a labourer's cottage stood. Fortunately some historical sites have been restored to their former glory, for instance, the formal gardens at Villandry in France. Beautiful for the gardener, for the writer they provide even greater possibilities, with a water garden and summer house designed for assignations, a music garden to remind one of gavottes and minuets, a love garden with fan and heart-shaped box hedges (sigh! think of the flirting!) and a kitchen garden that transports you back to monks and herbs and mediaeval food (with not a potato nor tomato to be seen).
The last time I rode a horse, was on Norfolk Island, thinking 'I can do this' (which was perhaps foolish, considering I was 47 at the time and hadn't ridden a horse since I was 15). But cantering flat out past the ruins of the old gaol was a magnificent feeling for me, even if the horse was more interested in getting back to his mid-morning oats. I hardly had time to think of the floggings and hangings, let alone the thirteen steps leading up to the gallows and okay, I couldn't move for two days afterwards, but what a sense of place!
I once had an editor query a story of mine he wanted to take. He asked had I "translated" it, from Turkish into English, meaning, was I passing off someone else's work as my own. No, it was all mine. The story merely evolved from a travel journal I kept while walking through Istanbul. I made notes of little details that caught my eye or appealed to my senses, and it must have seemed real to the editor, with a strong sense of place, for him to ask such the question. On the one hand I was insulted. I don't speak Turkish, and even if I did, I would never pinch another writer's work, but at the same time I was flattered, having pulled off a sense of place after only two and a half days in Istanbul.
Even if your setting is simple and takes place in a single room, you can still give the reader a strong sense of "place". Is it a bedroom - with a scarlet doona cover, and hastily discarded lingerie on the floor? Or a board room - with a large Aboriginal painting on the wall and jugs and glasses for water set out? A hospital room - with monitors and all those nasty tube thingies? Or even a 19th century cell - dark, with a tiny barred window for light, rats scuttling around, an upturned bowl of gruel on the ground, stinking straw for bedding.
Each of these rooms will have its own tiny details, unique to its setting, whether these be factual, or from your imagination, so use them, because these are what will bring your story to life and help create that lingering sense of place.
copyright Vashti Farrer 2009