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Blogs by Mala Naidoo
A Sense Of Place 4/12/2017 9:51:30 PM
This blog explores a sense of place as significant in fiction with a few practical suggestions on how to achieve this, aligned with characters and events that propel the plot of the story. Place in a story is vital to ground where and why characters react to or create situations that drive the plot of your story.
A sense of place should be evocative or compelling as characters grow either to be loved or despised. We connect to a place for an array of reasons because it reminds us of:
our brilliant childhood/not so brilliant childhood
first love/first break-up
marriage/honeymoon/divorce
travelling to landscapes or geographic locations where culture, cuisine, architecture, history or local people either inspire or horrify
favourite authors/celebrities who lived in those places
the stories we heard or read about such places made them part of one’s experience
loss and grief
the devastation of war and politics
personal heritage associated with a place
the comfort of home, a bedroom, a garden, study
The reasons are endless making it necessary when writing a story to anchor it in a specific place or a few places to create a sense of physical reality for the reader. Place, in fiction, does not have to be grounded in a real geographic location, the sights, sounds and smell of a place within which characters are placed and events will bring the place to life for your readers based on the connections formed.
'The heat in the street was terrible, and dust was all about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in summer'
–Author, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
These lines portray an inescapable landscape that confines and stifles. The narration indicates a familiarity to a place which makes it experiential for the reader too.
In the creation of a fictional place the writer should be the camera lens, start with a wide view, zoom into backstreets, then give consideration to:
Demography, who will you have in this created terrain- will it be a multicultural environment?
What is the socio-economic dynamic of this place?
What’s the weather like?
What sounds are heard in this place?
Is this a city or rural setting- what aspects will you include to define this landscape?
Is it a busy or laid back place?
The five senses are pivotal to connecting the reader to place through the experiences of characters. Not all should be painted for the reader, leave aspects to the reader’s imagination. Let the reader reach his or her own conclusion but be sure to add drama to most scenes and emotions that characters go through- this will allow the reader to speculate that particular places elicit expected reactions from characters.
The writer should allow the reader to peel away layer by layer from what has been provided as the location that anchors characters' actions and reactions to situations. Through the characters experiences the reader gleans the values or ways of thinking associated with the novel’s setting.
I leave you with these lines that reveal the lot of the human condition from Alan Paton’s, Cry the Beloved Country:
'The great red hills stand desolate, and the earth has torn away like flesh. The lightning flashes over them, the clouds pour down upon them, the dead streams come to life, full of the red blood of the earth. Down in the valleys, women scratch the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man. They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children. The men are away, the young men and the girls are away. The soil cannot keep them anymore.'
