How to Place Your Writing

And if you live here, you’re automatically a duchess

A couple of weeks ago, my girlfriend and I were invited to spend the night at a house on the Big Sur coast, a house that my girlfriend’s sister was considering buying a shared ownership in. It’s a modest home, bringing to mind a style of California hippie houses of the 70s, with funky, unpretentious charm. That comfortable worn-in feeling is both inside and outside the grounds of the home. And then there’s the view.

The view, of which the photo above only provides a rather shabby sense of its actual grandeur, is sublime. That’s the view you see if you step out the door of the house and move just a bit up the driveway. So, every time I stepped out of that house, my mind shot down that cliff in a delirious riot of color, light, sound and scent. From the cliff, you can hear the ocean whump though the blowholes below, you can hear the trill and squawk of birdsong, you can smell pine and sun-warmed grasses.

Though Big Sur is less than 90 minutes from my house and I too live in a coastal California community, Big Sur is vastly different. It is visually dazzling, with great, craggy cliffs that plunge to a sea crashing on foaming rocks. Even with somewhat recent fires, there are thick forests with trails that lead to rolling waterfalls. There are places like the Henry Miller library, with its eccentric art work in the tree-splashed front yard, the eclectic and thoughtful book collection, the free coffee and ping-pong, the absolute “hang out and read a while” feeling of the place. And, while being cautious of stereotyping the locals, Big Sur folks seem friendly in a way that doesn’t seem affected.

Place Is a State in Your Reader’s Mind
When you are writing about a specific place, you need to open a big window—or step down a short driveway—to the view of that place. But that view must let your reader crunch the gravel underfoot, let them remark on the unusual number of  people who have crew cuts, let them peruse a menu that has hush puppies rather than french fries. I’m working on a novel right now whose setting is mainly the San Francisco of the late 80s, and mostly Market Street downtown. The bike messengers, women in fashionable outfits, ragged homeless and lost tourists of Market Street look, sound and smell different from the people I saw roaming Key West a couple of months ago.

Today I went hiking in the redwoods near my house. The redwoods smell different from the pines of Big Sur, they throw the light in a different way from their branches. If you pay real attention to small details that can capture the essence of a place, or distinguish it enough so the reader says, “Ah, so that’s what Big Sur is like,” you’ve gained ground on capturing their imagination too. Or if you can lie skillfully enough to describe the taste of place so that there aren’t false notes in the rendering, even if you’ve never been to that place before, the writing, and the world of imagination it creates, can still hold together.

Oh, about that share in the house: the other partial owners came back, after an absence of some time, to consider whether they really wanted to sell. They came on a beautiful weekend; they decided they couldn’t give it up. Damn.

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19 thoughts on “How to Place Your Writing

  1. Tom, you had me at “… great, craggy cliffs that plunge to a sea crashing on foaming rocks.” Now THAT is my kind of coastline—more compelling, for me, than a tropical island vista. My imagination provides the brisk wind and stark afternoon sunlight.

    Bummer that Alice’s sister couldn’t get the place!

    And interesting how all sorts of personal preferences (craggy cliffs or swaying palm trees, friendly locals or keep-to-themselves locals, french fries or hush puppies) usually don’t matter so much, or make it even more interesting, when we’re enjoying the different view that a fiction writer offers.

  2. Madame, bummer indeed. But I didn’t exactly mean personal “preferences” in the writing, but rather the details that can secure a place in a reader’s mind, even if they aren’t precisely—or necessarily—accurate (like noting that it’s always 77 degrees and humid in such and such a place).

    I was mostly talking about amassing all of the elements in a credible way so that a reader trusts the narrative, and believes in the setting and the characters.

  3. Tom, frankly I don’t know what got me going on the idea, but I was referring to the personal preferences (and probably the biases, values, leanings, etc.) of the reader, not the writer. I wonder if people are better able to suspend those “preferences” and enjoy the writer’s credible details in works of fiction as opposed to nonfiction.

    An example:

    I”d probably enjoy reading a work of fiction, let’s say a satire, about a hypocritical jackass of a right-wing political pundit recklessly slurring a woman who was responsibly, and within her rights, seeking contraception.

    But you’d have to hold a gun to my head to get me to read such a pundit’s memoir.

  4. And Tom, having been in San Fran only once, in 2011, may I say that even your description of your description of what it was like in the 80’s gives me the feel of a very different place than the one I saw last year.

    So you’re right. And now I have to back to what I’m writing and describe the delightfully rich mixture of smells of the grass runways, egg-and-sausage second breakfasts, and petrol-toting Bowser trucks of high summer 1940 in southern England…

  5. Rick, your puns are scaring the horses. Yep, S.F. of the 80s was different: there was less scent of urine in the streets, more bike messengers, fewer espresso stands and fewer people staring at electronic devices as they roamed the streets. Really though, there are some differences, and I have to be conscious of not letting my current picture of S.F. cloud my past one.

    Keep those Bowsers fueled.

  6. Tom just your short description (plus photo) of this spot in Big Sur makes me want to go for a visit…. or possibly even live there. But no, how can I think of leaving SF, with all the gentle people with flowers in their hair?

  7. Stuart, sorry, I’ve been traveling and wasn’t able to get right to your snarky, er, perceptive comment. At least you do have some hair left to tangle those flowers with. But yes, the bud people proliferate now—if they haven’t got then in their ears, they are selling buds down on Haight Street. Some things never change…

  8. Biggest flaw in my writing, I believe, is that while I’m aware of the smell of creosote and sage, aware of the different feels of decomposed granite here, soft sand there; aware of the sharp cut of shade and sun as I walk down from Hole in the Rock in Papago Park . . . I simply forget to mention them because they’re so natural.

    Also, it just occurred to me, it’s possibly because for the first 43 years of my life, it was suggested, rather directly, that I might leave such details out and get to the blasted point, please.

  9. But Joel, sometimes those apparently florid details are the point. Is that why Proust went on and on about his little flavored biscuit? Of course, in your car’s manual on how to set the stations on the radio you don’t want to read about the color gradient of the knobs, but in fiction, that gradient might be grand. (Or not.)

  10. Oh, agreed completely. Just bemoaning my reduced state.

    Until now. I’ll add to the almost trite “Dance like no one is watching” — write like no one is reading.

    Wait; that’s not right.

  11. Haha Joel; much to ponder there.

    Reminds me of the dichotomy that Seth Godin pointed out in an interview:
    “It’s the best; buy it!!!”
    versus
    “It’s unique and interesting. If it’s for you, we’d love to hear from you.”

    I’m writing that second way, dang the torpedoes and full speed ahead.

  12. Yeah, Joel, if I was aiming for a hit it would have been no fin and fizzled out. Not least because I simply don’t have a hit mine. Trollope over Dickens, Corrine Drewery over Beyonce, Amazing Grace over Avatar.

    And on that point, I thank Tom for this blog and all his other guidance, which gives many of us the audacity (and helps with the skills) to write what we feel, not what we think the masses want to hear.

  13. Not to mention Tom’s mad editing skills.
    As in, I hit the “Submit Comment” button before I meant to.
    fin = fun
    and
    mine = mind
    Good heavens, next thing you know I’ll be confusing “your” and “you’re” like the under-30 crowd do.
    “What did your husband do for his midlife crisis?”
    “He started up with improper use of apostrophes…”

  14. What I hate is noticing that I’ve written “you” for “your” and said something moronic sounding like “Send me you address.”

    Your doing fine, Rick. Probably yore training, in days of you’re.

  15. Actually Rick, I think your word-slides were word-worthy. Consider “…would have been no fin” says to me that it wouldn’t have any kick or energy, because I read that as not having the wild fins of late 50s and early 60s Cadillacs. I think Marlon Brando first said something had “no fin.” Or he should have.

    And of course “a hit mine” is a large hole from which one dredges up machine-made, merely utilitarian, no-interesting-angles-or-spice hits, as opposed to works of art.

    See how smart you are?

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