a sense of place

So let’s talk about setting. I’m working on my next book, and the more I dig into the story, the more I’m struggling with whether the setting will be an actual, can-find-it-on-the-map place. Real vs. imagined hasn’t mattered much yet, but it will before long. There are elements that look a lot like where I live—old tobacco warehouses, vast farmland five miles outside of the city—but I just can’t commit to writing about my town.

There are so many examples of wonderful novels that handle real places beautifully, where the setting is as intrinsic to the story as the characters themselves. I love books like this, where a place is described so carefully, and often with such obvious reverence, that I finish the book feeling like I’ve traveled there. I’m thinking of novels like Tracy Kidder’s Home Town (Northampton, MA), Sarah Jio’s The Violets of March (Bainbridge Island, WA), Janelle Brown’s All We Ever Wanted Was Everything (Silicon Valley), anything by Peter Mayle (Provence) and Pat Conroy (the South Carolina Lowcountry). But when you write about a real place, you’re bound, to a certain extent, to sticking to the facts. No matter what, you’re almost definitely going to have readers who disagree with your depiction.

In How Lucky You Are, I did a little bit of both: I fictionalized a D.C. suburb, so I had the freedom to imagine the mood and feel of my made-up Maple Hill, but I also spent a decent amount of time writing about real places in Washington, and there’s an atmosphere to the story that’s reflective of D.C. in terms of the characters’ interests, motivations, and attitudes.

And that’s the thing: The setting influences so much of who your characters are and who they become over the course of your story. There’s a big difference between writing about a native New Yorker and, say, someone who’s just moved to Brooklyn from Southern California. For better or for worse, your roots define you. The protagonist in my next novel’s a military brat who’s lived all over the world, so she lacks an identity that stems from a strong sense of place and home, and this is a big part of her self-discovery over the course of the book. The question is, should the place where she finds herself be an actual one or something I dream up?