Places and Place Names
Dec. 3rd, 2004 06:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
odd_buttonsThe following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Places and Place Names
If your stories take place in Patagonia or Mongolia, you have your readers' attention from the start. Graham Green knew that, and so do Paul Theroux and V. S. Naipaul. So did Homer. The allure of the exotic seems timeless. The writer is returning from a foreign land with wondrous tales.
This doesn't mean that far away is "better". Few writers have been raised in Uttar Pradesh. If the Jericho you're from is on Long Island and your Naples is in Florida, you need to recognize the strangeness and exoticism of those places, too. They have their own odd customs, sinister rituals, sights and smells. Places you know are not necessarily familiar to others. You can create Atlanta and Altoona with the same energy, the same attention to detail, the same sensuousness, as Somerset Maugham gave to Malaya, Peking, and Samoa.
When you place your fiction in world-famous locations like Los Angeles or Paris or Harvard University, you establish geographical authenticity. Your readers already have an image of Hollywood, or the Eiffel Tower, or an ivy-league college quadrangle. You can be fairly sure that settings like the Watts Towers or the Louvre or Brattle Street conjure up some image for many of your readers. But don't rely on that familiarity to do your work for you. You still have to create the place on the page. Name-dropping of boulevards and parks won't substitute for real description. There's another pitfall, too. Real places commit you to their real layout. You can't pout a cathedral across the street from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, even if your plot desperately needs one there.
Walker Percy wanted to set Lancelot in New Orleans, but he also wanted to alter its geography for his own purposes. He explains his solution in his headnote: "Though the setting of this novel appears to be New Orleans and the River Road, this city and this famous road are used here as place names of an imaginary terrain." Percy's work is intensely involved with a specific place, yet he cleverly retains his artistic freedom.
Another strategy is to make up a place name -- Costa Piñata, Pennzburgh, or Elihu University. The knowledgeable reader has a sense of the real place behind the pseudonym, but you're free to install your own library, put the river near the train station, and rewrite history.
Place situates the story in your reader's mind. Fiction that seems to happen in no particular place often seems not to take place at all.
See Accuracy, Description, Names, Trust Your Material, "Write What You Know".
Places and Place Names
If your stories take place in Patagonia or Mongolia, you have your readers' attention from the start. Graham Green knew that, and so do Paul Theroux and V. S. Naipaul. So did Homer. The allure of the exotic seems timeless. The writer is returning from a foreign land with wondrous tales.
This doesn't mean that far away is "better". Few writers have been raised in Uttar Pradesh. If the Jericho you're from is on Long Island and your Naples is in Florida, you need to recognize the strangeness and exoticism of those places, too. They have their own odd customs, sinister rituals, sights and smells. Places you know are not necessarily familiar to others. You can create Atlanta and Altoona with the same energy, the same attention to detail, the same sensuousness, as Somerset Maugham gave to Malaya, Peking, and Samoa.
When you place your fiction in world-famous locations like Los Angeles or Paris or Harvard University, you establish geographical authenticity. Your readers already have an image of Hollywood, or the Eiffel Tower, or an ivy-league college quadrangle. You can be fairly sure that settings like the Watts Towers or the Louvre or Brattle Street conjure up some image for many of your readers. But don't rely on that familiarity to do your work for you. You still have to create the place on the page. Name-dropping of boulevards and parks won't substitute for real description. There's another pitfall, too. Real places commit you to their real layout. You can't pout a cathedral across the street from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, even if your plot desperately needs one there.
Walker Percy wanted to set Lancelot in New Orleans, but he also wanted to alter its geography for his own purposes. He explains his solution in his headnote: "Though the setting of this novel appears to be New Orleans and the River Road, this city and this famous road are used here as place names of an imaginary terrain." Percy's work is intensely involved with a specific place, yet he cleverly retains his artistic freedom.
Another strategy is to make up a place name -- Costa Piñata, Pennzburgh, or Elihu University. The knowledgeable reader has a sense of the real place behind the pseudonym, but you're free to install your own library, put the river near the train station, and rewrite history.
Place situates the story in your reader's mind. Fiction that seems to happen in no particular place often seems not to take place at all.
See Accuracy, Description, Names, Trust Your Material, "Write What You Know".