Place: The Life of Fiction

Place is the home I inhabit in a story until the last word shoves me back to a present reality. If I don't feel rooted in place, I am an itinerant soul. I don't stay long, never read that last word. 

Eurdora Welty once said, "Fiction, depends for its life on place.” If this is true for fiction, historical fiction isn't even conceived without place. Johnny Tremain needed Boston, Kit a Blackbird Pond, and the Watsons had to go to Birmingham. Anywhere else and they would have been different stories—or no story at all.

"Somehow it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum." --Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Lee had me at "sweet talcum."

God is in the Details

Sometimes called the canvas of story, setting is broad and sweeping, but also filled with details--and great historical fiction balances the two. Cast Off by Eve Yohalem achieves this balance brilliantly.  Set in 1663, Cast Off is a high seas adventure about a stowaway Dutch girl and a mixed race boy. Yohalem did her research down to the nutmeg, weevil infested sea biscuits, and bloodletting medical remedies, which is only a fraction of a percent of her detail. The characters and plot are fantastic, but the details are what made me believe it.  

"...we all hate generalities, and so does place. Yet as soon as we step down from the general view to the close and particular, as writers must and readers may and teachers well know how to, and consider what good writing may be, place can be seen, in her own way, to have a great deal to do with that goodness, if not to be responsible for it." --Eudora Welty

Setting as a Character

Authors create a powerful ally when setting is a character in their story. Dickens' London is often cited as such a character--that Good Olde City with it's fog-choked alleys, counting houses, and Bob Cratchets. Place as a character sets and changes mood with daybreak or sunset, the onslaught of storm or the shell of a bombed out church. Crow's island and the ocean are characters in "Beyond the Bright Sea". Anchored to the earth on solid black rock, the island was home, prison, or trap depending on its mood.







Setting as Complication

Sometimes referred to as the Twister Effect, setting as complication fuels plots and entire stories. At the outset we suspect Eveningstar Macaw will end up in The Well of Sacrifice (written by Chris Eboch). This and other complications of setting move the story forward in exciting and nail-biting action .  Zane and the Hurricane required Hurricane Katrina for its life, but it is the predicaments of the aftermath which Zane and his new friends must overcome that make the story.

Setting as Theme is my favorite use of place. May B. by Caroline Starr Rose required an isolated dugout on the prairie for its birth. Rose used this external complication to symbolize an internal theme. Isolated by her dyslexia, May struggled with shame and a failure. By surviving and overcoming her physical isolation, she gained agency to believe in herself, to overcome her internal isolation.


The best stories are complicated layers woven of the threads of character, plot, setting, and the indefinable magic of the words themselves. No one element but all in orchestration make the best books. Yet all of the best books have a strong grounding in place.




Michele Hathaway is an author and freelance editor. She has an M. A. in Social Anthropology and has worked in libraries in California, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania. She writes middle-grade nonfiction and stories set in culturally diverse, historical periods.

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