Setting: A Living Sense of Place

One of the things I love best as a reader is those books that create such a colorful sense of place that the setting becomes another character—so much so that a change in scene would change the feel of the book altogether. What would Inspector Brunetti be without Venice, right? Its geography shapes the action; its history shapes the people. Anyone who has ever visted that amazing city of water can immediately picture the ambulance taking off down the canal or the police boat puttering up to the scene of the crime. Admittedly, not every mise en scene is quite as distinctive, but wherever a book is set—be it a small American town or a futuristic megalopolis on another planet—that place should penetrate every page with its sights, sounds, and smells. Once the author has the reader where she wants him, he is hers to delight, terrorize, or mystify.

Gotta Be Here

Think about Eudora Welty or Harper Lee. Their books could only be set in the South. Those screen porches and streets without curbs are so evocative that you can almost smell the pecan pie cooling on the window sill. And it has nothing to do with dialect written out in strange spelling. It has to do with capturing the sensory details—the crickets and fireflies in the evening, the women with their paper fans rocking on the porch, the white gloves, the courthouse on the square with its statue of R.E. Lee. As a Southern girl growing up in the fifties, I could go on and on about what rings true in the writing of these two. Even if there were never a mention of any state, their work couldn’t be set set anywhere else.

Flesh Out the Map… and then Some

When it comes to bigger, recognizable cities, authenticity becomes even higher-stake, because so many readers will be able to picture the scene from experience. New York, Philadelphia, Paris—they all have their own soul. The line around the block at the gelato stand on a summer night. The inimitable sound of an el-train thundering and rattling past, just outside your second-floor window. The lights on the Champs Elysées refracting off the rain-slick sidewalks at dusk in winter. The world is full of wonderful details, unique to a single place, and that’s what our readers want to feel when they bite into a book. Give them all the sleaze or the glamor, the coziness or the Parrothead vibe of the place where your book is set. That’s more than just calling streets and landmarks by the right name.

In Your Dreams!

Even if the setting is a place nobody has ever been! Fantasies and other kinds of speculative fiction may have scenes that are wholly imaginary, but the demands are no less imperious. You can make up street names and architecture, and that gelato stand may become a spring where fairies water their unicorns, but it has to be just as convincing and evocative. Give us readers the same sense of sights, sounds, and smells—and touch, of course, because it’s either hot and humid or it’s not—so that we come away feeling we know that place, if only from a dream. These are the books people remember. These are the ones they want to read and reread, because sinking once more into that rich world is like coming home again.