Our “Dear Elizabeth” video…
Elizabeth asks, “How does the writer give the reader a sense of place when telling a story, and make the description of place free of cliché? Some examples, please.”
Elizabeth Bobrick writes This Won’t End Well: On Loving Greek Tragedy
Dear Elizabeth,
Your question makes me think of Henry James, and his description of the five positions of the writer to the text, from God to the subconscious via landscape, physical action, and conscious thought. Each of these is a place for you to stand, a frame within which to set and develop a story.
By example, try this:
1. Physical attraction, like the sensitive guts of a temperamental man, can be easily disturbed by colour.
2. The restaurant, set back on a busy main road, had the feel of a French bistro to it, a Paris café on a quiet boulevard except this was London, and in place of ladies with dogs rushed trucks spraying last night’s rain onto a pavement that should have had tables and chairs for outside smokers but instead was shuttered against the damp city by a small box hedge the owner tended, encouraging his guests inside.
3. John held the door for Sally.
4. She’d worn the purple scarf he hated.
5. Purple like his childhood nursery walls, yet unaware why the colour disturbed him, before they’d even sat down, he searched for a reason to leave, a way out of the discomfort that had sprung upon him the moment he’d seen her waving from the corner as agreed; he imagined it was the weather that was wrong, or his tie, changed his mind about the fish, and ordered soup.
Like this character John, who I’ve just made up but who now exists for all of us in a restaurant that’s a bit like a Parisian bistro only in London, with a woman he suddenly finds unattractive, we can range between these five places to tell the story of people in a location doing something; in other words, there are five places to give a sense to, and each can be developed so that when John and Sally start talking, we already have a feel and a picture of where they are universally, physically, immediately, emotionally and subconsciously. Like an ideal camera, we can understand the world they’re in, float above the busy main road, follow John to his table, see Sally through his eyes, and travel unobserved through his veins. We can inhabit Sally, too, and do the whole thing again from her point of view (note to all, I’d love to talk about POV, so if anyone’s got a question on this topic, please send it in.).
I’m also reminded of Ann Lamott’s one inch frame advice in Bird by Bird, that is, when feeling overwhelmed by how to tell a story, to imagine a one inch frame on your scene, say this scene in the restaurant with John and Sally, to put it over any part and literally describe only what it contains. When giving readers a sense of place, detail is everything. So let’s hold it at their table, and describe the vase with one purple flower which Sally thinks is a good sign as it matches her scarf, or the white tablecloth slightly wrinkled that John flattens with his hand, and as he does that Sally notices his knuckles, how she can’t imagine how his wedding ring got over the roughness of them or will ever get off again. What about the wine glass he’s checked for fingerprints, or the way Sally plays with her knife. Have you noticed that the salt and pepper shakers sit perfectly in their little silver nest although because of the wire that holds them, it’s hard to get them out, or that at the table behind Sally, a clip is falling from a woman’s hair, how it’s hanging half off and John wants to rescue it as he wanted to rescue Sally when they first met.
Let’s think about sound. Is there music playing? Can you hear shouts from the kitchen? Or is it hushed, the waiters padding like foxes, the maître d’ gliding like a man on ice? And when Sally’s onion soup arrives, can you smell it?
All these, not too many but enough, not made up but what you actually see, hear, smell, taste, fear, crave, find funny as you stare into that scene, you who are God and Sally and John and the tablecloth and the blood and wood and air of this world, you will write a scene that doesn’t just feel real but is real, and because of that, we can concentrate on the action.
How to avoid cliché? Write what you see. Not what you imagine a restaurant that’s like a French bistro will look like, but what this one looks like, the one in which John and Sally have their excruciating lunch. Being a writer isn’t a million miles away from life drawing, you have to learn to look, and to put down faithfully what you observe. If I describe my hand to you, even though it’s just another hand like the billions of other hands out there, I can make you see it as I see it by giving you detail: the veins that stick up, the spots that are beginning to float to the surface, the brass ring I found in a market in Armenia that has a blank space for inscription, the nails I bite, the dirt beneath them, the skin that would have been scarred by boiling water except my friend makes magic gel and it healed me. You see? It’s all in the detail. Every frame has something original and unique and all its own to tell because every moment is unique and so are you and so am I.
Character as place: I’m going to use Mary’s work, because it’s a good example of how creating sense of place does not have to be contained to physical landscape. In her memoir she sets up the story and lets it play out in meals she cooks to tempt D home, recipes to heal herself, a life and a breakup told in poetry and film that place a woman in the struggle to make this thing okay, this thing that is happening to her. Yes, we have physical place; Washington, Paris, her apartment, her bedroom, but these are detailed by her relationship to them, crucially they are injected and swelled by her feelings in them, and so our reference point for the whole book; Mary herself, becomes the constant place in which we feel safe and her story is told.
Place as character: this being a mighty subject, I’ll only touch on it here, but as you’re a Greek scholar I imagine you’re also familiar with the classics of literature; Dickens, Eliot, James, Woolf, Forster, Thackery, Mantel, Ishiguro, McCarthy, the list goes on but in each study how the places in which their novels are set become as much a character in themselves as the actual characters. Notice how they take their time creating this. They don’t rush to set this up, they let their characters move about, and before we know it, their rooms and cities and roads are as significant in the storytelling as the characters who move through them. A table set for a wedding is only described in how it relates the house and the person who lives there, a city to how its visitors see it for the first time, a landscape to the fear and tension of a father and son; these writers, and many more, land us in a sense of place through relationship, and it blooms in the water and sunshine of their attention, their character’s and ours.
To sum it up, when you face the page let your nerve endings travel out like mycelium or the twisting fronds of vines, explore with your hands, write exactly what you see, and let your pen move from universe to the deep dark underbelly of the subconscious and back again. Beware judgement as it leads to refusal, an overriding of what’s in front of you, and a pastiche which is the cliché you want to avoid. If the restaurant is loud when you thought it would be quiet, or John’s cuffs are stained when you were sure he was the kind of person who’d wear a clean shirt, understand that the character is always right. It’s you who must make the adjustment, not them. The key to creating a sense of place without cliché is implicit in the phrase: a sense of place. Trust absolutely what you see and hear, the scent in the air, the feeling of the cloth, the sensation in your guts, the omniscient knowledge of the writer as light and shadow and everything in between. Only you can witness your story in its original form, you are our eyes, only you can tell us.
Love,
Eleanor
We welcome questions! Feel free to get in touch. And if you missed our introduction to this series, here it is:
Oh, and where is that Henry James from? I'd be curious to follow that up.
This was a fantastic post — it helped me in ways I didn’t even know I wanted to be helped.