I spent the last four days on Minnesota’s lovely North Shore of Lake Superior. My husband and I have vacationed there many times before, and each time, it is both the same and different. Lake Superior is the size of a sea–the story goes that, if you spread out all the water of the lake, it would cover North and South America at a depth of one foot, although I can’t vouch for the truth of that claim. What I can say is that it is vast and deep, and the North Shore is stony, woodsy, misty, and mysterious.
I did a lot of reading on the North Shore, and I stumbled across this well-worn phrase, one that has been attributed to so many sources, I found the original author impossible to track down: Geography is destiny. As I sat on large gray stone at the water’s edge watching fingers of fog reach in from the lake across the shore, I thought of that phrase, though not in the way a social scientist might think of it. I thought about what it means for writers.
From time to time, I take one of my old stories–one set in Tokyo or New York, Orlando, Florida or Varanasi, India (all places I have lived) and rewrite them with a starkly new setting. What changes when I change the “where” of the story? Everything.
The characters see, hear, feel and experience different things. The weather impacts what they do and how they act. Their moods and even personalities shift, shaped, in part, by their surroundings. Their livelihoods, their plans, their choices, are all affected by place.
Writers need to think deeply about place. We need to put ourselves in places–whatever places we choose–smell them, listen to them, seem them (truly see them), experience them, soak them up. We need to see and feel the places our characters inhabit.
These days, people speak often about the way people shape places, about the power humans have to impact the nature of a place. But we writers need to reflect also on the way places shape people, on the power of places to change the course of lives.