Sense of place. Throughout the centuries great fiction and non-fiction writers have evoked real and imaginary places by using just the right sensory details, local characters, dialogue, and description. A place can be an imaginary planet, a city, a town, village, a desert, a grand hotel, a shack in the woods or just a room. And these places may loom larger in the psyche than the actual physical space they inhabit.
How do good writers evoke a sense of place? Sense of place - can be portrayed/evoked by geography, architecture, history, climate, language, people and their customs, mores, habits, ways of dressing, eating, communicating, language, music and dance.
Great travel writers have the knack for portraying one place in a variety of ways. They show the dark and light of a place, the night and day of it, the highs and lows, the spiritual and banal, and how a place seems different from the perspective of different points of view and states of mind: when the weather’s great or awful, when you're well vs. when you're sick, when you're having fun vs. when you're getting ripped off... and so on. It's challenging to look at a place in different ways, and writing from different perspectives gives a multidimensional feel to the place, be it an island, a country, a cave, or a room in an old historic hotel.
While focusing on Sense of Place, consider:
How we (or the media, poetry and fiction, ballads, songs, plays and movies) mythologise places, and how that mythology may offer a window onto a culture, a people, a country, a time Your choice of details is critical - it's not the quantity of details, but the specificity and authenticity that brings a place to life and convinces the reader that YOU WERE REALLY THERE.
In these days of purple, overwritten travel writing, including "brochurese," restraint and understatement can be arresting and very powerful. You can hint at hidden aspects of a place, or explore their metaphorical implications with the most seemingly innocent of descriptions. Shirley Hazzard, in her story The Transit of Venus, describes the rug department of Harrod's Department Store in London "thick rolled strips of carpet stood or lay like the fallen drums of columns in a temple."
Think of your setting as a stage set: what things are absolutely essential for the reader to imagine the locale, place, country, etc.?
Are you really seeing the place originally, with your own senses? Or are you filtering what you see or being influenced by what another writer has written, what you've seen on TV or the movies etc. (That perspective or point of view might be valid to use as a starting point, to depart from, for irony or contrast as a counterpoint to your own experience of the place.) How have you been influenced by the place's mythology, or what you're read or heard about it?
Do your descriptions actually go somewhere-- or nowhere? Are you just enchanted with the way the descriptions sound or read, or do they really reveal something about the place?
Are you engaging more of your senses than just sight? When writing about a place think about sound, smell, touch-textures, and even taste! (If you want to see how one writer focused a lyrical mystery murder novel on the sense of smell, describing Paris by only that sense, read Patrick Suskinds Le Parfum - Perfume. - Amazing!
By what means do these excerpts evoke a sense of place?
“THERE MUST BE A GOD IN HAITI
I knew this road. Route Nationale. On this beautiful, perilous road, my nightmare road, a dark journey toward the light threading humanity’s most fundamental aspirations, the road the American soldiers had nicknamed Highway to Hell; I knew it better than I knew the streets of my hometown.
It originated in the fetid harborside slums of Port-au-Prince, where the poorest of the hemisphere’s poor bathed in sewers, and homeless children fought one another for the feral right to lick the residue our of the brown plastic pouches of MREs - spaghetti and meatballs, chicken à la king—they’d scavenged from the military’s garbage...
Hours-long traffic jams billowed diesel soot, and along the quayside it was not unusual to see, throughout the infinite years of the tyrants, bodies bobbing in the otherwise tranquil harbor.
Yet everywhere here the roadside was thick with human vitality, thousands of marchands, energetic with desperation and gifted with tenacious, earthy humor, hawking what a world they had never seen had thrown away—a national yard sale of grease-caked junk and hand-me-downs. ”
Evoking a Sense of Place
“THE BLUE-EYED SHAN
[ Ranga] ... The Tame Wa are like pye-dogs, they will slink and snarl and grin for a bone. But the Wild Wa dwell high upon the mountain and smile for no man.
Their villages are set in swales and dingles, tiny valleys off the ridges, and the entrances at either end are planted with dense thorny hedge, and the way in or out is crooked and winding.
It was not always so. When the rifle came to these hills, men with swords, knives and even crossbows had to change their ways. No rifle can see through a Wild Wa hedge, and no bullet can went the mazy way. ”
“We called it Indian-No-Place and snickered to think it could actually be the “Crossroads of America” like the radio announcers said. Indiana was a country for hogs and soybeans, and its capital was a crossroads” only because you had to drive through it to get to someplace else. Indiana was flat, boring and lakeless, except for those muddy man-made things. But for the thrill of an occasional tornado, a summer in Naptown was a string of hot drippy listless afternoons that began with cars screeching at the Indy 500, and ended with pigs squealing at the Indiana State Fair. ”
“BIRCHBARK IN EXCELSIS
Nothing says the end of the Twentieth Century like the New York State Thruway. It’s a dreary gray conveyor belt of whizzing cars and veering semis, running more or less parallel to the Hudson River, which shows itself in brief, unspectacular glimpses.
But with a left onto Highway 28 at Lake George, suddenly the other cars drop away, civilization diminishes, and I find myself in the idyllic landscape depicted on the flannel lining of old-fashioned sleeping bags’ repeated pattern of stylized pine trees, round blue lakes with leaping trout, and pairs of low-flying ducks.
Bears appear randomly, carved from the trunks of trees or whittled from logs into lawn ornaments. Downstate, bears have been chased off by habitat loss, but here in these northernmost reaches, the bear is a totem. ”
“Though the old songwriter never saw it for himself, somehow Stephen Foster guessed right about the Suwannee River. It’s a bathetic heartbreaker, the Blanche Du Bois of waterways. Sometimes when I drive across and glance down at the tannin-dark river, I think of an old maiden aunt who lives in genteel squalor with her bourbon and bonbons and a dozen obese dachshunds. Or I remember my Intro to Cave Diving course, which took me a thousand yards under the limestone bed of the Suwannee; it was like getting mugged in a coffin.
And sometimes I’ll think of both the Old South expiring in an alcoholic haze and that cave dive and I scare myself. When the lazy river calls, the only question is, Sink or swim? ”