sense of place
Jul. 31st, 2010 07:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardI have had an epiphany. I've been starting to wonder, lately, if there's something wrong with me -- I read a lot of author blogs, and obviously I watch metafandom and follow links and so on, and one of the things that's come up continually is, "I started writing so I could read stories about people who look like me," or variations on that theme. And that's a great theme! People should totally write books or stories on that theme. But the thing is that it's never a theme that's driven me; maybe I don't have a really strong sense of self.
I realized today, driving from Ellensburg to Yakima, through rolling hills covered with sagebrush and sparse brown grass, that it wasn't stories about people that looked like me that I wanted, but stories about places that looked like the place where I live. And that's a much rarer thing to find especially in the genres I read. (Which is not to say that Japanese-American fantasy is common, because, ha, no.)
It strikes me that that's what I've been trying to do lately in my writing: build up a sense of place, a sense of setting as character, as essential to the story. But where I live, the land doesn't look anything like the generic western European fantasy land that tends to show up in novels: neither place I live, Washington or Louisiana. And that's a crying shame, because -- if the land is different, how does that change the story?
(One of many reasons I love S.M. Stirling's writing: the Emberverse is set in my neck of the woods, and Stirling uses the geography, and not only that, but he does it for my favorite kind of warfare. <3)
If my Narnia didn't look western enough before, just wait until the sagebrush shows up.
I realized today, driving from Ellensburg to Yakima, through rolling hills covered with sagebrush and sparse brown grass, that it wasn't stories about people that looked like me that I wanted, but stories about places that looked like the place where I live. And that's a much rarer thing to find especially in the genres I read. (Which is not to say that Japanese-American fantasy is common, because, ha, no.)
It strikes me that that's what I've been trying to do lately in my writing: build up a sense of place, a sense of setting as character, as essential to the story. But where I live, the land doesn't look anything like the generic western European fantasy land that tends to show up in novels: neither place I live, Washington or Louisiana. And that's a crying shame, because -- if the land is different, how does that change the story?
(One of many reasons I love S.M. Stirling's writing: the Emberverse is set in my neck of the woods, and Stirling uses the geography, and not only that, but he does it for my favorite kind of warfare. <3)
If my Narnia didn't look western enough before, just wait until the sagebrush shows up.