WHERE ARE WE?

By Sharon May

Imagine starting a story and having no clue as to where or when it takes place. You would feel as if you were floating in space. To make readers feel grounded we need a setting.

Most writers develop setting early in the work and expect the reader to be satisfied. But a skillful writer keeps the setting alive throughout the piece and lets it build organically. Silas House, in works like The Coal Tattoo, masterfully uses setting throughout his work.

It would be nice if we could establish setting in a sentence or two but the physical location and time of a story only scratch the surface. Instead, an author, to create an adequate setting, should develop what I call place, which builds the look and feel of a locale and era. Some authors use long descriptions to establish place, but details, a word or phrase here and there, can also build it piece by piece.

In my most recent short story, “The Birthday Gift,” the setting is rural Kentucky in the early 1960s. I could have said that in one sentence as I did here, but that would have been rather boring. Instead, the young narrator tells what he knows to demonstrate he is ready to start school, including his address and the president’s name. Not only does this information build place, it also reveals the narrator’s character. This helps me keep the story compact and short.

For my novel, setting is much more like a character so I provide lots of descriptions of the landscape, particularly of the mountains to capture how they sculpt where and how Appalachians live. If on a winding, narrow roadway, you can bet that the road is built along a river, and the houses or trailers, can only be found on wide spaces carved into the hillside. Small farms and towns fill bottom land between the hills. The mountains dictate this layout, and they mold the characters as well.

Patty Loveless, a Pikeville, Kentucky native, in her song, “You Will Never Leave Harlan Alive,” describes the mountains’ effect on the inhabitants as she describes the brevity of a day in a hollow, saying, “Where the sun comes up about ten in the mornin’/ And the sun goes down about three in the day.” A poet friend of mine wants to leave Kentucky because he is tired of the grey winter days. That pretty much sums up why I had to escape the mountains as well. This darkness leads to the hillbilly’s attitude of hopelessness and sorrow. Of course, place helps create the mood of a story.

Place can’t be dashed off in just a paragraph or two early in a story, but should unfold as the story progresses from beginning to ending. Readers want to be enveloped by place and time, to feel, hear, taste, and smell as well as see where they are.