It took me years to understand the importance of location and how it can make a story more powerful.
In the past, I placed my stories in living rooms. Bedrooms. Offices. The location was unimportant as I focused on getting my characters walking, talking, and bickering. Conflict, I had read, was paramount. Who cared if the curtains were red or black?
Mundane scenery was familiar to me. Although raised on a rural farm, I’ve spent most of the past twenty-seven years in home and office. I wrote what I knew. And besides, my stories were the tight, tiny equivalent of one-act plays. Spare little nuggets, no words wasted, no room for set decoration. I never wrote, “Couches Like White Elephants,” but there’s still time.
Truly, I was impatient and lazy. I didn’t know that by setting stories in locations that are fraught with meaning, you get a free shot of emotional juice. Consider these two potential first lines:
- The man with the serious face carried the balloon through the living room.
- The man with the serious face carried the balloon through the nursing home.
A living room means little to the reader without context. You’ll need to specify before they can start to feel anything (e.g., the empty living room; the living room littered with dead cats; the living room with the black walls; etc.).
A nursing home has all sorts of emotions baked into it. Just the mere mention will prepare some readers to cry because of past sad experiences there. The pump is primed!
Hence, add impact to a story by upgrading your people, places, and things. Choose them for emotion, be it tension, sadness, excitement, horror, or whatever your chosen flavor.
George Saunders has used a Theme Park in many of his stories: “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “Pastoralia,” “Bounty,” and others. George could have set his workplace drama in a familiar cubicle–and sure, there’s tons of shorthand available in that milieu (reference a broken copier and many office drones will twitch with a visceral response)–but Saunders uses (and perhaps over uses) the theme park environment because of A) its uniqueness (he’s really made the theme park genre his own) and B) the emotional memories it is likely to trigger (weird place, boring childhood trips, carnival food, strange enthusiasts, and so on).
Here’s a thought on juxtaposition. My favorite works of art contain a range of emotional notes. There are chuckles found in both Hamlet and The Evil Dead 2. I like when angelic voices sing dark material. Salvador Dali’s paintings of his beloved Gala combined his usual weirdness with naked adoration. Think about your own tastes and find what mashups matter most to you. Have you seen Everything, Everywhere, All at Once? It’s loaded with emotional mashups.
In the Saunders Theme Park stories, horrible things frequently happen, and they catch the reader off-guard because the set-up is so silly. They would be less impactful if the setting was drab, the characters were severe, and then something terrible is piled on. The reader feels a greater emotional punch if you first put them in the opposite mindset. Like a boxer, practice your feint and counterpunch.
For George, the theme park is has been rich soil to mine. What unusual/uncommon/underexplored place is your equivalent of the Saunders Spot? Go write a story set there. I’d bet that you will have a better (or at least different) writing experience, and your work will have more resonance.
An Exercise
Before starting your next story, write a list of ten places where it could be set. E.g., a funeral home, a department store, an emergency room, a vet’s office, a sewage treatment plant, etc. Then, mentally play out your story idea in each location. Your family drama would be hacky at a funeral home (we already have Six Feet Under). Perhaps it would have a weird emotional resonance at a sewage treatment plant where a father and son work side-by-side? Or what about The Sopranos set in kindergarten? Yes, please.
If you try the exercise, drop me a line. I’d love to hear about it and share thoughts.
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