How Place Shapes Story

How Place Shapes Story

Eudora Welty said, “One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.” She was onto something: where we live, the environments we navigate, inform who we are and how we understand the world. When writers create a fictional place, they create a force that likewise shapes their characters, whether it’s the unsettling Maine towns that have sprung from the imagination of Stephen King, or George Eliot’s provincial Middlemarch, England. While place can deepen the emotional lives of characters, it can also engender opportunities for satire, or pathos. It grounds readers in story by creating a sense of community or history. Setting has certainly played a critical role in my writing. Let’s take a closer look at the power of place.

Community and History

On the most basic level, a fictional place gives characters something to react to—or against. Members of William Faulkner’s Snopes family, for example, live the lives of sharecroppers, and as such resent the landowning families for whom they work. In Faulkner’s story “Barn Burning,” Abner Snopes acts out his frustration at perceived injustice, and ends up cementing his status as an outsider in his community. 

We also learn a lot about a place through its various historical “chapters.” In my linked story collection Strange Attractors, we visit a mall in its heyday, and then again later, when the once-festive food court has devolved into an assemblage of plastic statues and abandoned tables. Place, and the changes that ensue there, give a sense of time passing. By marking that passage of time, place helps us understand the transience of all things.

Emotional Life

Place can also be a mirror for the emotional lives of the characters who live there. Consider the Shire, J.R.R. Tolkien’s representation of “home” in Middle-earth—not just for its denizens, the hobbits, but for characters like Gandalf, who strive to protect it. The Shire is a place of innocence, a touchstone for the hobbits who are, generally, regarded as friendly and happy-go-lucky. To know the Shire is to grasp who lives there—and why this place is worthy. Tolkien understood this: the “conversation” that occurs between the Shire and its denizens carries weight even when characters must leave this idyllic place to further the story. At that point, we already understand something of who the hobbits are because of where they live—and what they have to lose. 

Understanding how place shapes us is a central tenet in my novel The Sound of Rabbits. In the book, the fictional rural town of Ladyford, Wisconsin, presents a thorny situation for protagonist Ruby, who left as soon as she could, and as a woman of middle age is called back to help during a family crisis. Ruby, who views Ladyford with a jaundiced eye, must come to terms with the fact that no place—or its people—are all good or all bad. In order to leave, Ruby villainized Ladyford. And yet she is a product of this place; she carries part of it within her, a lesson she is invited to learn during the course of the book. 

Satire—and Pathos

Place can ground characters in satire: consider George Saunders’ story “Escape from Spiderhead,” which is rich with Saunders’ characteristic worldbuilding and dark humor. In the story, inmates at an experimental prison undergo sometimes brutal tests. Why do they do it? Well, it (purportedly) beats the alternative: regular jail. As we get to know Spiderhead the place, we understand what the characters gain—and lose—by being there. And when the story ends, we understand why in this particular place, the main character can escape in only this particular way. It’s an earned moment.

Place can also be a source of pathos. Zora Neale Hurston understood that. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, her protagonist, Janie, is married to the mayor of Eatonville, Florida. Janie enjoys all the status that situation affords, and yet her life is unfulfilling; she is a prisoner to the mores of this place. When Janie finally breaks free, we as readers are glad—again, it’s an earned moment. We understand what Eatonville meant to her, and how it shaped her.

The Quotidian

Place doesn’t have to be exotic. In fact, sometimes it is the most quotidian of locales that tell us a lot about a character. In Anne Enright’s stories, an airport concourse can take on tremendous import—all because of her character’s interactions in this space. In her story “The Hotel,” for example, the real becomes surreal, the familiar becomes threatening. And in a place as plain-vanilla as an airport, that thin line between stability and danger is highlighted to devastating effect.

In my work, dead malls and dull community college campuses become the sites of all-too-human drama. After all, in life, we spend much of our time in these liminal “non spaces.” And even as an ordinary place can highlight the “everyman” aspect of a character, it also, because of its connection to life as we know it, can create an authentic space in which characters find out who they really are. 

Conclusion

Characters must interact with the places they find themselves in, with the places in which the author sets them. Place is a way for the author to ask: if I put you here, right now, what happens next? It’s not unlike the experiments in “Escape from Spiderhead,” if less cruel. 

And when we read, we enter these other places, these other times. We broaden our own horizons. Our place in the larger world becomes clearer, a little brighter. Maybe that’s what Welty was getting at: being in a new place, we gain empathy.

~ Janice Deal

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Bio:

Janice Deal is the author of a novel, The Sound of Rabbits (Regal House Publishing, 2023), and two short story collections: The Decline of Pigeons (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2013), and a linked collection, Strange Attractors (New Door Books, 2023). She has received an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award for prose. 

Janice and her husband live in the Chicago area, where they hike, follow the music scene, and scope out resale shops. Her belief that writing has the power to transform us, provide solace, and explore what it means to be human is a profound driver for her work.

THE SOUND OF RABBITS

“The Sound of Rabbits is a deeply affecting and powerful novel.” —Lynn Sloan, author of Midstream, Principles of Navigation, and This Far Isn’t Far Enough

The Sound of Rabbits tells the story of Ruby, a bright woman with a love of music who thought that leaving the small town where she grew up would ensure her happiness. But her life in Chicago is not going the way she’d planned. At 41, she’s drifted away from music, and a long-term relationship with a boyfriend has ended badly.

Everything changes with one phone call from her sister, Val, who cares for their mother, Barbara, in the hardscrabble Midwestern town where Ruby grew up. Ruby returns to confront some harsh truths about her family and herself as she tries to find meaning in her mother’s battle with Parkinson’s disease. Written as an homage to the classic archetype of the Hero’s Journey, The Sound of Rabbits relies on different points of view to explore themes of change and death, and considers the role that the past—and acceptance of that past—can play in one’s current and future happiness.

BUY HERE

STRANGE ATTRACTORS

In Janice Deal’s linked story collection STRANGE ATTRACTORS, everyday people navigate the uncertainties of life in the American heartland, seeking order in chaos with a very human mix of resilience and folly.

At first glance, the fictional Ephrem, Illinois, seems a friendly, familiar town: it draws you right in, even if you don’t need supplies at the mall or a snack at Brat Station. But as you come closer, you discover people who are complex and unpredictable. Life itself is capricious, and loneliness can turn a person strange.

Past traumas linger. Illness sometimes falls like a hammer. Yet there’s much affection here, small and large examples of human kindness. For years, Janice Deal has been publishing these award-winning stories about Ephrem. Now assembled for the first time, these extraordinary tales offer a masterful snapshot of life in today’s small-town America.

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