Spirit of Place

After this post, I plan to launch into varying the posts between information for those who regard themselves as writers . . . defined by those who actually write things regularly . . . and posts with information for people who do not enjoy writing but sometimes must do so.

The second group includes people who reluctantly need to write reports or other documents on the job [or to get a job] and college students in Majors with a focus on non-writing disciplines but who still must write papers for some of their courses.

If it were any other time than around a significant holiday that I began this blog, I’d delay this post until I had a few more of those posts in place.

But, because I began right at Christmas holiday weekend time, I’m going to diverge, here, into this topic now.

This is about writing, but it’s also about reading.  One’s reading for enjoyment or leisure time reading.

Back in the day, my college offered a course called “Spirit of Place.” 

What that referred to is the realization, primarily by fiction authors, of incorporating a sense of the location, or setting, into their stories.

Because many beginning fiction writers get their earliest ideas around a Christmas theme, I thought that made this a good Christmas Day post to the blog.

“Place” can be a very small location such as a garden or a particular spot in a house or a church building.

Artful fiction writers often create a sense, or “spirit,” of place so vibrant that the location actually becomes a kind of character in the work.

Even more so, you sometimes see this in filmed media, such as television.

For example, if one looks critically at the old television series The Waltons, after a time you realize that about 90 % of the action takes place in a half dozen or so venues.  Walton’s Mountain itself becomes a kind of character.  So do, separately, those subsets of the mountain.

Action occurs primarily in the following locations:  the kitchen table at the Walton home, John Boy’s room [and especially his writing desk], the school, the church, the lumber mill, on the mountain above the Walton home, and Ike Godsey’s store.  [With the subsequent addition of the various colleges the older students attended and John-Boy’s car traveling to and from.]

For an even earlier example from television:  what would Petticoat Junction have been without the Shady Rest hotel, the water tower, and the Cannonball steam locomotive?  And there’s a shared theme between these two series:  as with Godsey’s in the Waltons, Sam Drucker’s general store became a kind of character in Petticoat Junction.

Fiction writers also do this in novels and short stories.  Nathaniel Hawthorne capitalized on the spirit of place as the central focus in The House of the Seven Gables.

Modern authors often do this as well.  Romance author Jana DeLeon brings the lifestyle of the Louisiana bayou to life in her novels.  Historical romance author Marsha Canham has at least one novel in her cannon in which all of the action except at the very beginning and very end of the novel occur aboard sailing ships during the period the novel is set.

For novice authors learning the craft of fiction, the spirit of place often starts focused around a holiday such as Christmas or Easter and the family or community interactions prompted by such holidays.

An awakening of the spirit of place can get invoked in a budding writer by something as simple as a Christmas tree or the dining table during the holiday feast.

Usually, in most families, at holidays there is both celebration and conflict.  The spirit of place is a good starting point for many authors to define their first story ideas.

Add two types of conflict to such interactions, and the writer has the basic skeleton of the story.

From the reading point of view:  don’t you, as a reader, find the story more enjoyable when you have that tangible experience of the setting of a book or short story becoming as vibrant as an additional character to the people in the story?