Why “Sense of Place” Matters: In Writing and in Life

Sense of Place in Writing

For as long as I can remember, I have felt a connection with the landscape, and believe that a sense of place matters a great deal—both in life and in writing. We live out our lives against a backdrop of mountains or deserts, the prairie, city streets, or the ocean, often in various combinations of these settings.

And this affects us. It has an important impact in developing our character–how we perceive the world, how we perceive ourselves. So it is that, coming from our particular backgrounds as we do, when we write, we do so out of that background--whether our story takes place on the plains of Nebraska in the 1950’s or the Russian steppes of Tolstoy’s time.

In addition, of course, writing with a strong sense of a story’s setting provides the potential for readers to experience a place they may not have been before. Reading Wuthering Heights, we find ourselves in the Yorkshire moors of the 1700’s. Melville lets us experience the “sweet mystery” of the sea, and its “gentle awful stirrings.” We, too, can offer this experience to our readers, whether we write of life in the small town we came from, or the rocky coast of Oregon which we’ve only read about.

Most importantly, a powerful sense of place makes our writing come alive. Our characters fall into and out of love, make terrible mistakes, suffer, and find joy again—in a particular place. This is enormously significant in good writing. Place helps to make our characters who they are, just as it makes us who we are.

Sense of Place for Me

I grew up in rural Nebraska, and lived on four different farms our family rented until buying our “home place” when I was fifteen. And I attended three different country schools. Going to school meant walking down gravel roads with my sister, the two of us walking a straight road from north to south, then from east to west, hills and fields stretching out endlessly on either side, the sky enormous above.

It meant living in a place with few trees and few people, walking past deserted farmhouses and wondering who might have once lived there. What does it mean to grow up in a place like this? To live out your life? Does the enormity of the landscape foster feelings of insignificance? Or does it do the opposite? And when you can look out over the sweep of prairie, able to see long distances, what does this do to your view of the world? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I believe it does have an effect, most likely in different ways for different people.

It might mean basking in the place you live, enchanted with its particularities and its delights. It might mean railing against them. Often it is a complicated combination of the two. Whatever it means for you, a sense of place is vitally important. Important to you and to your art.

“The sense of place is as essential to good and honest writing as a logical mind;” Eudora Welty wrote, “surely they are somewhat related. It is by knowing where you stand that you are able to judge where you are.”
–Lucy Adkins

Writing Exercise:

When we first meet and start to get to know other people, one of the first questions we ask is where are you from. Where are you from? Read the poem “Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon.

Think about the landscape you are from—is it plains and big sky? A small town nearly hidden in a forest of oak and pine? Maybe you are from sidewalks and buildings that tower, maybe from sultry afternoons and leaf peepers crying at night.

Now consider what your parents did for a living. Maybe they are from Clorox and clothespins like George Ella Lyon’s people. Maybe from pocket protectors and lines of numbers without end. Think about the smells you smelled as a child, the food you ate. The fears that occupied your thoughts at night .

Now, write, beginning “I’m from….” And see where your writing goes.

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