What Makes a Sense of Place in A Story?

[forestofglory]

I've been thinking recently about what makes a story have sense of place. I've noticed that quite a bit of fanfic feels placeless. Just the settings feel generic, like things are in a city, or maybe a university, and there are some streets but nothing has name or more than the vaguest description. To me as a reader it can feel a bit adrift. I like stories to feel grounded, and to have a lot of texture. My favorite books tend to be SFF that makes me feel like a whole other world is real. I know that not everyone is into that. So I thought I would chat about what does give a story a sense place for me.

A key thing is simply specificity, places with names feel more real. Also things like a quick nod to the existence of seasons and weather can really help. If people are eating something then what are they eating? All of these kinds of things helps the reader build a sense of the the place the story happens in.

A long the same lines sensory details really add texture to a story. I want to know what buildings look like, what the food tastes like, how it smells when the characters enter a new place. That kind of thing is very grounding.

Finally a sense of space and movement. This one is the trickiest. But if you've every read a story set in a place you know and thought "those streets don't connect!" you might know what I mean. This is about how spaces relate to each other, how close or far away in both space and time are things? How big are spaces relative to other spaces?

A sense of place is something that takes work to create in story. These things all require the author to do a bit of work. And it makes readers like me very happy. So what make a story have sense of place for you?

Comments

[narie]

Like others are saying, a lot of generic/placeless fic feels terribly American to me, as someone who lived there for a while and is resolutely not from there. On the converse, generic, placeless fic, hardly ever feels like it is set in a nameless European city, for example; I've been pondering lately why there's so little UK-set fic when there's also a significant Chinese diaspora community there (although more tied to HK), and I really think it's just the make-up of fandom.

I think especially in MDZS fic there's a tension that's very hard to escape because most/many authors have not visited a modern Chinese city, which to me is most natural setting for a modern AU, and thus default to setting fic in a more familiar environment, which brings with it additional conventions and compromises (the US college experience is a particularly jarring one that I will back click out of 99% of the time). But I think at the same time on some level people recognise the less-than-ideal nature of that. So you have two choices - a generic no-name city, to keep the focus away from it as much as possible, or an online researched/Lonely Planet version of modern China, which is not the easiest thing to put together, in all fairness, especially if you don't speak the language. And which, at any rate, is probably also going to be disappointed; I've read fics that felt like tourist brochures full of authentic experiences that felt equally artificial.

(I've also been talking to others about how fic set in New York is also set in a very homogeneous, mythical version of New York. There are narrative shortcuts that signal "this is New York," from other media, when in fact, it bears little relationship to most people's lives in New York.)

In imaginary worlds, giving things names, and a geography is essential, but one place where things fall apart often for me is actually the economy (in the broadest sense)! Does the world that I am reading about seem like it is actually plausible? Capable of feeding itself? Below a critical population density and thus bound for inevitable decline? So for example I am forever disappointed at the shots of Minas Tirith in Lord of the Rings, because there are no farmsteads around it, no sense at all of how an city of that size is kept fed and watered (the book is clear that these places exist, that the fields of the Pelennor are fertile farms).

[kilerkki]

The hobbits are the only people in Middle Earth who should actually be able to feed themselves. Where are the Elves of Lothlorien growing the ingredients for lembas? Where are the kalegarths of Rohan?? Whence Denethor’s cherry tomatoes???

For MDZS, I would be happy to see more fic writers follow the example of many webnovelists and just set their stories in “City X” rather than trying to recreate Shanghai from Travelocity reviews, so long as they still make an effort to make City X feel like a real place. But I think we still need to read and research a LOT more broadly to have the details necessary to make that work. I’ve been some modern-day danmei novels but would want to read a lot more before attempting to set a story in a modern Chinese university. You can do a lot of magical hand waving in a canon setting; much less so in modern AUs for which people have lived experience.

[narie]

Yeah, in the movie they butchered that stuff - all the cities feel too small to sustain stable populations and realms! The books are definitely better about homesteads and farms outside places like Bree and throughout Rohan, but the movies... are gorgeous but sparsely populated!

For MDZS fic, I think it's very hard, because even if you set it in City X, it's hard to give it a genuine Chinese feel - the architecture and the geography feels wrong. Every time someone lives in a free-standing house with a yard presented as a normal thing I'm sceptical. I've not been to China but I've lived and worked in Chinese-adjacent countries and it's just hard to get those details right if you have no lived experience of them.

100% agreed that you can get a lot sloppier in canon, because canon itself is also pretty sloppy about locations and distances and world building. Most of the fics I've read do a good job of fleshing it out, actually! Although I'm forever haunted by trying to work out the economics of the world and who the people of Yiling pay taxes to (and whether his refusal to pay them is part of folk hero Yiling Laozu's appeal, tbh!). Yiling strikes me as a bit of a frontier town, as it were, you don't settle next to a giant haunted mountain of corpses unless you're out of better choices, you know?

[forestofglory]

The political system of CQL is such a mess! Who does anyone pay taxes to? What powers does the Chief Cultivator even have? Is there any non-cultivator government?

[hiddenramen]

Big BIG agree on the economy thing: some of my favorite worldbuilding is when the author takes the time to think about the location and how it actually works. How does your city deep in the craggy mountains feed itself? Do they import food? How do they pay for that? Where do they import it from? And how does that show itself on a micro-scale, in the way people eat, in what they eat, in who lives in your city and how many people and how they relate to each other?

[forestofglory]

Yes, please all the fictional food systems!

[narie]

Right? Sometimes it's so poorly thought out that you realise the world doesn't hold together at first reading, other times it's less readily apparent, but the satisfaction of digging into an imaginary world and seeing that it does work, that it does hold together... it's so good!

[forestofglory]

Yes! I really enjoy fitting the pieces of the world together in my head and having them work!

[forestofglory]

I'll try to be more aware of how my Americaness is making me see very American things as "generic".

I have read several fics that where set at very American universities but with Chinese place names and it was very jarring! A surprising number of Americans seem to have no idea that universities are not the same everywhere.

Also like the experience of living in place is not the same as the experience of being a tourist there. So stuff that's too based on travel guides doesn't feel right either.

This why the idea that modern AUs are "easier" doesn't make sense to me.

[narie]

I've worked at universities in four different continents, and let me tell you, the American college experience is a rare one. But ok, fine, you're writing an American college AU; I still find that the WWX American College Experience, which is a trope in and of itself these days, rings patently incompatible with his character, or at least with my understanding of his character. I get very frustrated by it.

I would say modern AUs are easier if you don't care about the setting, because then you don't have to make any conscious decisions about the setting. However, I don't think you and I are writing that kind of modern AU!