What Makes a Sense of Place in A Story?
Mar. 18th, 2021 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forestofgloryI'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?
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?
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Date: 2021-03-19 11:51 pm (UTC)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?
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Date: 2021-03-20 05:41 pm (UTC)