Pond in the Woods (1862), Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña
This Must Be the Place
I live in the woods, and the trees in these parts are mostly young, with narrow crowns and slender trunks, and crowded together, like concertgoers, shoulder to shoulder, arms in the air. They look especially youthful in the spring, when their feathery foliage is so vibrant, it glows. Brimming with birdsong, the canopy deepens to a dark gloss over the summer and turns fiery and redolent in the fall. The winter woods, though starkly barren, nevertheless check the wind, ensuring a hush around the house. When snow falls and gathers in the trees, I feel as if I’m living all alone in a snow globe.
These woods, however, harbor countless other lives: deer, squirrels, foxes, lynxes, coyotes. And evidence of former lives, too. I once came upon a scattering of apple and pear trees, buttressed by a bit of a stone wall—an old orchard, I expect, and the remains of an enclosure, now crumbling and overridden with moss. Maybe a farm stood there at one time. The woods are rife with such mysteries. They hide stories.
This morning, as a fog hangs around the trees, dreamy and gray, smudging the edges of the trunks and swallowing the crowns, the woods have me thinking about setting and how it functions in prose. It’s easy to undervalue setting, to see it as a slapdash backdrop, little more than a painted panel that flumps to the stage and before which all the more interesting things—plot, character, theme, structure—shine and unfold.
But these other elements can’t reach their shining potential unless setting also is given its due. Setting doesn’t merely evoke a mood, conceal a symbol or two, or showcase a writer’s flair for figurative language; it largely dictates the plot through its influence on the protagonist. It has the power to shape a character’s conflicts, thoughts, actions, values, aversions, decisions. . .Their very nature. If, as the saying goes, we are what we eat, one might also claim, we are where we grow. The same is true for our fictional characters.
A meaningful setting is essential to the reading experience. To lose themselves in the story, readers need the setting, however fantastical, to feel visitable, explorable, walkable, believable—real.
As for the writer? Specifically, the uninspired writer? Starting with setting can help them, too. A story that is going nowhere or falling flat might benefit from a refining of the setting or the creation of a new one. A different time and place, if fleshed out fully, will inevitably impact the action and unlock narrative possibilities.
Or maybe there’s not even a story to revise or further. If you’re a writer entirely at loose ends, you might set aside the pressure of coming up with an idea and simply focus on what interests you, setting-wise. Is there a part of your country you’ve always wanted to know more about, an era that intrigues you? Researching a time and place will educate you on countless practices, customs, cultural symbols, and beliefs, some of which are bound to hold promise as fodder for stories.
If extensive research doesn’t appeal to you, you might turn your attention to a location and time you already know—your grandmother’s kitchen, favorite teacher’s classroom, childhood bedroom, dusty attic—and mine your memories, jotting down everything you remember. Or you can simply be present in the moment, walk outside, and take note of what you see, smell, taste, hear, and feel. Gaze up at the trees. Wander through the woods. Find what’s left of an orchard. Can you picture the fruit trees’ sapling state? Good. Now rebuild the stone fence. Add the farmhouse and the struggling farmer. Introduce a romance, betrayal, injury, lie.
Whatever your special place, old or new, let a piece of it engender a tale and steer the action. Let it break, get lost, turn up, burn down, or hide a stranger, a dragon, an abandoned toy, a ghost.
In prose, the physical setting begets an emotional landscape. Setting grounds the reader—and the writer, too, for that matter—and elicits feeling. How often, when asked why they love certain novels, do readers struggle to form an answer? “This book made me feel. . .something. Everything? I don’t know. I couldn’t put it down, and I can’t stop thinking about it.” Some of that rapture, I’m certain, comes from the work’s setting. It invited the reader in. It compelled the reader to stay.
MELISSA OSTROM is the author of The Beloved Wild (Feiwel & Friends, 2018), a Junior Library Guild book and an Amelia Bloomer Award selection, and Unleaving (Feiwel & Friends, 2019). Her stories have appeared in many journals and been selected for Best Small Fictions 2019, Best Microfiction 2020, Best Small Fictions 2021, Best Microfiction 2021, and Wigleaf Top 50 2022. She lives with her husband, children, and dog Mocha in Holley, New York. Learn more at www.melissaostrom.com or find her on Twitter @melostrom.
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