Two days ago, on a perfect August Saturday, a girl sat in the Lewiston City Library. She wasn’t fidgeting or whispering. She sat perfectly still, pivoted in her chair to listen to the lecture on Ice Age Idaho. She was maybe ten years old, her freckled face a bit ketchupy, her bangs cut straight and very short, as if someone didn’t want to do the job again soon. An Idaho girl, as I had been.
I sat behind her. I was trying to pay attention to the lecture (for kids and adults) so that I could better understand the Lewiston/Clarkston valley, the setting of almost everything I write. Since I now live on the other side of the country, I try to gather setting details when I’m home on visits. I figured a smattering of the Pleistocene couldn’t hurt.
But I’ve always been more interested in people than places. I struggled to maintain focus on the paleontologist, who said something about massive floods from Lake Missoula and Lake Bonneville widening this valley. I watched the girl give a quick smile to her grandmother, who anchored the end of the row.
That funny smile, full of small teeth.
Days later, a dip into National Geographic tells me that strontium isotopes were absorbed into her teeth during their creation. Strontium isotopes are stable isotopes, atoms with extra or missing neutrons, that are absorbed from the place you are born. If that girl, like me, were born here, these isotopes forever record Lewiston, Idaho. If she, like me, decides to move to New York City, make her home there, and on to Ontario, then down to Miami, then her bones will record that. Apparently, bone cells turn over constantly.
She will take Idaho with her, and more specifically, this valley that the paleontologist is telling us all about, and the flood that swept through here eons ago, drowning mammoths and depositing basalt.
It helps me to know how setting can take residence in me. Setting is in my body. It helps to know that my teeth come from one place and my bones from another. The conversation between them is the storyline of my life.
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But our readers need a fully realized setting to make sense of a story.
As writers, how do we make a setting come alive? We know that it’s vital for good writing to have a sense of place in our narrative writing. But how to push past the ordinary and give your readers something true?
First, our bodies can guide us. All that we glean from our five senses can help to root the reader.
In this place that my teeth call home, I see such a big, broad sky, uninterrupted by many trees or skyscrapers. This valley holds both the Snake and Clearwater Rivers, spanned by several bridges. On one a sign says, “No Jumping,” and I wonder about the person who wants to jump. I hope it’s because they think they’ll never die, and not because they want to. Brown canyon walls deepened and widened by those Pleistocene-era floods ring this valley. A man being wheeled out of a church is missing part of his leg. Swallows rest on the telephone lines like so many notes on a ledger line.
In this place that my teeth call home, I sometimes smell the sulphur from Potlatch, the paper mill. It once was a constant, but now only stinks on days when there’s a thick cloud cover. The valley is a place of great natural beauty, and the smell is a manmade slap in the face. It’s a smell like cooking cabbage and boiled eggs inside a hot car. It’s a smell as if the town could not stop farting to save its life, even when company was visiting.
In this place that my teeth call home, I taste the salty bread and nut butter and black coffee at my cousin Terri’s home. I taste her husband’s delicious local merlot. I taste dust springing up after rain as I walk the neighborhood with Terri and talk about everything. Maybe the dust of a mammoth tooth. Maybe basalt.
In this place that my teeth call home, I hear a plane fly overhead, taking off from the Lewiston airport, where I once worked at the Italian restaurant as a dishwasher, my white orthopedic shoes stained pink with tomato sauce. I hear my dad’s voice telling me a story about Whispering Leo, who came back from World War II and spoke only in hushed tones for the rest of his life.
In this place that my teeth call home, I touch my own dry skin. I witness my fingers touching all manner of things. I touch the salty sourdough bread to my lips. My tongue touches the bread, and my Idaho teeth touch the bread, too. Touch is everything, curving palm to thick ceramic coffee cup, the warmth lingering.
Second, memory informs setting, too. My dad knows all the fish in these rivers, steelhead, sturgeon, salmon, bass, and trout. I don’t have his knowledge, but I do have memories. I remember the times I went fishing with him and never caught a thing. Except once, a rainbow trout, up at Dworshak Dam. Dad slit it open, and I saw its pink guts spill out and I was fascinated, not sad. He cut off the head and tail and we cooked it over the fire in a small iron skillet. The fish was a paler pink and firm and delicious. I remember the crack of the cold can of grape soda pop, the sting of my sunburned shoulders. That night, the sigh of my sister, snoring in the sleeping bag next to mine.
What our senses tell us, what memory adds, and finally third, emotion rolling out of us give the reader a rooting in where our story takes place.
I feel hard-won joy for all that this setting has layered inside me. All that my bones and teeth know, and the less hard parts of me, too. Those that will give way sooner. This place, where my real stories and invented ones take place.
It is just fine to pay attention to the girl paying attention to the lecture. Her story will be her own, with a knowledge of a flood coming at those woolly mammoths, carrying them along, leaving only their teeth to say that they were ever here.
You, my friend, will do the same in creating the setting of your story. You will bring to it all that you care about, all that you know, a bit that you looked up, and much that you can see, smell, taste, touch and hear. Your characters will navigate your setting, and your setting will push back against your characters, giving them tough things like river drownings and easy things like pebbles in sneakers that won’t stop bothering until you stop to get them out.