All stories take place in both time and space. Intriguing stories employ a keen sense of place as an integral part of the story and more than a backdrop. It must be a place that the stories’ characters enter and leave, places that sustain and threaten them, places they identify with or that repel them to the point of flight. Because stories can carry us across time and space if they occur in a place we can touch and remember. A good story needs a geography of length and breadth and height, signs of settlement if not civilization past or present, a place where plants and rocks aren’t generic but named. And, if it is Minnesota, the place needs some kind of weather. Being specific about the elements of a place implicitly conveys things that need not be said. If the action occurs in a valley woodland of maple and basswood trees, readers may sense without being told it is a cool and shady place. Or, if it is on a hillside grown to oaks and hickories, the reader may sense it is dry with mottled shade. Specifics both limit and extend the action.

Kirkus Reviews gave Copy Desk Murders a coveted starred review for, among other things, “a fine sense of place.” In the fictional Alton County, each setting reflects a specific locale in southern Minnesota whose details I know well. And it is the specific details of these that affect what the story’s characters think and do. For example: The intern’s corpse lies at the bottom of a ravine. The serpentine road down that wooded coulee suggests several plausible causes of death and differences of opinion that will drive the story forward. This coulee is real and I travel down it to ready a trout stream. The city of Featherstone with its Romanesque core of red brick buildings is a composite of several towns in the region. Then I borrowed the real Louis Sullivan bank (National Register) from one of those cities and added details from others. Though I didn’t grow up in a three-story house on a hill, the landscape visible in the novel it is an expansion of what I often saw from our farmhouse porch:  

Grandfather Meade built the house among the bur oaks at the end of a low, limestone ridge he dubbed San Juan Hill. From there, he saw most of Featherstone a mile to the east where the late afternoon sunlight gleamed from the water tower, courthouse dome, church spires and grain elevators. From east to west, his gaze took in the fencerows that divided southeastern Minnesota into fields of corn and soybeans, oats and pastures interspersed with groves and farmsteads. He could see for miles until the countryside dissolved into the haze at the horizon. At this evening hour, long shadows stretched from behind the trees and fencerows. In the distance, a solitary thunderhead floated in the cerulean sky trailing a narrow veil of rain beneath it…  he gazed intently at the landscape he had known since birth. He wanted to imprint the vista of this perfect summer evening in his mind as an eidetic memory. His eyes took in the details of the familiar longing for amazement as if seeing them for the first time. Then it was time to leave.

A sense of place begins with acute observation. Pay attention to the landscape but don’t judge it. I have driven across the Wyoming plains many times but didn’t truly see what was in the sagebrush until I shouldered a backpack and hiked the cattle ranges from Nebraska to Idaho. At a walking pace, the details of delicate flowers, insects and animals came into view. This wasn’t the sea of gray sage I saw from the car at 70 miles per hour. It was the real world up close and personal.

As you draft your story, find locales that appeal to you, that inspire curiosity. Go to places you think you know well and try to see them as if for the first time. What are their salient details and what stories do those details suggest?