Where?

When I was a freshman in college, my neighbor down the hall spent a long night trying to convince me to switch my major to geography.  In her defense, she was more than slightly drunk when she argued that geography was a perfectly marketable degree.  However, one of her comments stuck with me.  "I didn't know until I walked down the streets of Prague how very much of the city's workings had revolved around the ebb and flow of the Moldau, on its path, and on what traveled along it and in it."

I had spent two summers before, actually, exploring place in stories and had suddenly been aware of the role of where in the workings of my daily life and rituals.

On occasion, place can play a major role in your stories.  Stories that can either be written around place or ones that are enhanced by a sense of place include:

• A story in which your physical perspective allowed you to see something coming but not to do anything about it.
• A story in which your physical perspective allowed you to intervene first or cause the motion of the story.
• A story in which your ritual or actions were necessitated by the physical set up of something.
• A story in which the flow is interrupted by physical distance or obstacles.
• A story in which your perspective changes grossly over the course of the story (such as those stories of places that were overwhelming as a child but decidedly underwhelming later).

As you tell these stories, however, resist the urge to lay out the setting in essay format (there was a chair by the door, which was beside the steps, etc.) but try to add the details into the action of the story (as I crept back up to my bedroom, I slowly opened the door halfway, avoiding cracking it on the chair behind it and thus giving away my midnight run to the kitchen).