Location, or place, in writing occupies a lot of my thoughts. So many writers live in NYC or have at one point in their lives. A lot of writers have moved around and experienced different cultures. There are those writers, and then there are Southern writers, regional writers, Southwestern, Midwestern, and so on. But what about Colorado writers?
Usually an article about a writer from Colorado is placed in the context of the region. They’re writing about a coal mine or a flood or something related to the (sometimes boring) history of Colorado.
A poetry professor in college insisted that where we’re from, and where we’ve lived, seeps into our writing, that place is unavoidable. Since then I’ve been trying to figure out how Colorado factors into my writing.
At a novel writing workshop this summer, our instructor spoke briefly about place. We read an excerpt from a book that takes place in a coastal town in Maine. For the project I started, I couldn’t figure out whether to set the story in a coastal town or in Colorado. There is no doubt that location can be as large as a character, and if not, still shapes the story.
Colorado is landlocked, neither truly the West nor the Midwest nor the Southwest. We’re kind of the border state between the Midwest and the West. Sometimes we’re categorized as the (Wild) West and sometimes with the Midwest. The most accurate classification I’ve seen is the Mountain Region.
A few months ago I read David Payne’s essay in the Oxford American about why writers from the North are considered national and writers from the South are considered regional. I love Southern writing. The distinct flavor is down-to-earth, sometimes strange, lyrical, and magical. The writing seems to focus more on characters and place than ideas and plot, though neither of the latter are missing. But it’s no wonder that those writing from the South are tired of hearing that their fiction is colorful or being grouped together with the only common thread being place. I just stereotyped writers who happen to live in the South in this very paragraph.
But we can’t ignore location, can we? Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, two of my favorite writers, can’t be separated from their roots. Would As I Lay Dying be a different novel if it were set in the middle of Boston or San Francisco or Denver? What about O’Connor’s stories? The country characters need their farms and open spaces in order for the stories to work. The characters can’t go into town without having come from outside of it.
What irks me is that the sheer number of writers in New York seems to equate writing with the city. It says that writers can’t be writers outside of a city. I absolutely don’t believe this, but I’m tired of reading in a byline or the back flap of a book cover that the writer lives in New York. Even Flannery O’Connor lived in New York for a time. So does one have to venture East in order to be taken seriously?
There exist numerous ways to classify writing, and I suppose place is just one more. But I can’t help but wonder if our need to categorize and analyze reduces writing to stereotypes or helps elucidate the finer points.
Location in Writing
Location, or place, in writing occupies a lot of my thoughts. So many writers live in NYC or have at one point in their lives. A lot of writers have moved around and experienced different cultures. There are those writers, and then there are Southern writers, regional writers, Southwestern, Midwestern, and so on. But what about Colorado writers?
Usually an article about a writer from Colorado is placed in the context of the region. They’re writing about a coal mine or a flood or something related to the (sometimes boring) history of Colorado.
A poetry professor in college insisted that where we’re from, and where we’ve lived, seeps into our writing, that place is unavoidable. Since then I’ve been trying to figure out how Colorado factors into my writing.
At a novel writing workshop this summer, our instructor spoke briefly about place. We read an excerpt from a book that takes place in a coastal town in Maine. For the project I started, I couldn’t figure out whether to set the story in a coastal town or in Colorado. There is no doubt that location can be as large as a character, and if not, still shapes the story.
Colorado is landlocked, neither truly the West nor the Midwest nor the Southwest. We’re kind of the border state between the Midwest and the West. Sometimes we’re categorized as the (Wild) West and sometimes with the Midwest. The most accurate classification I’ve seen is the Mountain Region.
A few months ago I read David Payne’s essay in the Oxford American about why writers from the North are considered national and writers from the South are considered regional. I love Southern writing. The distinct flavor is down-to-earth, sometimes strange, lyrical, and magical. The writing seems to focus more on characters and place than ideas and plot, though neither of the latter are missing. But it’s no wonder that those writing from the South are tired of hearing that their fiction is colorful or being grouped together with the only common thread being place. I just stereotyped writers who happen to live in the South in this very paragraph.
But we can’t ignore location, can we? Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, two of my favorite writers, can’t be separated from their roots. Would As I Lay Dying be a different novel if it were set in the middle of Boston or San Francisco or Denver? What about O’Connor’s stories? The country characters need their farms and open spaces in order for the stories to work. The characters can’t go into town without having come from outside of it.
What irks me is that the sheer number of writers in New York seems to equate writing with the city. It says that writers can’t be writers outside of a city. I absolutely don’t believe this, but I’m tired of reading in a byline or the back flap of a book cover that the writer lives in New York. Even Flannery O’Connor lived in New York for a time. So does one have to venture East in order to be taken seriously?
There exist numerous ways to classify writing, and I suppose place is just one more. But I can’t help but wonder if our need to categorize and analyze reduces writing to stereotypes or helps elucidate the finer points.