;)
Contemplating geographic specificity in writing: do we need the detail?
Monday, March 28, 2011 at 12:00PM Setting is an important facet of our understanding of a story. Setting can add layers of meaning to the interpretation of a story. It can offer a more abstract background for the unfolding of events. Setting can pass by, almost unnoticed, or can pop out on every page. Handled clumsily, setting can be a distraction.
I’m reading Decoded by Jay-Z right now, and the setting of his youth—the Marcy Housing Project—is essential for an understanding of the story Jay-Z is trying to tell about himself and his generation. Before this book I knew nothing about Marcy. Jay teaches the important geography. He teaches me how to understand Marcy, and does it so well that Marcy becomes its own character in Jay’s story. This is a case of a writer taking an unfamiliar setting and unpacking it, DECODing it, making it known, even if it’s light years away from my personal experience.
That’s not the sort of geography that I’m contemplating. I’m talking about the other sort of geography that Jay engages here. He’s also a dropper of names in the broader milieu of New York City. He mentions the names of streets, neighborhoods, boroughs with the ease of someone who knows those corners and crannies. Stieg Larsson does this as well, taking great pains to name streets and towns as his narrative unfolds in the Lisbeth Salander novels. I mentioned this detailed geography in my comments on the Larsson trilogy (see “Locational Specificity” late in the post). I wondered if I was missing some significance in these allusions. And although Jay-Z’s New York City names have more familiarity to me in terms of language and popular culture, I couldn’t help feeling that I might be missing some connotation.
How much effort I put into figuring out that significance might depend on how invested I am in the story. But if I’m really gripped by the tale, I’m less likely to care about the geography, and more likely to speed past those road signs in search of the next plot development. This is as true with Jay-Z’s memoir as it was with Salander’s trilogy.
I confess that part of the problem is my own ignorance of the geographies in question. I may recognize the New York City places, but I’d be at a loss if you wanted me to point them out on a map. And the Swedish geography (even if you excuse that some of the places are fictional)? I got nothing.
I’ve decided there is only one city I know well enough to use geography to generate added significance: Albuquerque. But would anyone outside of Albuquerque get anything from those names? Is it worth the time of the writer to build that level of specificity?
My knee-jerk response was no. I thought, Build into the story a sense of the significance of the places that really count, as Jay has done with Marcy, but don’t bother name-dropping other geography. But. But. Then I thought of the handful of times I have read stories in settings I know personally. I remembered the thrill of recognition, the richness that my familiarity added to my experience of the story. Even if only a fraction of the audience gets that thrill or makes that connection or recognizes the possibility of an additional connotation, then those mentions ARE worthwhile.
Jay-Z talks about hiding Easter eggs in his songs. Tiny gems of added meaning that are packed into his rhymes for those listeners willing to think and find them.
Even if *I* don’t get the significance of the specific geography of a well-crafted story, someone else will. I hope someone else will get that thrill of recognition and the treasure of puzzling out additional meaning.
Reader Comments (5)
Interesting post, Dani. I can relate in the context of a TV show we watch, "Fringe." If you haven't seen it, it's a sci-fi/paranormal type show on Fox in the vein of X-Files. It takes place mostly in the Boston area, and it's neat when they show the names of the towns in which the various oddities occur. However, it cuts both ways, as the characters bounce back and forth between Boston and NYC as if they were 20 minutes apart, and that is jarring at times. I remember a time when they were just waking up in the morning in Boston, then zipped down to NYC and were still having their morning coffee. Maybe those ultra-secret black FBI helicopters are faster than I can imagine?
In general I think geography plays an important part in many stories, but it can be overdone, too.
Interesting, Cab. I watched a couple of episodes of a show called Being Human on SyFy recently and had a similar jarring feeling. I think the show is supposed to be in Boston (coincidentally), and though I'm not familiar with Boston, I'm pretty sure they're NOT filming in Boston. My best guess is Toronto (Check that. Wikipedia article says Montreal. Uh huh). So you're right, there are definitely times when the geography can be a distraction from the story. So to place those gems in the story for some people to find, they have to be authentic and perhaps even subtle so we don't feel whacked over the head with them.
How about a car chase down Meadowlark Lane in Corrales? Think anyone would go for that?
A car chase down Meadowlark would be pretty boring. The hardest thing on that road is keeping it slow enough to not attract attention. Although I do remember when a friend caught air going over the irrigation ditch...
I just visited New York for the first time in January (and then again this month, which was a lot of New York in a short period of time for a native West Coaster, but that's another story) and my travel companions kept pointing out how this movie was filmed here, and that bridge was in these movies and these TV shows, and this restaurant was features in this book or that - until finally I wondered out loud why so many films and TV shows and books were set in just one city. Sure, it's big and stuff, but what made it so worthy of a setting? We wondered about it for a while before finally concluding it must be partially an iconic thing, but also partially a recognition thing - a larger proportion of readers/viewers are going to recognize NYC landscapes because they either live there, have lived there, or at least have visited there.
I experienced the thrill of recognition personally when I read Jurassic Park as a kid and saw my hometown mentioned in the text, and more recently when I watched Basic Instinct for the first time and saw that same town come up a BUNCH of times. I was soon shouting at the screen, pointing incoherently at the beach on-screen and wildly looking around at my fellow movie-watchers and idiotically wondering why they weren't as excited as I was.
Sarah, Your visit to New York reminds me that the gems can work in reverse too. If a book or a movie gives a vivid idea of a place, then that story comes back to us if we're ever in the place. I also love your enthusiasm. ;)