Place in Fiction
Dominic Russ-Combs
This is a multifaceted introductory or intermediate writing prompt designed to allow students to access and utilize their personal experiences growing up. This, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth, and this exercise will lead students to interrogate and explore their upbringings by anchoring their writer’s eye in the sensory terrain of their hometowns and places. By the end of this exercise students should be writing about “what they don’t know about what they know,” accomplishing Eudora Welty’s brilliant imperative.
Ideally, instructors will pair a coming-of-age story of their choosing with Eudora Welty’s essay “Place in Fiction,” but any story or novel that has a strong sense of place will suffice. Other possible texts include The Ballad of the Sad Café (Carson McCullers), “Good Country People” (Flannery O’Connor), “Theory of Realty” (Holly Goddard Jones), or even the essay “Counterpointed Characterization” (Charles Baxter) for more advanced sections.
Sections A and B of Part I are designed to get students to render the worlds of their upbringings through their senses. For the most part, students have trouble intellectually or imaginatively engaging the places in which they grew up because they have intuitively absorbed the manners and habitudes of their home environments. Making them travel on foot (albeit in their mind) through their hometown makes them participate in their experience of their home as a reader or visitor. Instead of just getting into a car and stomping on the gas, they have to plot out the route they would otherwise blankly follow if behind the wheel. Walking, students must enter perception; they have to notice and ascribe. This is also why I ask students to remember or meditate first in order to ground themselves within their own inner narratives and expedite their imaginings. More important, this initial meditation exhorts students to evaluate what they remember and why.
Though only taking a few minutes, having students reduce sections A and B into a single representation or image for each sense should help them pin down an implicit and referential understanding of their settings around specific sensory nodes, which they can go back to in order to integrate a motif or deepen the subtext of their scene without interrupting or stifling the action.
Following Charles Baxter’s notion of counterpointed characterization, it’s easy to create conflict by putting opposites in contact with each other (as well as increasing a student’s capacity for empathy). Part II entices students to venture toward the other, while getting them thinking about the difference between the mundane (their hometown as they remember it, in exposition) versus the remarkable (what stands out to anyone not from there). The first gives them a greater sense of how their world organically lives and breathes, while the second guides them toward what might be interesting to the general reader.
Part III is designed to p