Travel and writing, not travel writing

I have the good fortune this week to be writing this post from Morgan Hill, California. I arrived Saturday afternoon, got my rental car at the San Francisco International Airport, and drove an hour south to Morgan Hill, taking in the scenery (and the traffic) all the way.

One of the interesting things about stepping into a new location is that your perception of your surroundings becomes heightened.

I called my wife from the car, passing San Jose, and said the area felt a little like El Paso, Texas, where we lived for three years. When I arrived in Morgan Hill and spent time driving around the town, I told her it felt like a combination of Bend, Oregon (big-money, outdoorsy), and El Paso (mountain ranges, farm land). Being in a new place forces me to observe, and being forced to do that makes me think about how and where I incorporate setting details into my writing.

I love atmospheric books. James Lee Burke’s rich portrayal of New Orleans. Robert B. Parker’s depiction of Boston. Alexander McCall Smith’s use of Mma Precious Ramotswe to offer insights into Botswana. Even settings that can’t be described but are present, like Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the physical structure of which I can’t explicitly describe but I feel the weight of the lighthouse on the characters on every page of the novel, nonetheless. (I’m still not sure how she does that.)

The settings in these books offer a layer of richness and nuance that readers might not even notice as they follow the plot and grow attached to the characters. And writing setting details is never easy. Hemingway said, Writing is always architecture, never interior design.

Likewise, the “clever” metaphor is only clever if it helps the reader by saving her time. Symbol, unless you are Steinbeck, is a critic’s word, not a writer’s.

So the use of setting to enhance a work can be a tightrope walk. I find myself often adding and just as often cutting in the same scene. A brushstroke here. A cover-up there. How much is too much? Am I writing that because I like it or because it will add something to the scene? (Be honest, John!) All are questions I struggle with as I go.

I’d love to hear what others think about setting and the place those details play in one’s work.

Who's Awed by Virginia Woolf?

I read Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse twice this fall, once alone and once with a class of high-achieving Advanced Placement students. I was wowed the first time I read the book, but taking a second look –– reading it to teach it –– forces one to take a closer glance under the hood, so to speak. This is particularly good for a writer –– the chance to study a master at her craft.

Now I’m a huge Virginia Woolf fan. Among the things she does fascinatingly well in the book is her manipulation of the point of view. And, yes, I use the word manipulation intentionally. The full-omniscient point of view allows her to accomplish things (in only 209 pages) that us mortals simply cannot achieve. One is the book’s ending: Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. The writer in me (and the teacher) asks how the sentence changes if you switch the verb tense. Have had is past perfect. Something happened before something else –– a brilliant way to conclude a novel about feminist themes. What is to follow? What will come next? And this speaks to the book’s precision.

Point of view is where many writers begin when they settle into a project. I’m working on the second draft of a book that took far too long to write. The point of view was a struggle. I wrote the first 30 to 50 pages three times, using three different points of view. Finally settling on one that felt right –– present tense, first-person.

My friend (and former professor) Rick Demarinis, author of The Art and Craft of the Short Story and numerous novels, used to say when a scene is going nowhere change point of view. He used this as a way to jump start a piece of writing that seemed to have no energy. One thing he did was to take a random (or seemingly random) photograph of people in interesting states and write a scene about it. If the scene was a dud, he’d change the energy of the scene by writing the same story from the point of view of another character in the photo.

Here are two pictures. (Since deleted.)

Think about how the scene changes depending on whose perspective you choose and whether you use first-, second- or third-person point of view. Give it a try.

And read Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.