Story Settings and Reader Experiences

Even stories set in very local, very specific places like those by William Faulkner and John Steinbeck will find a new setting when I read them. And the landscape I create for them is always specific to me, retracing, or retracting to, places I have lived in, or ones I am familiar with.

So right now I am reading Sweet Lavender by Terry O'Neal, and I give it a setting somewhere in Elk Grove, California, either because I know that's where the author lives, but, remember, that's where I work too. The story is set in Cecilia, Louisiana, I place I don't know. I am picturing a house outside of the place described by O'Neal, but it has all the features suitable for the story.

It's now my setting, something pulled out of my experience living in specific places. It's a reader-created setting in agreement to the writer's specific or imagined setting. By reading this story, I am bringing a certain experience into it, refusing to only receive what it contains, but agreeing to recognize the familiarity of its setting, a familiarity enabled by being human.

If you read my story set in Mazvihwa, with river names like Runde,Gwen'mbe, hills like Chisiya, Chigorira, neighboring villages like Chishamba, Murowa, Magetsi, you will accept by recognition what I present as a setting, and if I have captured the specifics of this setting, readers will see the familiar in it; they will then substitute my setting with one in their experiences.

Comments

NAVAL LANGA said…
For setting a novel, there is hardly a match for Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities is one of the finest examples of the same.

Naval Langa
SHORT STORIES by NAVAL LANGA
PAINTINGS GALLERIES
February 9, 2009 at 1:43 AM
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