Setting: Mototi, Mazvihwa, or Zvishavane; which is the Best?
This is one of those posts which satisfy some nostalgic hankering, while opening up creative possibilities. Oftentimes the writer within wants to keep talking about where he grew up, perhaps as a way of affirming, if not deconstructing, a sense of identity, itself a response to some stimuli in the immediate environment, such as, earlier today, driving to work, I saw a clump of trees on the side of Highway 99 that suddently recalled a simiilar feature along the Zvishavane-Murowa road, so I began to think about the setting of my stories, and remembered, perhaps for the hundredieth time, that my starting point tends to be Mototi, in Mazvihwa, Zvishavane, Midlands Province, Zimbabwe. All that is okay, a sense of place, specity of setting, which allows readers to see the familiar in the foreign, like how those trees along Highway 99 recalled Mototi.
I often wonder why, with all these choices of setting, my stories still default to Mototi, and ignoring the obvious answer, I begin to make an intellectual argument about how Mototi is more concrete than Mazvihwa, Zvishavane, or the Midlands. I usually conclude that the one place that I feel, whose solidity comes out of, or leads to, some organicity, is Mototi, the most central of the concentric circles of my possible settings.
It works this way: If I set a story in Mazvihwa, I can't tell or show successfully which area of the district I am capturing: is it Gudo, Magetsi,Gwen'ombe, Zuruvi, Mukwakwe, or Mudhomori? One possibility would be that I'm depicting all, but what I still don't have is how coming from Mazvihwa feels, as opposed to coming from Mototi. The latter then, whose sensory reality I can easily recall, becomes the preferable starting point; then if, later, I expand the setting to other villages, my characters' Mazvihwa experience has already been solidified through the elevation of Mototi.
I appreciate the value of setting in fiction. And when it comes to the question of which one is the best, I say the one you know best, or, the one which was once the best. And even then, with that setting there is a locale which provides the concreteness of experience the story needs; in my case, that place is Mototi.
I often wonder why, with all these choices of setting, my stories still default to Mototi, and ignoring the obvious answer, I begin to make an intellectual argument about how Mototi is more concrete than Mazvihwa, Zvishavane, or the Midlands. I usually conclude that the one place that I feel, whose solidity comes out of, or leads to, some organicity, is Mototi, the most central of the concentric circles of my possible settings.
It works this way: If I set a story in Mazvihwa, I can't tell or show successfully which area of the district I am capturing: is it Gudo, Magetsi,Gwen'ombe, Zuruvi, Mukwakwe, or Mudhomori? One possibility would be that I'm depicting all, but what I still don't have is how coming from Mazvihwa feels, as opposed to coming from Mototi. The latter then, whose sensory reality I can easily recall, becomes the preferable starting point; then if, later, I expand the setting to other villages, my characters' Mazvihwa experience has already been solidified through the elevation of Mototi.
I appreciate the value of setting in fiction. And when it comes to the question of which one is the best, I say the one you know best, or, the one which was once the best. And even then, with that setting there is a locale which provides the concreteness of experience the story needs; in my case, that place is Mototi.
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