First of all, if you have never read Eudora Welty's remarkable essay, "Place in Fiction," do that now! Here are two of my favorite excerpts on the importance of what we writers often call setting:

"It is by the nature of itself that fiction is all bound up in the local. The internal reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in place. The human mind is a mass of associations -- associations more poetic even than actual. I say, "The Yorkshire Moors," and you will say, "Wuthering Heights," and I have only to murmur, "If Father were only alive--" for you to come back with "We could go to Moscow," which certainly is not even so. The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place."

And, if you don't write fiction, consider these words of Welty's:

"I think the sense of place is as essential to good and honest writing as a logical mind; surely they are somewhere related. It is by knowing where you stand that you grow able to judge where you are. Place absorbs our earliest notice and attention, it bestows on us our original awareness; and our critical powers spring up from the study of it and the growth of experience inside it. It perseveres in bringing us back to earth when we fly too high. It never really stops informing us, for it is forever astir, alive, changing, reflecting, like the mind of man itself. One place comprehended can make us understand other places better. Sense of place gives equilibrium; extended, it is sense of direction too. Carried off we might be in spirit, and should be, when we are reading or writing something good; but it is the sense of place going with us still that is the ball of golden thread to carry us there and back and in every sense of the word to bring us home."

Think about it: Place can take us all the way to Mexico, and carry us all the way back home.

Even place names themselves have power. If Jan Karon's popular books based on the North Carolina mountain town of Blowing Rock were set in "Wasatchville" instead of "Mitford," would it have made a difference in sales? Maybe not. But maybe. 

Similarly, readers will have a different reaction to "Skaneateles Lake" (located near Syracuse, New York, where I lived from the ages of four to seven) than to "Lake Woebegone" of Garrison Keillor fame. And if the lake isn't named at all that creates yet a different effect. 

Our mind makes associations, and even perhaps assumptions, based upon place names. When we know, as we begin reading a poem, say one of Irene Honeycutt's, that we are in the Museum of the Terezín Ghetto, in the Czech Republic, there is automatically an established context. (You can find this poem on page 180 of Spinning Words into Gold.)

You may choose to paint the setting of your writing in the literary equivalent of oil paint, with lengthy, detailed physical description. Or in a few small water color brushstrokes of sight and sound. You may dab setting throughout your piece, or concentrate it in one spot on your canvas of words.

Remember that your setting, like the colors of a painting, will help to create the mood and/or theme of your piece. If you've read Thornton Wilder's Our Town, you'll know that it does provide "a picture of life in a New Hampshire village." But that setting is only a backdrop for what Wilder really wanted to accomplish -- "to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life."

                                                                     ~ Maureen Ryan Griffin