Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

By Laura Spinella

As readers we travel to places, visiting people we may never meet in everyday life: Huck on the Mississippi River, Scout in fictional Maycomb Alabama; moving east, we can venture all the way to a semi-fictitious West Egg and the iconic Jay Gatsby. The wind blows, the page turns and you’re in Mr. Darcy’s rural Longbourn, England during the Napoleonic Wars. From there, catapult a couple of centuries, never leaving the Motherland, and you may find yourself at Hogwart’s academy of wizardry.  Setting is to a novel what bees are to flowers.

Setting is one of my favorite elements in novel writing. Unlike those pesky characters who require invention, revision, and often a bottle of gin to get them in or out of my head, the place where I choose to drop my protagonists, antagonists and minor players feels more like the comfy hammock where we all come to rest. It’s also one of my favorite book club questions: “Why did you decide to set your novel in…” I think a good answer is as layered as the plot in a book. In BEAUTIFUL DISASTER, I tend to insist I chose Athens, Georgia because of its eclectic atmosphere. In truth, I suspect the setting chose me. While the story could take place on the campus of any large Southern university, UGA is the one I could describe in detail.  From a pragmatic standpoint, it makes perfect sense.  That said, it was hardly the rationale and certainly not my motivation for the setting.  BEAUTIFUL DISASTER is a love story, and while the tale does not mirror anything that happened in my life, the emotion tied to the main characters, Mia and Flynn, draws upon my days spent in the Classic City. In this case, the setting was a direct line from my vein, and for whatever it was worth, I used it until I could not kick it any harder.

            After all that angst, PERFECT TIMING was an emotional reprieve, and my approach to setting was quite the opposite. I use multiple locations for this novel: Boston, Las Vegas, California, and Long Island, although the back flap and my publisher will insist it’s another Southern set novel. True enough; the bulk of the action does take place in Catswallow, Alabama, although you do have to give a rock star and his story space—hence the additional hot spots. However, it’s the Deep South setting that seems to resonate. Not long ago, a reader emailed, curious to know why a Google search produced only PERFECT TIMING references to Catswallow, Alabama.  The woman was adamant that she once knew somebody from there. *sigh* My motivation for dreaming up Catswallow was twofold. It’s a small Southern town that, in part, perpetuates small-minded ideals. First, I did not want to take license and put labels on any real place—though surely they exist. Secondly, and perhaps more important, I wanted the reader to see only what I painted on the canvas. But as the email from my reader proves, try as you might, setting is subject to interpretation.

        Surrey, Massachusetts serves as the physical location for my current WIP. Like Catswallow it is fictitious, although I believe Surrey is representative of larger towns on the outskirts of Boston. When I think about setting in this book, I don’t focus as much on the real estate as I do the smaller scenery, namely a newsroom where much of the action occurs. Maybe that’s because the novel’s main character, Aubrey Ellis, grew up in a carnival and led a wandering gypsy life. It’s an important element in the story and almost as critical as Aubrey’s improbable gift—in addition to her precarious past, Aubrey also speaks to the dead. As I write and rewrite this story, I find that the setting has evolved from a place to a person. It’s not so much about the where Aubrey lives, but the person that makes her most comfortable with her extraordinary gifts.  Like Aubrey, I too am learning. As I close out this revision, I find that I have, once again, imagined a setting that surprised me for reasons I did not consider when I first typed “Chapter One.”  It’s interesting when it comes to books, whether you are the reader or the writer, the places you’ll go.    

Laura Spinella is the award-winning author of Beautiful Disaster and newly released Perfect Timing. Visit her at lauraspinella.net