Writing About Place: The Boundaries of a Story

"The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book-a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell each day." -Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

Consider the Five W's:

Who is character;
What is plot;
When is chronology;
Why is motive;
Where is place, the boundaries of the story.

Journalists are pretty good at getting the first four into their work. But "Where" is the least explored and the most poorly executed in American journalism. Why do so many of us write so ineffectively about place?

• Time. As deadline approaches, many of us spend dwindling minutes thinking only in terms of plot and motive and possibly character.

• Inclination. We grow up thinking place is unimportant. Many of us have an undeveloped sense of place in our own lives-we're unfamiliar with our own backyards-and we don't know what things are or how they relate. Meanwhile, the best writing weaves place into narrative and creates literature. Think of Mark Twain on the Mississippi and Cormac McCarthy in Mexico-the land in their work becomes another character. Joseph Mitchell, John McPhee, Alex Wilkinson, Jimmy Breslin, William Least Heat Moon, and Isabel Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The New Yor Times this year for feature writing, brilliantly use place as well. How can we all do it better?

• Be there. Sounds obvious, but how many times do we end up doing our reporting over the telephone. Sometimes a reporter has time for nothing else, but sometimes the reporter is lazy. Stories filled with disembodied "talking head" experts from government seldom are memorable. Specific details about people and place, gathered by a reporter on the scene, are rewards a writer can sprinkle through a story to hold readers.

• Ask "What's that?" Find an expert who can identify key landmarks for you, from buildings and trees to animals and sounds.

• Become an expert on the community you cover. Find out as much as you can about living things: human, animal, and vegetable. Develop your eye. As Thoreau wrote in an 1851 journal, "The question is not what you look at,but what you see." An exercise: walk in your backyard, look around, close your eyes, and recall specific details of what you've just seen.

• Look for telling details. If it's the oppressive heat, hammer it, not once, but several times, into the narrative,in different places;weave in the humidity, the dripping sweat, the need to constantly drink, the short tempers; make the reader feel it.

• Let place become a character in your story. Environment writers like to sentence readers to breakfast with talking-head politicians, scientists, and statistic- spouting lobbyists. Place is an afterthought in stories that beg for description and even wonder.

• Interview subjects in their natural habitat. Never, ever, let a story subject come to your office for an interview if you can help it.

• Take a field trip with your story subject. Place can provoke new information, funny stories, and great dialogue. The way people talk, and what they talk about, is influenced by their surroundings. They may whisper in church, shout on the basketball court, talk nonsense after a couple of tall boys. Or they may chat about something remarkable they've just seen, something important. Ask people about their "sacred" places. They're vaults where we store ideals. "Where did you grow up?" "What did you enjoy doing when you were a child?" "Where did you do it?" all can open emotional doors. When you interview somebody at home, ask for a tour. Every picture, every book, every piece of furniture, can tell a story.

(Jeff Klinkenberg, St. Petersburg Times)