Entering Place--
Wait--Where, Exactly, Do Your Characters Fight Battles, Break Hearts & Patch'em Together Again?
Hey there!
Hope you’ve enjoyed the holidays, however you’ve celebrated (or ignored) them! Mostly, I hope you and your loved ones are healthy and safe, doing things that make you happy.
As part of our Christmas, we took a tour of Warner Brothers studios in Burbank. A studio tour isn’t something I’d necessarily think of doing, left to my own devices, but that’s the beauty of other people’s ideas, right? I went along with it and had a blast. Thank you, family!
As we rode a tour bus, the guide reeled off a list of how many shows used the same storefronts and sets, the same grand staircases and impressive federal-style buildings, how many characters had been shot or threatened in the same narrow alleys, and how many had struggled, dramatically, through a small bamboo patch. “New York City” was encapsulated in a fire escape, and “backwoods” was indicated with a gravel road through a thicket of trees.
“The place where Rory was hit by a deer” in Gilmore Girls, as she drove back to school on a high-stress day, turns out to pass in front of Sam Merlotte’s Bar and Grill in True Blood, aka the cabin in Pretty Little Liars, on the road to the Walton’s place, in The Waltons.
Goodnight, John-Boy!
It’s an awesome mashup. Did Sam Merlotte, that sexy shapeshifter, hit Rory’s car, as he loped through the woods? And why didn’t an aged John-Boy come ambling out to help?
All of this was cut with intermittent glimpses of landmarks of a show-in-progress, Abbot Elementary.
The shows are wildly different in tone and worldview, and sets have been dressed up or down to suit the stories, but they’re functional spaces. To pass through these landscapes and architectural landmarks conjures a sense of entering into the world of the narrative, the dream, the imaginary and influential.
When I first started writing, I was young. Carver and Kafka were close to my heart, often in my backpack, alongside Sartre, DeBeauvoir and Camus. Paris as seen through their words, between the two world wars, loomed large in my mind. Settings in Carver’s stories though are painted in broad strokes with so much left out that locations could be essentially interchangeable with other down-at-the-heels working class, drinking class, primarily white American crash pads. The landmarks within the setting are small: a recliner, a couch, a lamp, a beer. Outside, there’s a convertible when the characters are lucky, leaves in the yard as things fall apart and sometimes a river outside of town. A studio tour of Carver’s stories would look like a lot of houses, of the era. It might even look like the set of All in the Family, or Sanford and Son.
The phrase “world-building” was first used in 1820. It picked up speed again in the 1920’s, and now another hundred years later it’s in heavy use. Often when people think about world-building, the conversation turns to science fiction, fantasy, gaming and other imagined worlds. The phrase is used to talk about rethinking systems of gravity and molecular relationships in imagined landscapes, and so much more. Still, even Carver, as he leaned on a common understanding among a dominant class and power structure, on this earth as we know it, was building a world through his stories.
We disembarked the tour bus and walked through Central Perk, past the famous orange couch and then outside, to the fountain of Friends. We saw the hallways and shops of Hogwarts laid out inside, in a museum, and outside again, we wandered past Lorelai Gilmore’s house to the town center of Stars Hollow, the gazebo, the church with a tower where the Town Loner once unrolled his scroll with a demand that nobody could manage to read before the paper tore and the message fell and the Loner went home.
Architectural landmarks serve, in some ways, as though essentially oversized objects.
In writing, those of us who are Spanbauer fans, say, “Love your objects.” Zoom in on important objects and show them to readers. Make the objects real. Make a few chosen objects work in service of the story arc. Bring them back, put the objects in different hands, let them transform in meaning. Buildings can function in a similar way. Show the locations. Build the architecture. Return to these spots. Let them take on meaning and let that meaning evolve into a mythos.
We do this in fiction, and we can also turn the lens toward our lives, looking at personal landmarks and how we craft meaning, find meaning, in our days, in our lives, and how we can convey that significance to readers.
As they say in real estate, location, location, location, right?
Signing off, from Stars Hollow, from Walton’s Mountain, from Bon Temps, from Baloneytown.
I hope you’re well.
Cheers,
M
I adore the studio tour mash-up! And the way you talk about place. Ever inspiring.