Writing place – exploring the potential of setting

I’ve always been drawn to novels with vivid settings, and I studied ‘place’ in fiction as part of my creative writing PhD. More recently, I’ve had lovely feedback following the publication of my novel The Lost Detective, and many readers have commented on how I write about place. This has prompted me to reflect on the craft of creating settings. My findings could apply to all different genres, and I hope they help you explore the potential of place in your own writing. 

Knowing a place versus feeling a place

The ‘world’ captured in your novel will range from the overall location – such as rural Ireland, or Mumbai, or in an imaginary realm – to the individual places where scenes unfold, from a kitchen to a woodland to a public square. Era is a factor too – is your novel set now, or in the past or future? Setting also includes time of day, season, weather. Setting can be about movement. If you have two characters talking to each other on a bench, that scene would be very different if the conversation happened while they were driving along a motorway.

There is a tendency to focus on the visual aspects, for example, by listing the contents of a room, the trees in a landscape. This ‘paints a picture’ but does not invite the reader to fully experience the scene – the light levels, temperature, sounds, smells, touchables. When I think of ‘place’ in my writing, it is as a sensory realm.

I know it is cold if an author states ‘it is cold’. But I can feel the coldness if a character wraps a cardigan tighter round her body. Here is a technique that can enrich your description of setting – bring it into the point of view of your character. What do they notice? What do they feel?

Pairing setting to scene

In my novel, The Lost Detective, there is a scene in a shopping centre. My protagonist Dan is standing at the top of an escalator, unable to move. He has just learned some devastating news but cannot articulate his reaction via words or thoughts. By placing Dan on the precipice of an escalator, with the metal treads churning, and people jostling past, I wanted the reader to feel his inability to absorb what he has been told.

This is something to consider in your own writing, the choice of settings and how they might be paired with the events of your novel. Perhaps you are struggling with a particular scene. Two characters are talking to each other, but the scene feels flat. Try shifting the location. Your characters are no longer in a living room, they are in a café where the screech of the espresso machine is making it hard to hear and the waiter clearly wants the two of them to leave as there is a queue of people wanting seats. This puts ‘pressure’ on the scene and increases the tension.

Is it on the page?

I was working on a previous novel, a few years ago, and I told myself I was really capturing Edinburgh. Then came the realisation that these vivid settings were in my head rather than on the page. However, if you observe somewhere, such as a street, and document every building, the different shops, the contents of their window displays, and so on, then clearly there is a risk that your prose will collapse under the weight of these lengthy descriptive passages. And your reader’s attention may wander away…

Conjuring up a place involves putting in some but not every detail. Readers have brilliant imaginations. Offer them a number of elements – a beech hedge, the smell of freshly mown grass, slanting sunlight, some perennials past their best, the quiet murmur of a radio – and readers will create that garden in their head. Depending on your writing style, you can augment this description with more detail, such that the reader’s impression gains more precision. When describing a place, it becomes authentic and believable if it is given specificity. You are capturing a particular moment in a particular place.

Place is a character

I’ve done research on ‘place as a character in crime series’, but it was only on gathering my ideas for this craft piece, that it really struck me: when I create settings in my fiction, I use the same skills I apply to creating characters. Each place has a unique personality, a voice, a backstory and hidden depths, with conflicts that generate drama.

Landscape exists at a pace measured by millennia. A city or settlement has a history going back centuries. A house contains the ‘ghosts’ of everyone that used to live there. The breadth and depth and ‘memory’ of a place can be explored through your writing. And that longer chronology can be brought into contrast with the more immediate concerns of your characters.

I encourage you to tune in to the ways in which a place is communicating to you and your characters. Does a street corner still carry the ‘shadow’ of a fatal accident that happened there last year? Does the oozing-between-the-toes mud of a riverbed make your character rethink their marriage?

Place is a mood shaper

Places stir up emotions and sensations. Places can also seem to mirror a character’s feelings, through the technique known as ‘the pathetic fallacy’, for example, where your character is happy and the sun is shining. You can play around with that technique. Perhaps your character is sad on this sunny day, and it adds to their sense of isolation, as the weather seems to be mocking them.

Places have psychological and physiological qualities – the fear that lingers in a dark alleyway, the cleansing tang of pine in a forest, the crazy thrill of a clifftop. Places also trigger past memories, good and bad. An abandoned icehouse is a key location in The Lost Detective, and this buried chamber – secluded, damp, dark – has an unsettling effect. My novel is literary crime fiction, and I use the settings to generate suspense and tension and unease. Depending on the genre of your novel – literary fiction or romance or horror or fantasy, and so on – you can shape the different ‘moods’ of your settings, all of which will contribute to the overall tone of your novel.

My approach to writing place

I chose to set The Lost Detective in the Brecks of East Anglia as this secretive landscape has always intrigued me. There are large tracts of heath and wood and fen, and it is easy to get lost. Dan is grieving and ‘lost’ after a recent tragedy. His sense of the moods and motives of the land and the waterways are woven into the unfolding story. Dan’s relationship with the Brecks is central to his recovery and also integral to how he solves the mysteries at the heart of this detective novel.

Your own approach to writing place

Every writer is different. You will arrive at your own way of expressing the places in your novel. What world are you hoping to create? Where do you want to take your readers? How do the places relate to the events of your novel and the personal arc of your characters? Sometimes it can help to look at what other authors do, perhaps there are techniques you might borrow.

My final suggestion is to spend time in the real world around you. Explore your relationship with place. Sit and walk and think and feel and notice how you are affected. Tune in to your senses, your emotions, your mood, your memories, the many ways in which the inner you and the outer you are engaging with your surroundings. That immersion in place will enrich and enhance what you write, and help you create vivid and memorable and meaningful experiences for all your readers.

The Lost Detective by Elspeth Latimer

“A superb crime debut – beautifully imagined, beautifully written, stylish, tense and genuinely moving.”  LEE CHILD

On a summer’s day, a baby vanishes. The mystery is never solved, leaving a young mother lost in grief. Twenty-one years later, ex-police detective Dan Hennessy is struggling with his own tragic loss, and when a neighbour disappears and a body turns up at the solar farm, he is desperate for answers. The haunted landscape is keeping secrets, and there are dangers lurking in the Brecks. Dan must find the truth. Can he offer hope to the grieving mother, and also save himself?

Buy your copy at: Story Machine | Waterstones | Amazon | Hive.co.uk | Bookshop.org*

DR ELSPETH LATIMER has taught on the Creative Writing Crime Fiction MA at the University of East Anglia. Her debut novel, The Lost Detective, was shortlisted for the Bath Novel Award 2023, and is published by Story Machine. She is also author of Writing the Detectives, an academic study of the protagonist in the contemporary crime fiction series, published by Cambridge University Press. Elspeth lives in the Brecks, and she loves exploring and photographing the landscape, and featuring it in her novels. You can follow her on Instagram and Facebook

Read more: The Debut Interview: Elspeth Latimer on writing detective fiction and landing her book deal.

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