The Necessity of Writing Place
by Joshua Fagan
Writing is about ideas, but it is not only about ideas. Writing is about people, but it is not only about people. Above all, writing is about life, the vivid propulsion of sensations and experiences that overwhelm narrow and rigid beliefs and ideologies. Place, a sense of environment and history and context, is the tapestry in which people and ideas exist. It is what turns a disembodied abstraction into life.
Matthew Arnold writes that what distinguishes great poetry is its “powerful and profound application of ideas to life.” Place is what breathes life into those ideas. This fusion of ideas and life is not only true in poetry, though poetry as a medium can evoke place most deliberately. A poem like “Tintern Abbey,” written by Arnold’s beloved William Wordsworth, precisely evokes the melancholy, reflective spirit of wandering through the grand, mossy ruins of an ornate cathedral. His “Composed upon Westminster Bridge” similarly conjures a dreamlike, serene morning in London, where an almost otherworldly wonder hangs over the great buildings and streets of the city before the routine rush of life pours into them. In America, Walt Whitman zealously exalts the wild kinesis of New York in “Mannahatta,” while Robert Frost elliptically evokes the inscrutable, restorative power of darkness in the quiet hinterlands in “Acquainted with the Night.”
Poetry deliberately abandons the world of habit and everyday repetition to reveal the essence of a place. Even more modern poets, eschewing the elevated diction of traditional poetry, chase a purity and intensity of experience beyond that which prose offers. Poetry diverges from the ordinary way of perceiving the world in order to densely, concisely capture the essence of its topic, not simply its external appearance. The modernist William Carlos Williams famously declared the dictum, “No ideas but in things.” By choosing specific physical details in a sharp, restrained manner, a poet like Williams reaches toward meaning. Conveying ideas depends on conveying the essence of a particular location. The stakes are high: “So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens.” Conveying only superficial things, a superficial view of a place, means a poem without meaning or value.
In prose, fictional or otherwise, the stakes are less immediate. A story, for instance, typically features a protagonist who pursues a goal or aspiration, leading to strife. Obstacles confound the protagonist’s attempt to achieve their goal, giving a story its plot. A non-fictional profile of a person works somewhat similarly. It details the goals and ambitions of a specific person, while providing insight into their history and the obstacles they face. In these instances, place is not foremost. Evoking the essential spirit of a location is not the primary focus. Still, location matters, and without it, writing loses substance. Ideas without place have no history or origin. There is no blueprint for how they operate in the murky and chaotic complexities of the actual world, so they shrivel into limp abstractions. People without place are hardly people at all, but rather vaguely human-shaped outlines. An environment shapes people, and people both demonstrate and discover who they are by specific actions in a specific environment.
A writer can say a character is smart or brave, but such triumphalist phrases have no power or resonance unless the character, clearly, acts in a way that is smart or brave. Homer constantly refers to the cleverness of Odysseus, but if that hero spent the entirety of The Odyssey blindly following the orders of others, such claims would be absurd and ridiculous. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger argues, all being is mitsein, or being-with. There is no truly isolated self, formed apart from a place and environment. Even radically escaping the society of others and retreating to the woods does not escape the influence of mitsein. The individual still has the trees and rocks and animals for companions, but as importantly, the individual carries with them particular views of those trees and rocks and animals that depend on the specific time and place of their upbringing. The forest for Homer meant something different than it did for Wordsworth, and the forest for Frost meant something different still and more characteristically modern.
To create a real and organic sense of identity, people need to act, and they act within the context of a specific place. Worldbuilding is not only or even primarily for speculative works. Stories become convincing when they viscerally clarify that the people they portray are not simple collections of traits and thoughts but individuals who yearn and weep within the bounds of a specific world and community. The Lord of the Rings needs the extensive amount of time it spends in the Shire in order to establish the kind of place Frodo and friends find comfortable and homey, yet a book like The Great Gatsby also benefits from the amount of time it spends detailing the effervescent, transient glamor of Gatsby’s parties and the venal corruption of the selfishness of the New York milieu surrounding him and Nick.
Gatsby without New York, without the ash heaps and the memories of Manhattan as the “fresh green breast of the new world,” is only a wispy shadow of a tale about abstract concepts and types of people. Action, movement, experience: these are what illuminate ideas and transform types into fully formed individuals, and these for their existence depend on a sense of place, meaning a specific world in a specific time and in a specific historical context. Celebrity profiles tend to situate their subject in space for a similar reason. For a recent example, a Rolling Stone article on Billie Eilish starts with her performing the cover shoot for her latest album. A similar profile by the same magazine on Olivia Rodrigo starts in her car outside Highland Park in Los Angeles.
The unstated assertion behind profiles like these is that knowing a person requires a glimpse of them in a specific, meaningful situation. Interviewing them at a random diner is not sufficient. Knowing them requires knowing them in the world in which they operate. Cultivating a sense of place in these articles creates a sense of what their subjects value and prioritize. For instance, the amount of time Billie Eilish willingly spends completing an uncomfortable photoshoot demonstrates her perfectionist tendencies more viscerally than any direct comment ever could. This determination, to an extent, undermines the loose, carefree air she attempts to display in the interview.
Place, experience, mitsein: they reveal the insufficiency of abstract concepts of people and ideas. The philosopher William James compared the “simple, clean, and noble” images of life cultivated in a classroom to the direct experience of life, which is “multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful, and perplexed.” Ideas without place are beautiful mirages. They may seem coherent when examined in isolation, but they have no solidity or applicability. Elegantly simplified notions of people glimmer with iridescence in the chambers of the mind, but then the depth and vividness of a specific place reveals new sides of them. Static, adjectival conceptions of individuals dissipate, replaced by a less palatable but fuller truth. Gatsby may be both a showman and a deceiver, but only through how Fitzgerald depicts his experiences in a luxurious but vacuous New York environment does his character develop true poignancy.
Writing place does not mean providing a neutral, mechanistic list of facts about a location. What makes writing an art to develop, and not simply an automatic task that even a computer could perform, is the cultivation of a specific, precise sensibility. For a poet like Frost or Whitman, that cultivation means capturing what they view as the essence of the wilds: expansive and mystic and glorious in Whitman’s case, mysterious and solemn and uncertain in Frost’s. In capturing these places, poets develop ideas and emotions with a greater vividness or solidity than they could by simply stating these ideas and emotions. Writing about a person or series of events, real or imagined, needs a specific sense of place just as much. Gatsby is hyper-attentive to certain elements of the world through which he lives, while being less aware of others. The same is true of Eilish or Rodrigo. Succeeding at writing place means using it to infuse otherwise static outlines of people with what all true writing has: the chaotic and honest vigor of life.
Joshua Fagan is an award-winning writer and critic currently residing in Scotland. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. He is the author of The Philosophy of Avatar, an extended study of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the context of the Western philosophical tradition. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature, myth, and technology in the aftermath of Darwin, and he has published a variety of articles on writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as William Morris, H.G. Wells, and Robert Frost. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt.