A Sense of Place?

One aspect that I have noticed while reading several Hobnob books is a strong "Sense of Place".

Storyteller includes places in Wales that I have visited and it triggered lots of memories.
Coffee with Thunderbolts covered places that I knew nothing about - but felt very real to me.
In Hearth: Exile I found the New York scenes seemed very real, but the "elsewhere" scenes less so.

In all three I have been tempted to go to a map or Google Earth to follow up details

I would guess that real places are easier to transfer to paper/eInk than more fictional ones - does that agree with your experiences - either as a writer or as a reader?

As a reader - is a "sense of place" a concept you recognise? Is it important to you?

As a writer - is place something you think a lot about - or is it always subordinate to other aspects?

Good topic! Oddly enough I was thinking about this subject yesterday while reading about the Irish Dindsenchas, texts which discuss the meaning of place names and the stories associated with them. The book in question, An Introduction to early Irish literature, also cites Wisdom Sits in Places, which we've discussed on one of the Storyteller threads. For recreation between writing just now, I've been rereading some of my old Louis L'amour books. I enjoy them not so much for the plots - which are simple and repetitive - but for the brilliant evocation of many places familiar to me in the American West.

I'm so glad I'm not the only L'Amour fan around here. And for exactly the same reason.

Interesting: I've not read L'Amour since prior to college, and recall the simplistic plot but not the sense of place. I may have to reconsider if I come across a handy copy.

4: It's stronger in some than in others. If I think of a particularly good one, I'll recommend it to you. Any suggestions, @MerryMary?

It's also a background thing for me. My mother's family moved west to Texas from Tennessee before and after the Civil War, like a lot of L'Amour's characters; her uncle by marriage sold mules to the army when the army still used mules, and probably knew some of the Old West gunslingers. I've known other people in the western US who would fit right into those books.

5: yes, I think personal background makes a big difference

I read The weirdstone of Brisingamen many years ago, before I knew Alderley Edge at all, but have now visited there often, and while reading the new Boneland the place leapt out. (@gwernin, there is an overlap of place - you asked me about visibility over the Cheshire Plain - in Boneland this happens the other way round, looking from Alderley Edge, over Lindow Moss to Beeston)

I look for a place in the story that I would feel at home in or want to get out of it. If the author makes me feel either way, the author has done a fine job. When I write, I choose places I've been to, or want to be in. And I research the heck out of them if I haven't been there so there's a touch of authenticity.

I suspect my teenage devotion to Science Fiction and Fantasy laid the groundwork for the importance a sense of place has for me as a reader. I think any prose (fiction and non-fiction) is an exercise in world building, to greater or lesser extent, and often the sense of place lent by the writing is more important than plot.

Not sure I have the same impression for verse, unless it's a narrative epic.

Sense of place is very important to me as a reader. I once gave up on an
ER selection after four chapters because I couldn't tell where the heck we were, and it was distracting me from the plot. I also gave another one more stars than it otherwise deserved because the landscape descriptions were so good. Anyone else ever done either of these?

Excellent topic indeed. Some of my favourite authors, including Fantasy, have painted the location extremely well and that really adds to the story. This may explain why I like Historical Fiction rather a lot as well.

Different readers get their "sense of place" from different kinds of details.

So a book that I think has a great sense of place may not be doing much for someone else, and vice versa.

>10 jaqdhawkins:
Agree that historical fiction is another aspect of sense of place, adding time and evolution to geography.

>11 LShelby:
Now that's a fascinating exercise: identifying various types of detail that help, and how they work. Obviously there's: description of locale; use of dialect in character dialogue; use of specific vocabulary (for instance, to show differences in education, class, ethnicity, vocation).

What else is there?

Thought I'd give this a bump, as it's an interesting thread. I'd like to see more people listing specific titles which gave them a strong sense of place, and perhaps giving snippets as examples.

A favourite example for me in the historical fiction category is Patrick O'Brian. the nautical home of the British Navy is captured so well, at least for someone like me who otherwise stays on shore rather than venture into or atop it. This is an example where description and also dialogue are key to the sense of place: how the ship works, how the sailors work the ship, what they say to one another and how they wile the time.

>13 gwernin: Boneland leapt and clobbered me with place - both the places I know and recognise (such as http://www.alderleyedge.org/stormy_point.htm the photos don't do it justice), and those that I don't. I will try to grab a few extracts from my kindle

15: I was there with my sister and a friend about fifteen years ago. I hadn't read the first two books in the series at that time, although they had (which was why we went), and it made reading them later more enjoyable. That visit was what led to the "king in the ground" episode in Flight of the Hawk.

Is Boneland aimed at the same juvenile audience?

16: no - it is extremely different - the amazon.co.uk reviews agree with my feelings. It is much less a straightforward "myth intruding on our world" than the others. I have not read any other "later Garner".

In some ways it has a very similar "not clear what is real and what is not" (for some definition of real) to some of the underground sections of your books. It is split time - stone age and now with lots of resonance and connection between them.

Earlier, gwernin and I were mentioning Louis L'Amour books. Setting was always L'Amour's strong suit and his point of pride, so all of his titles have good 'sense of place.'

Perhaps the best example might be The Lonesome Gods. The young protagonist travels with his father across the desert to settle eventually in the small village of Los Angeles. The accompanying map is very detailed, and young Johannes explores much of the territory in his wanderings. The story is engrossing, the historic research is excellent, and the georgraphic details make the land almost one of the characters.

Perhaps needless to mention, I like this one a lot.