The power of narrative setting.

Australian writer and blogger Cally Jackson writes about the importance of setting in bringing out a story's deeper elements. Jackson, who lives in Brisbane, suggests that she strives to have her fictional locations feel so real that her readers "forget where they are and begin to see, hear and smell everything" her characters do.

I agree. This is profoundly important in creating well-rounded work. All the senses should be accounted for. Too often, perhaps, we get stuck in simply describing what things look like or what sounds surround. Taste is important. Touch and feeling such as temperature and textures should not be overlooked.

Good characters are embedded in social, geographic, and psychological territories that consist of overlapping boundaries. Bringing this out includes what ethnographer/anthropologist Clifford Geertz would call "thick description." 

As much as one's own identity is often bound up in the significant places one has been and those places one holds dear, so too must realistic fictional characters. Taking the time to lay out the setting, allowing it to become a character itself is worthwhile. Geertz displays this in his now-classic work "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" [pdf] about a series of experiences he and his wife had in a Balinese village in early 1958.

Jackson, in commenting on some of her favorite Australian writers, suggests that they are successful, at least in part, because the "mood" of narrative locations "filters into every scene." Because of this, Jackson writes, "you feel as if you’re right there in the location with the characters. I find this to be true of good fiction, nonfiction, songwriting, and cinema as well. It is, at best, transcendent.

Just like Jackson, I to am curious about which writers bring you into a deeper sense of place. When does setting become its own character? How does identity shift over time by the places we love as they, too, change?