Comments on: Getting away from it all

By: Bill

Bill — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 01:10:05 +0000

I live in Maine, so let me suggest something based on personal observations: Maine is like Texas, California, Montana, and a few other places. People here like to be reminded that they live in Maine and that they deserve to be proud of it.

You can sell anything here if you can say, “It’s perfect for our Maine summers!” (or winters, etc.). You cannot sell a truck in the Lone Star State unless you point out that it’s “a Texas truck for Texas workloads”. Similarly, anything you sell to a Californian has to be “for our California lifestyle”.

Consequently, the sense of place is very strong among Maine writers. It’s part of their psychic makeup as Mainers.

PS — This is going to sound awful, but it’s a fact: a lot of Mainers have never been anywhere else!

By: Joseph Johnson

Joseph Johnson — Sat, 17 Aug 2013 18:21:42 +0000

I have several theories why you encounter authors writing about their backyards. Here’s one perspective from Flannery O’Connor (whose theories are probably better than my own): “As a fiction writer who is a Southerner, I use the idiom and the manners of the country I know, but I don’t consider that I write about the South. So far as I am concerned as a novelist, a bomb on Hiroshima affects my judgment of life in rural Georgia, and this is not the result of taking a relative view and judging one thing by another, but of taking an absolute view and judging all things together….”
Maybe the question isn’t really about setting, but whether the setting limits the story (New York or Portland or Clyde, Ohio).

By: Kim

Kim — Sat, 17 Aug 2013 04:41:44 +0000

I find that interesting. I haven’t written anything that takes place in Idaho. I have lived here over 17 years now but I moved all over the country when I was kid and could never call one place home. So the locations where my stories take place tend to be all over the country too.

By: Kate

Kate — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 20:05:19 +0000

I write primarily about where I live, and I love to read books that have a similarly local feel. I enjoy exploring a setting that hasn’t been worked-over a thousand times already. I read to visit other places and meet people who don’t share my daily experiences, so locally-focused books suit me well. To be honest, I’ve gotten tired of reading books about New York or by New York writers. They’ve started to run together for me.