No Place like Home

Chris Womersley October 11

For some writers, ‘where?’ is the very first question they must ask themselves before they begin. A sense of place – landscapes both external and internal – is everything, intrinsically linked to the voice, story and character. But creating these textures is no easy task. In the September edition of Meanjin, Chris Womersley considers the role of place in fiction, form early literary influences in suburban Melbourne to his own latest offering, Bereft. A brief extract is below, and you can now read the full essay on our editions page. Our mini-interview with Chris can also be found here.

‘Why, you couldn’t write a story that happened nowhere,’ remarks Eudora Welty in her Paris Review interview of 1972. For Australian author Peter Temple, the first question when starting a new novel is: where will this happen? And, of course, they are both quite right. Everything happens somewhere, whether you like it or not. A setting can be a country or city, naturally, but that isn’t where it ends; there are bedrooms, sporting fields, kitchens, hallways, cars, waiting rooms and, finally, the very chambers of characters’ hearts. A setting is not merely a random place where people meet and action happens: the setting is intrinsic to that action. Our world lives in us as much as we live in it, and it is part of the fiction writer’s task to conjure it.

A novel consists of many things working seamlessly together and place is as crucial as voice, character and story to the overall success of a work of fiction. For me the setting for a work of fiction I am creating makes itself known in tandem with the characters and story; the setting effectively becomes a character in its own right. It’s difficult, for example, to imagine To Kill a Mockingbird, with its simmering brew of racism and innocence, being set anywhere else, in any other time. Likewise Crime and Punishment, Monkey Grip and On the Road are tied to their time and place. A setting doesn’t have to be reality, however: it may be merely a plausible variation of what we take for reality. Ask Dante, Samuel Beckett, Margaret Attwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mervyn Peake or J.G. Ballard, all of whom have conjured worlds from thin air. Fiction is to reality what memory is to an actual event; it’s recognisable if you squint, but is often merely a starting point for something substantially different.