‘Find the maniacs:’ tidbits from a writing conference

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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From Sense of Place in Fiction Writing, a writer’s conference workshop panel. Writers Amy Knox Brown, Sebastian Matthews and Ron Rash talk about sense of place. Here’s what stood out for me:

• Make landscape a character

• Finding the beauty of language makes characters more complex; similes and metaphors; the rich language of the natural world

• Readers want to drink from places; think of the body in relation to place; think of how a body reacts to a landscape.

• “People in a traumatized state tend to love their furniture.”

• Do a little research. You can often find amazing facts that reveal detail you could never imagine. Get the small things right for readers to buy the big lie. People often read fiction to learn about real things.

• Read poetry, language at its most concise and beautiful.

• Place is earth and sky and landscape. It’s also rooms and houses and offices. A psychological state can be mirrored by physical space.

• Talk to people. “Find the maniacs,” says Rash. Find the person who thinks that one thing is the most important thing in the world, and they’ll help you with sense place. Look at newspaper archives, photo archives.

• Don’t fall into the trap of “ruinous nostalgia,” says Matthews, quoting another writer.

• Don’t get hung up on real v. ficticious names.