Today we’ll continue with something very important for your memoir: how to create a strong sense of place for your readers.
We’ve already worked on enhancing a sense of place—a setting—within a room or home or office in your memoir. (If you missed those posts, click on links below.)
Describe each place as if you were seeing it for the first time.
How can you find words for those places? By returning to those places.
But what if you can’t go back? Look at photos of the place. Really look at those photos. What do you see?
Consider these pictures from my home territory. I no longer live there, but the photos transport me back.
Those silvery vines are wild blackberries (one of several kinds in the Pacific Northwest). The photo reminds me of salal’s leaves and tiny blossoms, and of Scotch Broom.
In this other picture, I see the familiar bark of an old Douglas fir tree and, in the foreground, baby Douglas firs with their tender, pale new growth. I see spent rhododendron blossoms hiding behind them. And, of course, those places have their own scents and odors—an evergreen smell, a loamy soil smell, a damp smell.
Below you’ll find examples of geographical/physical descriptions from my soon-to-be-published memoir, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go!, set in a mission center called Lomalinda in South America:
From Chapter 14:
September turned to October. Back in Seattle, people would be inhaling familiar scents of gold-emblazoned maple leaves and smoke from fireplace fires, and they’d bundle up in sweaters and jackets to ward off autumn’s cool temperatures. But in Lomalinda, summer didn’t turn into fall into winter into spring. We had only two seasons: hot and humid, and hotter and arid. And so it was that in October, the annual five-month rainy season ended after dumping 150 inches. Temperatures rose and muddy roads dried.
From Chapter 16:
October turned to November and back home, Seattle would be a place of swollen clouds and rain, and frost once in a while. People would be wearing rain boots and raincoats and stocking caps and gloves. Family and friends would have recently gathered for Thanksgiving, a squally season when tempests stirred up wild seas and sent ferry boats bobbing and careening, when wind storms downed trees throughout Puget Sound, caused widespread power outages, left half-baked turkeys and pumpkin pies in cold ovens, and drew people together around fireplaces in homes perfumed by wood smoke.
But Lomalinda was into the dry season with clean cerulean skies and hardly a wisp of a cloud. Daytime temperatures soared to over 100 degrees in the shade—cruel, withering. The green scent of rainy season had given way to the spicy fragrance of sun-dried grasses. Immense stretches of emerald disappeared, leaving grasslands stiff and bleached and simmering under unrelenting equatorial sun.
Muddy paths and single-lane tracks turned rock-hard and, with use, changed to dust. Yards and airstrips and open fields turned to dust, too. From sunrise to sundown, a strong wind blew across the llanos, a gift from God because it offered a little relief from the heat. On the other hand, we had to use rocks and paperweights and other heavy objects to keep papers from blowing away. Dust blew through jalousied windows and into homes and offices and settled on our counters and furniture and in cracks and crannies and on our necks and in our armpits and up our noses.
From Chapter 19:
Rainy season returned and heavy, humid, tropical heat crawled in. We welcomed it, for the most part. We’d grown tired of parched air and longed for the scent of wet leaves and grass.
The first heavy raindrops that fell after dry season sent mini-clouds of parched earth into the air and our mouths and nostrils so that we tasted dust and breathed in the odor of wet bricks and window screens. In a few days, we would smell new life—green pushing up through mud—and before long we’d inhale the perfume of rain-drenched hibiscus and mango and papaya and avocado and bamboo and lemon trees and grasses and palm trees and orchids.
Lomalinda’s rain didn’t fall gently like Seattle’s. Rainy season brought chubascos. We watched them approach across the llanos, from the east, from Venezuela or Brazil. The sky hung low, angry, draped in steely blue and gray. Soon wind whipped and lashed, and gusts forced trees to bow into each other. From our house, we listened to the torrent pummel homes on Lomalinda’s east side. We heard it marching toward us like an advancing army, louder and louder, the sky darker and darker.
Those were signals for Matt, Karen, and their playmates to run to the east edge of our yard, daring the storm, waiting to defy it, getting their timing just right. When the downpour got to within a few feet of them, the kids sprinted from east to west through the yard, outrunning the deluge and flinging themselves through our back door before they got wet—just as, with a grand crescendo, the tempest hit our house, pelted the roof, and drowned our voices.
Within seconds it blasted into homes to our west and continued pounding toward others on our center’s western edge. It hammered the ground and thrashed against the east side of homes and rattled windows and flattened grasses and turned dirt tracks into crooked streams of mud.
In some ways, rainy season was a gentler time, but it brought mixed blessings. Dry season’s hot, bold wind let up, no longer soaking up our perspiration. Instead, shirts clung to our sweat-drenched backs and chests and armpits.
So, look over your manuscripts, asking yourself what readers need to see, touch, taste, smell, and hear in your memoir’s geographical places.
Work hard on those descriptions
so your readers will experience your story alongside you—
that’s what they want!
And deserve.
And that’s how your memoir can enrich your readers
and bless them.
Related posts:
Must-know info about your memoir’s sense of place
Make your memoir come alive through a sense of place
Creating a sense of place is essential for your memoir
Use setting to ground your memoir and keep readers reading
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