Roadtrip to NaNo: How I Let Go of Setting, Overdescription, and the View In My Head

November is coming. To get ready, we’re taking a Road Trip to NaNoWriMo. On the way, we’ll hear from writers about how their cities can inspire your novel. Today, volunteer Municipal Liaison Stacy in Chicago, Illinois, shares her struggles with writing about place:

One of the most important things I have discovered about writing is how I personally like to handle settings. In short, I don’t.

I am not really sure when my aversion to “settings” as a writing concept began. I just know that, somewhere along the line, I got really tired of trying to describe everything. Is that something a writer should never admit? After all, isn’t our whole existence predicated on describing things for other people to envision as they peruse the worlds we’ve created? But despite it being a huge faux pas, I’m admitting it. I’m a writer who doesn’t like to describe things.

If you looked at my early writing, back when I lived in various small towns throughout the Midwest and the South, you’d never guess this fact about me. My stories overflowed with details about how each room in a house looked, right down to how many feet the couch sat from the door. I wanted so much for the reader to see exactly what I saw. Creating cities and countries gave me fits as I tried to map out each street and building. How could a reader understand the tone of the town I was creating if they didn’t know the architectural makeup of every building within its borders?

Fast forward to today. Now, I live in Chicago. For many people, just the word Chicago evokes a stream of images and feelings. It might be the musical, Chicago, or the seemingly mythical and glamorous history of our crime-ridden early 1900’s. A number of people associate Chicago with government corruption, while others might simply think about cold and windy weather and looming skyscrapers like the Sears Tower.

As a writer, the randomness with which people associate images with words used to make me crazy. I used to struggle so hard to control my readers’ perceptions of my settings because I felt that I couldn’t trust them to figure it out on their own. And I wanted to make sure that what they saw was exactly what I saw. If I was writing about a place like Chicago, I couldn’t just let it be Chicago; it had to be my Chicago, as I saw it.

Being such a control freak ended up causing me to want to write less. Describing things started to feel like an impossible burden that I could never fully succeed in, no matter how detailed and precise I was. I now realize that my plight to describe things objectively was an inevitable failure because there is no such thing as objectivity. Even a concept as seemingly concrete as my Chicago is an ephemeral and constantly-changing beast.

And so I’ve learned to embrace the reader’s mindset. In fact, as someone who reads more than writes these days, I have become fascinated by how language feels after it is written. What images does a reader conjure from just a few simple sentences? Which are the details that are vital to the success of a place? Which are overkill?

For me, Chicago means hot dogs that have pickles, onion, and sport peppers, but absolutely no ketchup, ever. Other people might picture pizza with the sauce on top of the cheese instead of underneath it, over a thick and chewy crust. Or they might think about Millennium Park, Opening Day at Wrigley Field, and a river dyed green on St. Patrick’s Day. There are hundreds of different ways to interpret a word, a sentence, a setting. And that’s okay.

Stacy, aka “smwalter”, has been a NaNoWriMo participant since 2007 and an ML in Chicago since 2011. She is a licensed Illinois attorney with her own solo practice in Chicagoland, and she self-published her first NaNo novel, On Her Own Two Wheels , under the pen name Stacy Xavier in 2012. She is married to the most supportive husband in the world and is the dog-mom of Scout, the cutest Jack Russell terrier on the face of the planet.

Photo by Flickr user tellmewhat.