Have you ever given thought to what would happen to the story or any of the character's lives if you had changed the setting to a different place?

Georgia Scott Heidi without the mountain? Moby Dick without the ship? I can't think of those books without their settings any more than Rocky without a boxing ring. The stories I write are inseparable from their settings. Like the flowers that grow in cracks of concrete, they arise. They aren't planted and could never be transplanted elsewhere. To illustrate, let me bring up something I recently reviewed. In Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Marguerite Duras grounds past traumas and present passion so much in setting that the lovers call each other Nevers and Hiroshima. Characters and settings are similarly entwined in the love story I'm writing. Set in a former Soviet bloc country in the 1990s, to picture those times, think of someone who missed out on adolescence getting a chance to catch up. That is the tempo after the Berlin Wall comes down. It is rash and jubilant. Now imagine that your love is forbidden. I wouldn't tear these lovers from that setting any more than pull that imperfect child from her perfect New England town in American Girl: Memories That Made Me. No returns, as they say in some shops. No exchanges on any settings.

Big thank you for your question, Suzanne.

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