Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction

Neighborhoods

Neighborhoods When I first began writing fiction, my stories’ settings were often amorphous, sometimes nonexistent, or they were rural, probably since I had spent several years living in southern Illinois, where, as an undergraduate , I had decided to become a writer. But it took years for me to be able to write about where I had grown up on the southwest side of Chicago. My first attempts resulted in maudlin prose, and the details I focused on were always gratuitously gritty: the crumbling sidewalks, the bent and twisted guardrails, the broken glass. That sort of thing. But then, in the early nineties, I began writing stories about two characters, Hank and Ralph. Hank was my thirteen-year-old alter ego, and Ralph was based on three different kids I knew when I was growing up, one of whom had failed two years of grade school. The stories almost always grew out of something autobiographical, and once I began using real place names—Ford City Shopping Center; Guidish Park Mobile Homes; the corner of 79th and Narragansett—I finally saw the stories with a clarity that my earlier stories set in nebulous rural towns never achieved. Granted, I’m a slow learner, but what I eventually discovered was that characters were a product of a place, often a very specific place, and that all place had to do was be. Faulkner’s books couldn’t be set in Anchorage , Alaska, any more than One Hundred Years of Solitude could be set in Poughkeepsie. What I discovered was that place provides a context for who people are and why they behave the way they do. The more specific the place, the more intensely those characters become defined because every place has its own urban legends, its own mythologies, and the people who live there have their own peculiar ways, whether it’s the food they eat (in my neighborhood, beef sandwiches at Duke’s on 85th and Harlem) or the neighborhoods 113 way they insult each other. My characters come from a blue collar background , as do I, and their sensibilities, like my own, are inextricably tied to that socioeconomic environment. In other words, I couldn’t simply move the cast of characters in my novel, The Book of Ralph, to another location. It wouldn’t work. These characters couldn’t be from wealthier northern Chicago suburbs, like Winnetka or Evanston, any more than they could be from Mars or the Andromeda Galaxy. Likewise, they couldn’t have grown up in the much poorer Cabrini Green housing projects, either. The world they know—the world from which they sprung—is a very specific 4.2-square-mile area, two miles south of Midway Airport, on Chicago’s southwest side. The notion of setting as an essential element of fiction writing isn’t new. Pick up any textbook on writing fiction, and you’ll find a chapter that will convince you why setting is a good thing. I’d like to go one step further and suggest that you should be thinking about neighborhoods. It’s an oldfashioned word that conjures up The Andy Griffith Show or, even, Seinfeld. And it should. Even though one is set in a small town (Mayberry) and the other in a large city (New York), the characters in both travel in small, intimate circles where they know not only their neighbors but also the people who work in their local businesses, whether it’s Floyd the barber or the Soup Nazi, and viewers begin to experience place not in terms of “small town” or “big city” but as something unique to The Andy Griffith Show or Seinfeld. We know those places as well as we know our own neighborhood ; maybe we even want to live in Mayberry or Seinfeld’s New York, even though we know they’re fictional. Such is the power of specificity. In his book Fiction Writer’s Workshop, Josip Novakovich writes about settinghaving“fallenoutoffashionattheexpenseofcharacterandaction”: Perhaps this trend has to do with our not being a society of walkers . Big writers used to be big walkers. Almost every day, Honoré de Balzac spent hours strolling the streets of Paris; Charles Dickens, the streets of London; Fyodor Dostoyevski, the streets of St. Petersburg. Their cities speak out from them. 114 neighborhoods If Novakovich’s assertion that place has fallen out of fashion is correct, I suspect one reason is because the country itself...