LOCATION! LOCATION! LOCATION!

Part 1: Setting can - and should - be as big a character as your characters! And where you set your novel can make it or break it.

You hear it all the time in real estate when searching for a new home:

Location, location, location!

My aunt and uncle were real estate agents, we’ve purchased two homes in two resort towns — very tricky markets — so I’ve learned a thing or two about location. But setting in a book is just as important and complicated.

Too many authors — established and aspiring — don’t consider setting as a foundational part of the story. They mention a town once. Or give a rather rote description of a place.

But place isn’t just place. It’s a part of us. A piece of our soul.

Let’s start with with the biggest setting of all in our lives, shall we?

Home.

I began to write Viola Shipman novels when I found my grandmother’s heirlooms (charm bracelets, recipe boxes, hope chests, quilts, family Bible, scrapbooks) boxed in the attic of my childhood home. My mother had passed, my father was failing, and it was time to move him to a smaller, safer, one-story home.

In packing up the house, I was overwhelmed (many of you’ve been there I’m sure). What to toss? What to keep? When I found those heirlooms, I knew I needed not only to keep them and cherish them but also to change direction in my writing as I realized my Ozarks grandparents (an ore miner and seamstress, neither of whom finished high school) were never poor, they were the richest people I’d known because they understood what mattered most in life (the foundation of all my novels).

I was born and raised in the Ozarks. Rural America. Have you seen the TV show Ozark? Yeah, well, they sugarcoated it. It was hard for me as a kid.

But the setting. Oh, the setting! The Ozarks are breathtakingly, heartbreakingly beautiful. The morning mist on the horizon. The whippoorwill’s call at dusk. It wasn’t just where I lived. It was a part of me. A piece of my soul. A ghost pain.

I used that setting, of course, in all of my memoirs. It was what I knew. Every bluff. Every crick. Every pasture.

When I started my first novel, The Charm Bracelet, my earliest drafts had the setting again in the Ozarks. But something was stopping me. It just didn’t feel … right.

I had moved to Michigan in February of 2006 (dumbest decision of my life, btw) after I quit my job, started writing (without a second book contract!) and left St. Louis. I felt called to move to Michigan. I absolutely loved my resort town of Saugatuck. It was Currier & Ives cute. It was a Hallmark small town but with a twist: It was artsy, progressive, filled with entrepreneurs and artists of all kinds.

Most of all, it was stunningly gorgeous. Every twist and turn — from Lake Michigan to Lake Shore Drive, the orchards and wineries, the beach, sand dunes and ice cream shoppes, the old-timey downtown on the water, the shops and restaurants … it all looked like a movie set.

And it had changed me. Profoundly.

I am fascinated with environment.

Where we grow, where we move, where we live, how we live …

Environment changes us. Not only the place — the weather, the type of city, what it offers and doesn’t — but the people. It slowly makes us who we are. It influences how we think, our every decision. It becomes a part of our soul, like the air we breathe.

When we move, or when we go on vacation, environment impacts us again. Often, when we move, we are excited but scared. We are forced to meet new friends, go to new grocery stores and shops, we are, literally, out of our comfort zone.

Conversely, when we go on vacation, we travel to places we love, places that offer us escape, relaxation, joy and comfort, places — I believe — that, after a few days, make us the people we dream we can become because daily life and all its troubles slowly fade like a beautiful sunset.

I stopped writing and began to consider all of this when considering a new setting for The Charm Bracelet (and future books).

And then I began to read, especially all of the authors who had influenced me.

Pat Conroy.

Dorothea Benton Frank.

Truman Capote.

Erma Bombeck.