Experiencing Place in Fiction: On Allowing Your Characters to Get Lost

There’s a slipperiness to the landscape of the southwestern desert if you’re used to navigating a city. Scale works differently. There aren’t the usual buildings and trees to indicate how near or far you are from something.

Take Coyote Buttes South, in the Vermilion Cliff Wilderness of Southern Utah: the towering forms of undulating sandstone, striated in pink and white, shaped by a millennia of wind, were unlike any landscape I’d ever traversed. To get there, my husband and I had obtained a hiking permit through a lottery system from the Bureau of Land Management, and hired a guide to drive us over the ribbon of sand through wilderness to the trailhead, for fear that our rental car wouldn’t make it over the terrain and we’d have to pay a steep fee to get it towed.

The guide, an easygoing lapsed Mormon with a cross tattoo that took up his whole calf, had told us that he would let us wander and would meet us at the spires where we’d entered. Once we were swallowed up by the rocks, there was no landmark to look toward to know what direction we were going in. With the exception of some footprints we followed through pink sand, there was no evidence of other humans anywhere.

It was very beautiful and very strange. The rock formations looked like something from another planet. There was no trail. There was no cell service. When we arrived at what we thought the correct location was after our wanderings a couple of hours later, the guide was nowhere to be found. Were we at the spires? Or were those the spires, over there?

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There is an exercise I do with my writing students: I have them draw a map of their childhood neighborhood and write short descriptions of emotional landmarks—places that trigger memories. In our childhood neighborhoods, we grow so used to the way things look that we hardly register them unless they’ve changed in some drastic way. Like the sedimentary rocks in Coyote Buttes are layered with compacted sand, our personal landmarks are layered with memories.

The idea behind this exercise is to convey that place and character have a symbiotic relationship. This is something that the writer Dorothy Allison stresses in her essay “Place,” originally given as a lecture at the Tin House Writing Workshops. “Place is not just what your feet are crossing when you’re trying to get somewhere,” she says. Place is something that’s experienced by a person—or by a character.

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In Coyote Buttes, we made a few cautious loops in an unsuccessful attempt to get our bearings before a sense of doom set in. Were we lost? My husband made grim jokes about the movie Gerry by Gus Van Sant, where two friends named Gerry wander off-trail and become hopelessly lost in the desert without food or water. The sun was higher now, and the rocks looked different: the light had changed them from rosy pink to whitish tan.

I mentally catalogued what I had in my backpack: a sandwich. Some trail mix. The water in my camelback, plus the water in my water bottle. I’d brought a survival kit—overkill, maybe, but maybe not—which had things like an emergency blanket, an LED headlamp, glucose packets, some expired Percocet that I’d added in case one of us fell and injured ourselves. We were not the Gerrys.

We gloomily ate our sandwiches while I wondered silently to myself if we should be rationing. The unease turned to bickering. My husband insisted we were at the meetup point—those were the spires—but I wasn’t convinced. Hadn’t I been tracking our location on my AllTrails app? Why not? (I had forgotten. I was sorry.)

The sun grew hotter the longer we sat. We called out again for the guide. My mind raced. What if something had happened to him? How cold did it get here at night? How long until someone came looking for us?

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In her essay “Open Door” in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit meditates on the many meanings of losing oneself, weaving together Passover tradition, anecdotes from search-and-rescue team members, ideas from Thoreau, the Wintu tribe of Northern California, Keats, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, and other disparate sources to underscore the importance of making space for the unknown in our lives.

“Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery,” she states. Keeping the unknown close is also beneficial to our fiction: it’s that uncertainty that makes stories interesting.

After writing about the memories of their neighborhood, I instruct my students to write from the point of view of a stranger navigating that neighborhood. The lesson is twofold: one, that looking at familiar surroundings through a stranger’s eyes will unlock details previously unavailable to the writer, and two: to understand how place in fiction is dependent on context, specifically the context a character brings to the place.

But what happens when there is no context for what it is your character is seeing? When what is in front of them is so strange and foreign to their own experience that they aren’t even sure how to process it? That’s when the seams between what’s real and what’s not begin to tear and let nightmares through.

In my short story collection Mystery Lights, many of the stories are told from the point of view of women who are unfamiliar with the deserts where the stories are set. They are apprehensive and unsettled in the harsh landscape. If they have memories of the desert, the memories are unpleasant ones. This tension and uncertainty serve as a driving force behind the stories. They are strangers in a strange land.

In the final scene of my story “Vermilion,” Nancy wanders a rocky landscape inspired by Coyote Buttes. She is in denial about the fact that she’s still mourning the loss of her daughter who disappeared nearly two decades prior. She’s on vacation with her new husband, a man who has no emotional connection to her vanished daughter. The air is thick with wildfire smoke, and the two unwisely separate on solo hikes.

It’s not long before Nancy is completely lost in the rocks. Panicked and coughing from the smoke, fearing for her life, it’s in this heightened state that she realizes her denial, this is when she sees a figure—her daughter, or so she thinks. Things aren’t quite what they seem.

In this story and others in the collection, the protagonists eventually find their way back to relative safety, but not without experiencing an internal transformation. Just as placing a character in an unfamiliar or uncomfortable emotional situation (an awkward dinner party, a bad date, a run-in with an enemy) can add tension and heft to a narrative, placing your character in an unfamiliar place can bring a sense of urgency to your story.

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Of course, we made it out of Coyote Buttes—my husband found a patch of cellphone reception and we were able to get ahold of our guide, who was waiting for us in the Jeep he’d assumed we’d returned to to wait for him, a half mile away. We found our way back to his parking spot and climbed into the vehicle, relieved and mildly annoyed.

Soon we were bouncing over the sandy road as ads for Mormon prepper storage solutions blared over the radio, safe, the spires disappearing behind us in the dust.

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Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia is available via Tin House.