One of the things about my fiction writing that is fairly obvious after a page or two is that I pay a lot of attention to setting. I like my characters to be fully immersed in a place, swimming in its details and colors and smells. I usually use settings in which I myself have lived, enhance them a bit, twist them a little. Characters don't exist outside of their setting, they are part of it, they interact with it, and they react to and are influenced by their place.
Last week while touring Northern Arizona I trundled through several spectacular Places. Real places, where real characters live. Looking at a vista like this, in Sedona, Arizona, I wondered how utterly different the world must look to someone raised among the red rock towers of the southwest, compared to those of us who grew up in the mossy redwoods of the California Coast.
The rich red color of the rocks contrasts with the velvet black asphalt of the new road through town.
Impossible rocks perch in the distance.
The sky is wide open here, and the air is stunningly clear. Thunderstorms do come in the rainy season, what there is of it, but the contrast to my wet, dark childhood underneath a thick canopy of redwoods couldn't be starker. I wonder where I would have gone in my life if I'd been born and raised in Sedona? I'd be tanner, that's for sure. And based on the population I observed, substantially thinner and more inclined to wear sparkling jewelry with jeans and a long, multicolored shirt. And perhaps I would be interested in vortexes, these mysterious if scientifically unprovable things that are claimed to exist in the various corners of Sedona's red rock skyline. Or, I might still be here in chilly Minnesota, having left Sedona to look for work outside the Vortex industry. One never knows. But one of the delights of vacation is the chance to script an alternate path to our own lives, and this one seemed sunnier, with better food.
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