“All description is an opinion about the world.” ~ Anne Enright

Setting is integral to any story. Applying the methods to your memoir that a fiction writer uses to create memorable settings will strengthen the writing and draw the reader into your story.

However, creating a sense of place doesn’t mean heaping on details about scenery, clothing, or period decorations. As readers, we’ve all endured paragraph-on-paragraph or page after page of endless description, even from our favorite authors. And what was the usual result? We skimmed these passages or flipped through pages looking for the place the actual story picked up again.

Besides causing the reader’s eyes to glaze over, the main problem with detail dumping is that it creates a detachment from the point of view character (or the subject of the memoir). If a reader is engaged in the story, he can become disconnected when he encounters a high level of detail, because at that point the character isn’t the one speaking from the pages, it’s the author. Even if the surroundings are not essential to what’s happening in the rest of the scene, you still want the setting to be expressed through the eyes of your character – and no character will normally notice pages worth of detail about wall hangings (unless she’s a seamstress).

This naturally leads to the question, “How much detail is enough and how much is too much?” And the answer is…it depends. If more description is needed to understand or present the story, use more. If less is needed, then less. In other words, whatever it takes to serve the story – and knowing when to do either one often takes time and experience. But instead of dwelling on “how much,” determine why this particular place is important to the character and how she feels about it. The answers to these questions will steer the writing and help to unveil the character’s life and world.

In the article “The How of Where,” David Rocklin discusses the difference between writing a setting that holds no meaning to you and one that bears witness:

Find a room…[that] holds nothing of your past life. You don’t know its contours, or how it looks on a cloudy morning. You can literally find one and occupy it, or find a picture and imagine yourself into it. Describe it. Tell the readers what we see. What we could touch, if only we were really there.

Now, describe the same room a second time. This time, give the room a story. This is where someone died. That chair was where a husband sat as his wife told him that she was leaving him. Out that window, a single mother watched a moving van pull up after losing the house to foreclosure.

What just happened? The room’s physical description changed, didn’t it? That’s not merely a bed. That’s not simply a street outside. The walls and their peeled paint have something akin to a voice. This setting isn’t just an edifice or a space anymore. It bears witness.