A few weeks ago in the Escape section of the New York Times there was a wonderful essay by the actor William H. Macy about his cabin in Northern Vermont. He’d bought in the 80’s; tiny and lacking inside plumbing or electricity, it took him ten years to get to the plumbing. “But the days I spent working on that cabin gave me some of the purest pleasure I have ever known,” he writes. And he still loves it. “A little cabin in Vermont that fits me perfectly.” He writes about the moose who walked toward the cabin with him one night, six raccoons hanging on his bird feeder, going cross country skiing at midnight under a full moon, temperatures dropping to thirty below. Through what he loves and observes in the essay, you get a sense of him as well as the place.

To Do: Where does your story take place? Write where you know. Write about a place you love. Describe it with specific detail – the weather there, the smells and sounds, views and landscapes. Your fiction and even essays need to be grounded in a specific place. Whatever you write doesn’t take place in a vacuum.

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