Betting on Setting
In my MA program, I was fortunate to take an entire course on setting, called Essence of Place. I still think about that class. And I am thinking of it now as I go through my manuscript and try to establish setting as its own character, something big and glowing and cinematic. In the midst of this final draft of my novel, I am in the process of packing up the house that meant so much to my beautiful mother and getting moved into my apartment in downtown Albuquerque. I pack a few boxes, then take a break and go to my computer and work on this book. Life is chugging along at a brisk pace.
In the midst of all these boxes everywhere, where I skirt around sharp corners, desperate to avoid stubbing my toe, I’ve been contemplating giving this latest iteration of my novel its own draft name. For a long time, I have been reworking and retooling what I call my “Edinburgh draft.” Calling this last draft its own name is a truly negligible thing — what matters is the content — but I am anxious and excited and I am glued to my notebooks and my fountain pens and my tea. I am so close to querying this novel, and I have amassed exactly fifty agents to send the manuscript to once I cross that finish line.
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My new apartment is a studio. I will be able to keep my beloved writing desk. My grandmother gave me the desk when I was….I believe eight. Over the years, its legs have grown wobbly and little scratches accumulated. But it matters to me and I am excited. I don’t even mind sharing writing time with packing time because I feel like life is moving forward in a staggering limp, moving on from a terrible grief. I have some of the small tokens for my mother’s altar to guide me. I am rooted in a place where she always lives within me, as Hallmark as that sounds.
How to describe the setting of my novel? I have wanted for so long for it to be a Hispanic-American steampunk and dieselpunk, something that combines my identity as a Mexican American. It is an off-kilter take on the American Southwest. Typing that out, it seems so simple, like blowing up an air mattress to establish that essence of place, but it really is quite complex and I am juggling all these characters whose backgrounds right now still feel divorced from their physical origins. It is hard in some ways, but I keep on keeping on.
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I can walk to the library from my apartment. I like to write in coffee shops, though that is expensive, so I don’t do that much anymore. I purchased a beautiful gray satchel in July of last year to take with me to Scotland on my whirlwind trip abroad. I stuff it with my computer and a few journals where I do my writing by hand, my pens, my jump drives, my poetry that I take everywhere, from libraries to doctor appointments. I like the walk, get used to thinking in my own head as I amble towards this place of solitude and knowledge.
The library, in fact, features in my novel. For purposes of privacy — just in case this book ever does get published — I won’t go into too much detail as to how the library appears in different iterations in my book, but it is something that matters to me, something that makes more sense each time I visit the chapters and carve out some of the story in its mask of stone.
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My mom always wanted me to be a writer. She liked the name Savannah Tate because she thought that it was a name a writer would like. While most parents prod their children into careers in engineering or law or medicine, my mother questioned my quest to learn physics (my original major when I was an undergraduate) and said, “Why do that when you can do writing?” Going to an apartment that she will never see, will never celebrate with me, is a certain suffering of its own. She never finished my novel; she read the first half of the rough draft. For now, I will have a new space and a new book without her. I am fortunate to have the greatest family in the world, but I am also taking a step without my mother to cheer me on and that means a lot, means that I am stopping to think about where I am.
One step at a time.
