Seeing the Alien, Seeing Magic – Writing Wednesday

While writing what was supposed to be a piece of flash fiction, I was confronted again by just how important details are when setting a story in a specific location. In this case the story is set in my hometown. Well, city, to be exact. I sent the story in for critiques to my writing group (The Anomalous Sandbox) and received some notes which made me realise just how alien the description was to someone on the other side of the world. While the bustling streets were familiar, layout of streets and shops, things in the shops and the weather were noted as being “wrong”.

Photo courtesy of 
Belovodchenko Anton

As I had described a neighbourhood akin to mine (and weather I’ve been living with my whole life) I knew that what I was describing was indeed “right”. But I had not painted a clear enough picture of the setting. Not only that, I had not included the details which I take for granted every day which would have set the story more firmly in a specific city (or neighbourhood).

I started reworking the story, putting in a bit more description here, a little bit more “local flavour” there, and soon realised that a bigger story was waiting behind the first scribbled draft. I’m still working on the second draft, though, but this time around it is most definitely set in SA. Or, at least, the small part of the country which I live in.

It’s a strange mixture of cultures, languages, violence and compassion. Only when speaking to some people from other countries do I realise anew that it’s not second nature for everyone to switch between two (or more) languages during a day, or normal to walk into the kitchen at work and hear four different languages spoken. And I realised once more that setting a story in my little part of the world is as alien to some readers as if I had set in on another planet.

Protea, SA's National Flower

You may ask yourself ‘what is the point of all this rambling?’ Good question. My answer is that the point is learning to see _your_ world through different eyes. Not the eyes of the person who travels the same route to work every day, or who visit the same shop every week. It’s the eyes of a person who sees a place for the first time, who sees anew the people, the neighbours, the streets, the music, the poetry and the jokes. There is a magic, a fantastical world waiting to be discovered in your everyday surroundings. And, sometimes, I forget that.