Writing craft – Patricia J. Parsons

Backstory, Writing craft, Fiction Writing

More Than a Setting: When Place Becomes a Character

Posted on 13 Oct 2026 by Patricia J. Parsons

A setting is where a story happens. But what if it can be more than that? A place that becomes a character is something else entirely.

It has a personality. It exerts influence by shaping the people who inhabit it. It shapes what they take for granted and often becomes something they can never quite escape, even if they leave physically. It holds secrets, preserves memories, and often complicates the lives of people who call it home or just come from away and stay only a short time. But unlike a character a writer creates in a story, a place arrives with its own history.

As writers, we describe a coastline, a city street or a small town. We establish the weather, sketch the architecture and provide the geographical coordinates. But none of that necessarily brings a place to life. A place becomes a character only when it matters to the story.

Think of the landscapes in the fiction we remember. They are rarely interchangeable. If you removed the Yorkshire moors from Wuthering Heights, the Mississippi River from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or, my favourite, Manderley from Rebecca, you would change more than the scenery. The story’s emotional and moral universe would change dramatically.

Place undoubtedly influences behaviour. It establishes boundaries, creates opportunities and imposes limitations. It even shapes local humour and social conventions, becoming central to the stories people tell about themselves.

But through whose eyes does the story of “place” become true? An outsider may see an extraordinary landscape, and yet a lifelong resident might see it as the site of a childhood humiliation, a family feud or a harrowing drive to the nearest hospital. A tourist sees the picturesque bits. A local sees a leaking roof. Both are telling the truth, but neither possesses the whole truth. This tension is fertile ground for writers.

As a writer, I’ve noticed the challenge is resisting the urge to turn a place—my story’s setting—into a travel brochure. This challenge can be exceptionally charged when the setting has so much to offer to travellers. The most interesting settings, though, are not necessarily the most beautiful.

I thought about this while writing We Came From Away, my book, a finalist for the 2025 Leacock Medal for Literary Humour. Newfoundland is more than a geographical backdrop. Its character, culture and distinctive sense of humour are inseparable from the story’s world. The place shapes not only what happens, but how people understand it and talk about it afterward.

Every place has its own vocabulary, rhythms and silences. It has things people discuss freely and things they know better than to mention. It has myths about itself, some deserved, and others maintained largely out of habit. Rather than decorative details, they’re part of a story’s social architecture.

Perhaps the real test is this: when readers finish a book, do they remember only what happened to the characters, or do they feel they have been somewhere?

When a place becomes a character, readers don’t simply visit. They form a relationship. They may recognize it, miss it, argue with it or want to return. They may even discover that a place they thought they knew looks different through someone else’s eyes.

editing, punctuation, Writing craft

Ode to the “Em Dash”

Posted on 12 Sep 202612 Sep 2026 by Patricia J. Parsons

I’m working on the second draft of my newest novel. I love working on second drafts almost as much as writing the first draft. (The less said about how much I love working on the subsequent ones, the better.) As I edit, I’m struck by a detail that should never have become a problem. It is a punctuation mark.

I’m not sure when I first discovered that I had a favourite punctuation mark. However, it was a revelation when em dashes began appearing in my writing decades ago, if I recall correctly.

Most people aren’t aware, but the em dash first appeared in the fifteenth century as a mark indicating the width of the letter “M.” It was, in fact, not even an invention created by grammarians to assist us in expressing our precise meaning, as most punctuation does. Rather, a printer gave us this handy little mark, which lets us replace parentheses, commas and colons. In my view, it also gives the sentence a different feel and, therefore, a different meaning.

I even did a YouTube video on this handy, well-loved little mark back in 2022 (when I still did that kind of thing), giving tips on my personal favourite punctuation marks. FYI, I’ve added it at the bottom in case you’re into these things.

So, you can imagine my horror at discovering that the em dash is now one of the ways editors and readers think they can spot writing created by artificial intelligence. How utterly simplistic. This horrific discovery then sent me on a mad chase to find my em dashes in my second drafts. I examine where I have used them and try to figure out whether parentheses or commas would be better. In almost every case, they would not. So, I’ve succumbed, like so many other writers these days, to incorporating the dreaded sentence fragment. Probably even worse. If you get my meaning.

Then, common sense dawns. I step back and realize that if anyone thinks any piece of writing wasn’t created by a human just because there are em dashes, then I believe we have a serious literacy problem. If, on the other hand, you love a story that also might have the odd em dash, used correctly, effectively and by design, then read it and love it.

I am not apologizing for my em dashes. I love them.

Creativity, Writing craft

Why Accidental Writers Often Tell the Most Honest Stories

Posted on 1 Jun 2026 by Patricia J. Parsons

Most people imagine writers as people who always knew. I suppose, in some ways, you might even say I was one of them because I wrote short stories in high school. But, like so many others who loved writing, the “Love” of writing wasn’t obsessive enough to propel me toward a career as a novelist.

So, not even the child with notebooks under the bed or the English major quoting Baldwin at nineteen or the aspiring novelist who introduces herself as “a writer” long before she has written anything worth is necessarily anything but an accidental author. The truth is that many of the most compelling writers arrive at writing via a circuitous route rather than the straight path we might assume. So where do writers come from?

They come from boardrooms, classrooms, newsrooms, hospitals, marriages, divorces, campaigns, courtrooms, and funerals. They become writers not because they spent their lives cultivating a literary identity, but because they eventually encounter something they can’t stop thinking about. I have long felt that this experience matters in writing, perhaps more than anything else. Taletn certainly isn’t enough… although it helps.

People who stumble into writing accidentally often spend years observing human behaviour before they ever attempt to describe it. They’ve worked with difficult people. They’ve watched institutions protect themselves. They’ve seen good people act selfishly and selfish people occasionally behave with astonishing grace. They understand that most human beings are not consistent enough to fit neatly into moral categories. In my experience, this changes how they write fiction.

Writers who arrive through life rather than academia are often less interested in performance. They’re not trying to sound like writers; rather, they’re trying to understand something. The writing becomes an investigation rather than an exhibition, and readers can feel the difference even if they have no idea where it comes from.

I think that there is a particular kind of dishonesty that creeps into fiction when the writer already knows exactly what he/she wants the reader to believe. Characters stop behaving like people and begin behaving like arguments—moral arguments that morph into preaching.

By middle age, most people have discovered that villains rarely announce themselves as villains. They rationalize. They justify. They protect their self-image. Even cruelty often arrives wrapped in explanations that make sense to the person committing it.

Fiction becomes interesting not when it delivers moral instruction (*gag*), but when it allows readers to inhabit uncomfortable ambiguity. A novel can explore revenge, greed, abuse, power, forgiveness, or corruption without issuing a sermon. In fact, fiction usually becomes more powerful the moment the author stops trying to control the moral outcome.

In my view, readers don’t want to be managed, but they do want the chance to recognize the truth of a story.

Accidental writers are often better positioned to provide that truth because they didn’t begin with a theory of literature. They began with experience. Something happened. Someone betrayed them. Someone disappointed them. An institution failed. A relationship changed shape. A contradiction became impossible to ignore. The writing then emerges from pressure rather than ambition.

Perhaps this is why some of the most honest fiction feels less like writerly performance and more like confession. OF course, that’s not necessarily an autobiographical confession, but an emotional confession. The writer is not standing above the reader explaining the world. The writer is standing beside the reader, trying to figure it out.

Ultimately, the healthiest and most honest way to approach writing may not be branding, but curiosity sharpened by experience.

I believe the best fiction rarely comes from people trying to prove that they’re writers. It comes from people trying to understand what happened to them—and to everyone else.

[originally published on my Substack, May 28, 2026]