An exercise in story geography:

Physical and mental geography of story is important because it is truly the trunk from which all the rest grows. Setting must be appropriate to the characters as well as the geographical location. There must be an understanding between the story and the reader as to why characters are in a particular physical place and why they appear there in a certain physical context. You wouldn't put an Eskimo dressed in polar bear fur on the beaches of North Carolina in mid-July without the reader needing to understand why and how such an event could happen. The setting of a story affects the perception of the reader and can either ring true or false. When it is true, we believe the writer and trust him or her to lead us through a good story. If the setting is false, we know we are in the hands of a rascal and won't trust the story to be authentic.

When I speak of mental geography, I am talking about all the elements of a story and how they fit together to create the world we are willing to accept as real and live in for a few hours as we turn the page. One must always start with the physical world, create that place where the action of your story will reside. But then it is the responsibility of the author to fill that world up with credible "evidence", behavior, description, dialogue and props that reinforce the world of the story. Like a set designer on a movie, the writer has to make the world real, the actual physical part that must then be accepted mentally as true, so the fictional world will evolve into an acceptable reality.

Assignment:

Place a character in an unexpected setting (i.e. an Eskimo on a beach). Now pay attention to every sight, sound, and feel of that setting and make it credible for the character in it.

Remember to pay attention to both the physical and mental geography of the scene. The physical gives you a sense of reality, while the mental (or the accumulation of the elements of the scene) allows you to believe the character and his or her presence and behavior within in this fictional world.

Recommended Readings:
Novels and short story collections

Lewis Nordan’s Music of the Swamp
Silas House’s Clay’s Quilt
Julianna Baggott’s Girl Talk
Jill McCorkle’s Final Vinyl Days
James Joyce’s The Dubliners
John Updike’s The Afterlife and Other Stories
Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood
John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath
Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms
Lee Smith’s Saving Grace
William Faulkner’s Collected Stories
Fred Chappell’s Brighten the Corner Where You Are
Reynolds Price Blue Calhoon