As I think of it now, writing fiction seems a matter of somehow managing to jump onto an already spinning merry-go-round. Character is action, we are told. Spin. But any reader also knows instinctively that place is character, and action is place. Spin.

My Texan friend Clay began writing one of his novels with nothing but the single word “scooched” in mind. It appears in the first sentence of the book and isn’t even used with a meaning I had known before. Clay and I grew up in small towns in different corners of the world. A lot of miles separate Westbrook, Maine and Quanah, Texas.

You may well find that no matter how much you travel or where you live your stories are mostly set in small east coast cities, more or less at latitude 43°39′N.