Writing the City as a Character
Author Evan Marks discusses writing the city as a character, including why it made sense for his debut novel.
To what extent would Dune be different if it wasn’t on a desert? How does Yorkshire Moors play into Wuthering Heights? How does setting inform story? That’s the crux of this essay and while there are several ways you can address it, for my novel, Vesper, it came down to three factors: superficial, philosophical, and personal.
To contextualize things, Vesper is an anti-romance novel about independence, love, and self-discovery told through the eyes of Manhattan consultant, Vesper. It’s being positioned as “Sex and the City meets Milan Kundera,” in large part because on the surface, it’s very much a story about the New York City dating scene. The highs and lows, the trials and tribulations, and all the drama that comes with it. It’s superficial, glossy, and high octane, with an atmosphere that follows the well-trodden path of a litany of films and novels, not least of which is SATC. I’m sure the reader can appreciate the connection between such a theme and a city like New York, so I’ll spare further discussion other than to note the significance of the city in this regard.
But Vesper is more than dating. There’s a philosophical aspect to it; the “Milan Kundera” part that offers a deeper exploration of some of the dualisms I was interested in. Namely, order and chaos, perception and illusion, and change and inertia. And it’s these factors that made the choice of New York City equally as foundational as the restaurants and private members clubs were to the dating elements of the story.
Order and chaos—the idea of finding symbiosis within conflicting elements—is a theme frequently examined throughout the story. All the way from the subtle references of individuals embodying the concept, such as Freya and Empedocles, to the insertions of the more prominent expressions in Taylor Swift’s Blank Space and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the context of a city, it doesn’t get more chaotic than New York, with its packed subway cars, pedestrian stampedes, and melting pot of personalities. And yet somehow, amidst the chaos, there is an elegance holding everything together. It’s in some ways a contemporary example of the ancient definition first found in Hesiod’s, Theogony, which held chaos as the primordial origin from which order emerges.
Another theme I explore in the novel is the malleability of perspective—how the same experience can be perceived in a variety of ways. Philosophically, it’s an idea that’s been extensively covered for millennia, dating back to Plato through to Nietzsche and Locke, and there are several examples of this woven into Vesper. The most notable of which is the concept of a date, where two participants can sometimes walk away with radically different views of how it went. But it’s also demonstrated on a more abstract level in the essence of New York as a city, where millions of people harbor a variety of perspectives, each informed by their own subjective experiences. You also see it in first-time visitors to the city, as preconceived illusions give way to the reality they encounter over the course of their trip.
The final example is perhaps the cleanest and deals with the relationship between change and inertia, highlighted in the book’s epigraph: “Everything changes, everything remains the same.” It’s a variation on Ovid’s omnia mutantur designed to reinforce the novel’s metamorphosis theme and the paradox of things evolving while still feeling constant. You see the idea expressed through the circularity of the character evolution the protagonist undergoes, but it’s equally present in New York itself. Where you have a fixed identity that persists even as everything within it is in flux: its people, its buildings, its ideologies.
By now, you should have a sense of how I approached New York in the context of Vesper. From its surface-level role in advancing the dating premise to the depth of character that supports the narrative’s philosophical ambitions. And while both of these are true, the final and most important factor is also the simplest: I chose the city because it’s been my home for the past 11 years. It’s what I know, it’s what I love, and it’s what I want to share.
So what’s the takeaway from all of this? How does my experience help you refine your own approach to selecting a location for your story? First, approach the setting from a variety of different considerations and layers. Every reader will see the story in a different way and the more depth you add to the experience, the more room there is to accommodate the variety of reader interpretations. Second, don’t ignore the most basic purpose of what the setting should do, which is to advance and support your story. It should be congruent; it should be purposeful. Third, choose somewhere you’re genuinely interested in or somewhere you understand deeply through experience, obsession or research. If you’re selecting a location because you feel like you need to, change your story. It all goes back to my earlier comment of making your writing personal. Because if you’re not doing that, what’s the point?
Check out Evan Marks' Vesper here:
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