Setting IS Powerful

I was one of the lucky people in our country to be in Washington DC on inauguration day for President Obama. It is not that day I want to discuss, but the day preceding.

I’d like to take you with me as I reminisce about the Lincoln Memorial and what an impact it has made on my memory. I’d like to tell you what it was like to stand on the steps of the most powerful court in the land and how thrilling it was to even just look at the words, The Library of Congress. I’d like to show you how seeing the Capital Building shimmering white in the setting sun filled my heart with pride at being a citizen of this country. I’d like to share with you the deep sense of joy and hope that permeated the air that day as I walked the paths with thousands of others to visit the monuments and memorials.

But, that is not what I want to discuss.

I believe as writers we all have a bit of magic tucked away in our brains. The ancients called it our muse. Through the ages it has been labeled insanity, imagination, lunacy, inspiration. As writers we have all experienced this shot of realization, this startling of an idea. I definitely felt it that day.

All around us music flowed. People laughed. There was joy and hope flitting on the cool breeze. The sky was damp, but no rain fell. It was the optimism of the day that kept it away. The path led us onward as we felt a camaraderie with perfect strangers.

Rising from the ground was the black mirrored image of the Vietnam Memorial. And for the first time that day I felt an ache deep in my heart. I saw my reflection in the black marble, my hair tossed by the wind. My skin felt hot as tears stung cold on my cheeks. I am a daughter of this war. My family, my loved ones, my father, my uncles all gave pieces of their lives for the sake of lines on a map. I know what it is to see a soldier beaten down, defeated. I know what it is to see his bent back, his lowered head. Seeming to all of those around him that there is no more. No more hope. No more life. No more dreams. But he does not fall. Like the heroes of old he rises with some unseen strength, with pride burning out from his eyes.

I stood with my hand against the cold stone, feeling the beating hearts of the men who had given their last breath for their country. Hearing the Bye, bye miss American Pie lyrics blaring on the radio and the muffled, deep thomp, thomp, thomp of the Huey helicopter as it flew overhead. Circling us, protecting us as it had done all those years ago. I felt as if I had been transported back to 1969.

And even as I grieved for men I never met and felt sorrow for those who stood with roses in their hands, the writer in me learned a lesson. There is no other place where this could have happened to me as a human. No other time, no other moment. Each aspect of it is filled with symbolism and metaphor. I couldn’t have written it to be as real as it was. In transferring that to my fiction writers mind, I see how important it is to have the place in which the characters interact be as large as the characters themselves. Setting is powerful.