For my first three books the setting (or place if you will) has always been a given - N.J. and the Dominican Republic and some N.Y.C. - so from one perspective you could say that the place in my work always comes first.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Many of my books are set in New Jersey because that's where I was born and raised. I lived there until my kids finished elementary school. Then we moved to New Mexico, the setting for 'Tiger Eyes.'
I think when you first start out, you're writing books that are about your immediate place.
If you ask me, the place that a story happens is as equal character. It's almost like an ecological viewpoint: These people are living in this piece of land, and in this piece of land in this time this is possible. For me, I almost think location first. It's time first - what year is it - then where are we, and then who is in it.
It doesn't matter where it is in the world or who I'm making the movie with; that's the closest thing that I've got to a sense of placement.
Wherever I am, I take books, not novels.
Though it may not seem like it, I never try to write about a place, per se; it's always, first and last, about story. Story is everything. Story and a bit of attitude.
A sense of place is very important in writing.
New York is the place where they bind books and write blurbs and arrange the publicity and print the galleys... But Chicago is the place where the book is lived out before it is bound and the song is sung before it is recorded.
Actually, between books is precisely when I do give myself vacations.
The only thing that changes in my novels are the locations.