The Power of Place: Mastering Setting for Richer Storytelling with Gila Green

On this episode of The Ingenium Books Podcast we dive deep into the craft of storytelling and the art of writing. In today’s episode, we’re exploring a fundamental yet often underestimated element of great stories: setting. 

Whether your tale unfolds in a bustling city or a quiet countryside, whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, the way you use setting can shape your story’s tone, atmosphere, and emotional impact.

But setting is more than just a backdrop for your characters—when used effectively, it becomes a character in its own right, with its own personality, mood, and influence on the narrative. Today, we’ll unpack how to treat setting as a dynamic force in your writing, how to use it to reflect themes and character development, and why specific details matter.

We’ll also discuss how setting can drive your plot, evoke symbolism, and even shape your characters’ behaviors and choices. And, of course, we’ll touch on the importance of research and cultural sensitivity when crafting believable and immersive settings.

So, whether you’re a seasoned writer or just starting out, stay tuned as we explore how to make the most of your story’s setting and transform it into a powerful storytelling tool. 

Our guest on this episode is Gila Green, a Canadian author of four novels, with a fifth and a sixth on the way. She has written books that span the Ottoman Empire, British-mandate Palestine, modern Israel, the Canada of the 1980s, present-day Canada, Johannesburg, and Kruger National Park in South Africa. She has a Masters Degree in Creative Writing She has taught creative writing, and she also teaches English as a Foreign Language at the Jerusalem College of Technology. 

Transcript

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:01)

Our guest for today’s episode has heard authors say that their story, their novel, could really take place anytime: maybe last century, maybe this century, or maybe at some point in the future. And if those authors that have said that, believe that that is true, maybe they also believe that it could take place anywhere: any location. And maybe they believe that because theirs is a universal story of thwarted love or maybe it’s a murder mystery that could happen anywhere, or some other representation of the hero’s journey where a challenge is overcome. 

But is it true that any story could take place anywhere? Not any story: A particular story could take place anywhere. And just how important is place in our writing? 

We are talking today with Gila Green. She is a Canadian author of four novels. She has a fifth and a sixth on the way. She has written books that span the Ottoman Empire, British-mandate Palestine, modern Israel, the Canada of the 1980s, present-day Canada, Johannesburg, and Kruger National Park in South Africa. She has a Masters Degree in Creative Writing She has taught creative writing, and she also teaches English as a Foreign Language at the Jerusalem College of Technology. 

We are talking with Gila today about the role of place or location in storytelling. 

Introduction (01:33)

Boni Wagner-Stafford (02:14)

So we are joined today by Gila Green, who is a many-times published author, a Canadian but living in Israel. And before we dive into our topic of location and setting and place, I think that we just really have to do a little bit of a check-in because you’re in a part of the world that’s all over the news for us right now and we want to make sure that you are okay. So welcome. And tell us what your life is like right now, living in Israel.

Gila Green (02:48)

Well, first of all, Boni, thank you so much for having me and inviting me to be here with you today. I wish we were all over the news for much better reasons – for technological advancements and scientific and agricultural advancements – but unfortunately, right now that’s not why we’re in the news. I would say it’s a little bit tense right now. It’s kind of, people realize this is not going to be short. If anybody knows the history of Israel or Middle East in general or even modern Middle East, that wars tend to be shorter rather than longer – certainly in Israeli history – and this one is not going to be short because there is a need for a larger, more fundamental change in the region.

So people are, I guess, going day by day and it’s not easy. You wake up every morning, you look at the news, you hope that … Somebody has been taken from the world a little too early and you hope it’s not someone you know personally. But Israelis are strong and they’re going to get through it.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (04:13)

You are speaking to us today from where?

Gila Green (04:19)

I’m speaking to you from Beit Shemesh, which is really equidistant between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It’s really smack in the middle. You can see the Judaean Hills outside my window. It’s a very suburban town, but it’s close enough to two major cities that you can get your dose of city life pretty easily.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (04:42)

And you’re sitting on a chair and you’re mentioning where you are earlier, before we started recording.

Gila Green (04:49)

So this, yeah, this is my bomb shelter. So if there was a code red, which I’m not anticipating – they kind of, it sounds funny, but terrorist groups have hours. They actually, you can anticipate their schedule after a while. I know that sounds probably really odd, but there tend to be times of day that are quiet and times of day that are less quiet. And you can really start anticipating the schedule.

So we shouldn’t have any problems, but all houses built – can’t tell you the exact date, but maybe from like the mid ’90s to late ’90s – have bomb shelters by law. Their own bomb shelters. So this is mine. It doubles as my office. And so that’s where we are.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (05:42)

All right, well thank you for that update and we hope that you are able to stay safe and are sending our thoughts, of course, to you. But I think it’s a very interesting place to segue. So we’re talking about location and place and here you are sitting in a bomb shelter in Israel when the country is engaged in a war and we’re not here to talk about the war; we’re not here to pick sides about the war, but we’re talking about place, location and setting. And so I was intrigued by one of the video blogs or vlogs that you had shared with me where you mentioned that you have heard from authors – some authors – that they believe that their story can take place anywhere or at any time. And I’d like you to just talk about that to get us started.

Gila Green (06:42)

Yeah, you’d be surprised, or I was surprised anyway. Maybe in your professional – maybe you wouldn’t be as surprised. But I was surprised. And there was a good sort of almost 12 years there. I’d say from 2009 until about 2020, I guess right before corona, around corona time. Ironically, instead of going online like other people, I had kind of stopped.

I think you have to move on and do other things. But for really a very long period, I was teaching creative writing online three times a year. One group would stop and one group would start. Usually between six and eight people. And most of the women were in the US, but they could be in Canada, they could be in England, they could be in Australia, et cetera. But anyway, people – most of them – whose first tongue was English and we were taking creative writing. And I would very often be surprised at how many submissions I would get where people – and I would say in my feedback, “Where does this story take place?” And, “Oh, doesn’t have to take … Doesn’t matter. Anywhere in the States, you know. Anywhere in the US. It doesn’t matter. Anywhere. Anywhere in Canada, you know, kind of anytime, like modern.” They just say like “modern”, you know: Like obviously it was current in terms of the technology, say, but no specific year. 

And this was really surprising because my first response to that would be, well, if you close your eyes – or not – and I ask you what are your favourite books – it doesn’t have to be a book: movie or a book – I can pretty much promise you that your second or third sentence is going to tell me where it takes place and when it takes place, right? You’re either going to say, “Oh, this took place in the American South and it was, you know, it was still during Segregation or it was still during the Civil War, that you’re going to say this either first or second, after maybe you talk about a character. It is not going to be buried way down there. All of our favourite stories – film or print, digital at this point – we know where and when they took place. 

And yet when we go to write, you know, so many of us say it doesn’t matter. So that’s a myth and that has to absolutely go.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (09:12)

Yeah, so it is true. And I can see where some of those authors may have gone astray, where they think, oh, it’s a timeless, you know, thwarted love story or whatever the story is that is represented by the hero’s journey, where somebody overcomes a big challenge, and therefore location, place, or even time may not matter from that perspective. But I think to – and I’m agreeing with you, that to continue to believe in that is going to leave your readers wanting more, and it may in fact lead your readers not to finish what you’ve written. So if it is indeed our job as writers and authors to treat location and place – I’m going to use a word; you tell me whether you agree with this word – but almost like a character, a main character, then perhaps we can dig into how you might suggest that a writer do that. 

So first of all, is that a fair characterization that you would recommend that setting, place, even time be treated as a character in a work?

Gila Green (10:38)

A hundred percent. Place is a character in your novel and I would say it’s the primary character. I would go so far as to say it’s the primary character because everything is coming out of place: The dialogue, how people are going to speak, the phrases they’re going to use, obviously more and more the technology they’re going to use. No one is going to – no one would have been able to write a story just a couple of years ago and mentioned, you know, ChatGPT or the technology, the transportation, how people dress. Everything. What they eat, what they can and cannot do, depending on the current political situation. I mean, especially now in a post-corona society, that should be very obvious that if you’re writing about something now that’s taking place now, well that’s post-corona and that still has an effect. 

So I would say it’s primary. Everything is coming out of that. What women can and cannot do. The relationships. How people would react to their different relationships, their careers, how many children people have. Just everything. I could go on and on. It’s all coming from place. I know that we don’t like to think so, right? We like to think that we are supremely enlightened and far less ignorant than any other people in history ever because we’re just above any of the isms and any of the ideologies. But the fact is, sorry, we are all very, very strongly products of our place: our place and time. I know that no one likes to hear that because we’re all so unbelievably enlightened. But as somebody who has lived in three countries and has been surrounded by people all the time from all over the world and who is married to someone from the other side of the world, I can assure you that we are very much products of our place.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (13:00)

Now, you’ve written about several different places. I want you to just tell us a little bit, without going into too much detail, but tell us about your books and where they are set and then we’ll continue to dig into this notion.

Gila Green (13:16)

Right, so place, as you mentioned, is divided between time, location. There are different aspects to place and it can go all the way from the micro, what time of day is it when your character is doing whatever they’re doing and what season is it and day of the week and on and on and on, and which holidays are coming up, et cetera. So place is actually a lot bigger subject than maybe it sounds at first glance. 

My first publications were short stories. I really enjoyed short stories, I would say, between 2005 and the old days when there were printers and envelopes, stamps, and self-addressed stamped envelopes, these international stamps.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (14:00)

The old S-A-S-E, yes.

Gila Green (14:02)

Yeah, and finding one typo and having to reprint the whole thing. So, I was publishing short stories, I would say from 2005 to about maybe 2009. And short stories are different because the place can stay a lot steadier. You know, you don’t have these necessarily, but usually you don’t have these vast changes in place. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (14:26)

Shifts.

Gila Green (14:27)

Right, correct. These big migrations. Once I did move into novels – so I actually set my first novel in a futuristic place. It was a futuristic Israel that does not exist, in which Israel was divided into two, if not three, countries. They had built a man-made island off the coast to accommodate other people and it had completely separated into a very, very staunchly secular state and a very, very staunchly religious state. There was a commentary on the tension between religious and secular: secularism which was very strong. 

So it was in a futuristic place. And so you really need to work on that, right? Like that, how are people – and I’m no expert in sci-fi and that, so it was more sort of how would that work? What would happen if a lot of people got what they wanted, which was, “I just want to live with people who are identical to me. You just want to live with people who are identical to you. Everybody just wants to live.” And then what would actually happen? How would that actually work? And families were split up and divided. You could almost put that into the sort of a US thing, almost, between Democrats and Republicans if they had split in two. Maybe you could do that in Canada as well in some cases. So it was futuristic. That was published in Vancouver. That was called King of the Class. 

And then after that, I published a novel called Passport Control which really was focused in Haifa, which is sort of more northern Israel, in 1992. Very specific time. Very specific: It was really the peace. It was one of the reasons I came here at that time. I wanted to be part of this whole peace movement. We were finally going to have peace; we were going to have an Oslo Accords. All the stuff of the past was going to be the past and we were young, we were going to be the new generation of peace and moving on. And I wanted to see that and live in that in Haifa, which has a particularly high Arab population. I wanted to be in that environment as opposed to Tel Aviv, where I was living with Arabs, with Druze, with Palestinians. I wanted to be part of this new Middle East. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out exactly how we really thought then at the time that it was going to, but that book is centred on that time. So it’s a very specific, really idealistic time. There were a lot of people who were really convinced that that was it.

So that was a very specific time. And then I’ve written a novel called No Entry, which really leaves Israel behind completely. It sort of had enough and this takes place in Kruger National Park in South Africa. I lived in South Africa for close to a year, also at the very end of apartheid, the end of De Klerk’s premiership. And I didn’t want to touch apartheid. I felt that there were enough South African authors to write about that and who was I as a girl from Ottawa to go near that? I’d observed it but I didn’t feel it was my place, pardon the pun, to comment. I didn’t want to comment on that. It’s mentioned, it’s there, but I didn’t – I think they’re doing a great job on their own. So I wanted to talk about environmentalism and that book is an eco novel with an eco heroine who takes on an elephant poaching ring in Kruger National Park and really talking about the whole elephant extinction, ivory trade – through a novel, obviously. But that was a very, very specific place. And, you know, it was a big challenge to me. Could I write a whole book set in Africa when I’m not from South Africa? And could I convincingly do that? In other words, would South Africans believe that they were in South Africa? You know, not Canadians, but actual South Africans. So that was a big challenge and I had to work a lot on place, dialogue, dialect, all kinds of stuff. They have a whole completely different system there. Just everything is different. So that was another book. 

And White Zion is a novel with stories and that really migrates. That goes all the way back. My actual family came to Jerusalem in the 1880s and during the Ottoman Empire and I wanted to explore that: the Ottoman Empire. And then my grandparents were born in the Ottoman Empire here and then my father was born in 1936 under British-mandate Palestine. He grew up here under British rule. So I always had a really big fascination with the ’30s and ’40s. Because it kind of jumps: everyone’s sort of centred on Europe and the Holocaust, and then Israel’s created. It just kind of jumps in a lot of people’s minds. But what was going on here in the ’30s and ’40s with the British, and what was it like here? And obviously I had direct people to interview, et cetra. So that was also a very specific place and that novel and stories migrates to Canada, a modern Israel. 

My more recent book, With a Good Eye, that’s just in pre-release now in Montreal, is completely Ottawa of the ’80s. Really, really strong – I mean, I guess as Canadians we don’t think so, but my American feedback is like, “Wow, like really small town. Like so different.” I guess I didn’t think Ottawa was one of the bigger cities. I’m like, “Small town?” I wasn’t writing about, you know, like, I don’t know, Timmins or some place in Ontario. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (20:38)

It’s the capital city of our country. What do you mean it’s a small town? (Crosstalk.)

Gila Green (20:42)

But they felt it was very strongly like, “Oh my gosh, you’re really not American, right?” Because there’s a lot of assumption, even on the part of Americans, that we basically grew up in the same place. Really the same country. But then when they read it, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, no, not same country, like not same country.” Which, we know that. I read a book that takes place in New York or LA and I’m very aware that this is not Canada. That’s very obvious to me. But it’s not always obvious the other way around, which is interesting. So, I’ve really spent a lot of time and place thinking about place in all of my work and I am also a writing coach and a book editor. And I think also because I teach English as a Foreign Language in Jerusalem and my students are from everywhere. They’re from Ethiopia, they’re from Russia, they’re from Ukraine. They’re from – they have Syrian backgrounds, Afghanistan, France. Really everywhere. So you really have to be tuned in to where they’re from if you’re going to get anything across. So I have a lot of, I guess, place in my head. It’s really strong, how important it is.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (21:59)

One of the – I’m going to call it a buzz phrase but that may not be entirely fair – but world building is something that when we’re in author or writer circles, it’s like, “Okay, you’ve got to focus on your world building.” And often that is something that might make somebody think that we’re talking about a fantasy novel and we’re creating a world that doesn’t actually exist. And so we have to build the world: We have to build it from scratch, as opposed to place and location where we’re not necessarily building it from scratch, but we’re trying to create it the way it is and give it its distinction. But do you see any similarity between what we’re talking about here with location and place and being true to the time and place and location where the story is set, and this notion of world building? Are there similarities?

Gila Green (23:02)

There are. It’s just that, I mean my understanding of world building – and I could be wrong; I don’t own the copyright on the definition of world building – but my understanding of world building is that you get to create that world. That’s a really powerful, almost god-like power that you get to have. Like what are the rules going to be in this world? Is it going to be ruled by women? Is it going to be ruled by children? Are the teenagers going to rule? Are the poets going to rule? That’s different because you can decide. Now, it has things in common. People still have to know what the rules are.

But in some ways – I guess it depends on how your brain works – that could be easier because who is to challenge you? When you’re talking about a real place, as I mentioned before, let’s say with South Africa, it was really important to me that a South African would read my book and that they would be convinced that they were in Kruger National Park. You don’t get that kind of power. If anything, you’re subservient to the place. You don’t get to, you know, “Let’s get out of this jam by saying she calls emergency on her cellphone,” if cellphones didn’t exist. And similarly, you can’t get everybody out of every jam because they call someone on their cellphone. Even though in real life that might be precisely what you do. But you can’t get out of every scene because the cellphone magically rings and MacGyver’s on the other end, right? So I would say it’s more difficult in some ways, and in some ways it is the same. Not the same thing.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (25:01)

So, no. And those of us who are trying to write historical fiction, for example: I have a work in progress, based on the true story of my grandfather, but it’s fictionalized for a number of reasons, but it starts out in 1917 in the Volga region of Russia. A place to which I have never been. I had planned to go and then of course Ukraine happened so there’s no travel for me going there but I do plan to finish and publish within the next 18 months. So what’s your advice for authors when they cannot physically get to the place? And maybe it’s, “Don’t do it.” But what would you advise?

Gila Green (25:59)

Well, certainly that’s the ideal. I don’t think I could have attempted writing a book that takes place in Kruger National Park if I’d never been to it. Even though now, I mean, I think there’s even a live YouTube somewhere where they’re filming it all the time. So even though, I don’t know if I could have done. Obviously that’s the first prize, is you go. 

I would say it depends how much of the book. If your entire book takes place in somewhere that you’ve never been, that’s really tricky. So it depends what percentage: If it’s just starting off there, like you said, with the grandparents and the great grandparents and then it’s moving on to Canada, you have enough resources today to get away with it. So it depends how much of the book. Is the actual hero or heroine from there? You know, you really got to break it down. As you notice, as brave as I say that I was, I was not brave enough to make the heroine South African. She’s still Canadian. She’s Canadian and she goes there because even though I hear it all the time, the language, their sentence structure, everything is so different. It would just seem to me like so put on to change my language that way. Or maybe I was just not brave enough. But I still had a heroine who was Canadian. 

So you got to – it depends. Is the character from there? Is it told through the eyes of someone you can relate to more? Is it the whole book? I’m working with someone now who’s also been working a long time, also kind of auto fiction. And she also had – she’s American but her background, part of her background, is from Morocco. And she, even though we’ve been working on this for two years now, she got to Morocco and she was only there like a week or ten days but she came back and she was like, “Oh, thank god I went to Morocco.” Because we almost thought we can get away with this. It’s really already on fourth draft and she was like, “You know what? This is going to be so much better.” So that’s first prize. 

If you absolutely can’t, you have to analyze what percentage of the book, the hero, that kind of thing. If you think you can still go ahead, you have to at least interview people from there. You can’t just go on the two-dimensional, you know, the YouTubes, the internet, the Google Maps, because everything you see, everything in the world is put out by someone. Which means they can’t show everything, right? They can only show … So at least you’ve got to go for first-hand interviews. I interviewed as many people as I could who lived here, who grew up here in the 1930s and ’40s. It’s not that easy; these people are elderly. But what’s great now is that in the last decade, maybe more, there’s kind of this new thing that’s sort of, for grandma and grandpa’s 50th, they publish their memoirs. The grandchildren interview them. This self-publishing, but just for the family. I don’t know if it’s as popular in Canada, but it’s very popular over here with Americans, particularly. So that’s great because people like us have a lot of interviews and memories that maybe by the time we got to them, let’s say this person would have been much older, but because they’ve published this, their grandchildren all clubbed together and put out this book maybe when they were 70 or 65, there’s a lot in there. So you have to have first hand sources. That’s what I would tell you.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (29:53)

So when you are in the research phase, I’m wondering if you could talk about what are the things when you’re in the location and you’re starting to work on your book. What are you looking at? What are the details that you are paying attention to in a way that is different than if you were not a writer trying to write in an authentic, detailed way, where a South African, for example, would recognize the park?

Gila Green (30:30)

Well, you have to do a lot of listening, first of all. People speak differently. Their sense of humour is different, their insults are different, their teasing is different. I don’t know if you’ve ever – well, you say you’re in a different country right now, so you’re aware. I think, first of all, you have to know who you are. I think that people who are living where they’ve always lived, and they’ve never really ventured that far or maybe they’re not language teachers, so they don’t have this sort of built-in sensitivity, really need to develop that and those people are going to have more work to do. Not everyone: You know, some people, naturally, things just work for them. But in general, I would say those people have more work to do because people who have never strayed that far from their home culture or home language, like you said, they often wouldn’t know what to look for. They’re not sensitive to it. They’re not. 

But people who maybe lived in a different country when they were young or have relatives from overseas or maybe they have more intermarriage, et cetera – I mean, a million different things – are probably going to be more sensitive to it automatically. 

So first of all, you have to ask yourself who you are. I don’t really believe in blanket advice: kind of like health advice, you know? It doesn’t really work for everyone. So someone who has maybe more of a mixed background, travelled, will already have picked up things and they won’t have to maybe work hard. But you’ve got to listen a lot. You have to listen; you have to stop talking. As fun as it is to talk and be the centre of attention, you have to blend into the background, listen, and forget about tourist places. You know, that’s where the tourists are. You want to go to the grocery store. You want to take a bus. You want to take a subway. You want to take a train. Whatever their transportation. If they all go on Vespas, then like get on a Vespa. You know you don’t want to eat at like Italian McDonald’s. You want to go to some really local place. Basically, in short, you want to try to live as much as a local person as you can, even if it’s only for a few days. And you can’t be interacting with the actual people but you have to try not to interact as such a tourist, because then they’re going to answer you like a tourist. You know, dress more like them. Don’t walk around with your sort of taking a photo every second and your whatever giant stereotypical tourist with your like Canada maple leaf shirt and your Canada maple leaf baseball cap. Maybe don’t do that. So you want the most authentic experience you can have.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (33:21)

Yeah. So somebody listening to this conversation that we’re having may be noticing that we’re talking about location and place. And you have hardly mentioned mountains or trees or the smell in the air. You have been talking about the people: the way the people are in the place, the way they behave, how they speak. Is that on purpose?

Gila Green (34:00)

No. Again, let’s say Kruger National Park, that’s what it is: It’s the bush. So you’re going to be paying a lot of attention to what trees would grow there and what seasons, what birds. Israel in the ’30s and ’40s, I did a lot of research when the young boy goes to the Shuk or the market. I had to think like, “Well, wait a second: Were there avocados here in the 1930s? When did we start getting avocados?” Were there watermelons? What would they have what been selling? What kind of car would they have had? How did they heat their homes? This is what I’m saying: It’s a huge topic. How was the house heated? How was it lit? Everything. Everything from the refrigeration, how did they wash their clothes? All of these things. 

And you can spend hours or a few weeks and it’s just a line in your book, right? It’s just, “He turned on the primus,” which is the type of heater that they used here in the ’30s that was popular. And that was it. What TV show would have been on? I think in my new novel, I think they were playing – remember that sort of … What was it called? Like Simple Simon or Smart Simon that like spoke to you? In the ’80s? Something Simon, right? It escapes me now, but something with Simon. You pushed buttons and it talked back to you, and we just thought that was amazing in the early ’80s. So, what games would kids have been playing? 

This goes on and on, which comes back to my original point: When people say to me, “Oh, it doesn’t matter.” Now again, we don’t have to be travelling countries. You know, Toronto’s not Vancouver: The climate is very different. The weather is very different. And clearly Americans know that New York’s not LA. It doesn’t have to be across the world. Places are really important. Even neighbourhoods are important.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (36:06)

So location and place, we’ve talked about them having the same importance. Not only the same importance, but that they are like character. So maybe you can talk a little bit now about the arc. So likely, listeners are familiar with your character arc: the change in your characters that need to occur between the start of the book and the end of the book. You know, how have they been shaped by the events of the story? Is that the same with location and place and setting?

Gila Green (36:43)

Yes, a hundred percent. It has to travel with you. It can be one of – actually for me, I’m hoping I’m not the only one – that can be one of the hardest edits. When you think you’re done, or you think at least it’s good enough to go to an editor or a high-level beta reader, and then you think like, “Oh my gosh, this started in November, in the morning, and I’m so focused on the plot and the action and the climax and how I don’t want it to be too predictable and ending but I don’t want it to be far out, James Bond either,” like it has to it has to be real or whatever it is, you’re so hyper focused and then you think, “Oh, whoa, what happened?” And then you have to painstakingly go – and I often tell my clients to time stamp all their chapters to add up. I tell them it’s going to go away at the end; it’s not necessarily going to be there. But you must time stamp to the second. “‘Monday, two o’clock.’ This doesn’t make sense. They’re in school. Oh, wait a second. She was just in school. She can’t just go home now. She just said she doesn’t even have a key and three paragraphs later you’ve got her going home.” Or, “Wow, she hasn’t eaten in three days.” Or, “It was night before. Why did she put on a sweater? And now she’s at the beach.” All of these crazy things. It can be a very difficult edit. Whatever it is you’ve got to do – I don’t know, Google Docs, Excel, whatever you like – timestamping is an absolute must. 

This arc has to go with you. And I say to them, “How? Do you want this to be a year? Is it a month of her life? Is it a year? Is she going to go through Christmas? Is she going to go through Passover? Is she going to go through Ramadan? Like, what is she going to do?” Because what about those holidays in these major – if it’s spanning time. So it’s a very important arc. You can have a book that takes place over three days, right? Over a day. You have to time stamp every day. A hundred percent time stamp.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (38:56)

Right. We’re a little bit over our self-imposed roughly 30-minute estimate, but I just have a couple more things I want to ask you about. And that is how do you determine the appropriate balance with respect to place, location, setting? I keep using the three words because they’re all part of the same thing. But the balance between description and action when you’re talking about those elements.

Gila Green (39:38)

Oh, I see what you’re saying. The great thing about place is it can be part of any of the other elements. So you don’t need to hit people over the head with a hammer. You know, you don’t have to have somebody saying every minute, “But this is the Middle East.” “But we’re in North America.” “But …” You don’t have to. It can be very subtle. It can come out in the dialogue, particular expressions, the way people talk. It can just come out in some piece of jewellery. In my most recent novel, the close friend gives the heroine a hamsa, which is like a good luck charm, so to speak. It has a lot of history. Maybe that was a bit glib, “good luck charm”, but just for the sake of our time on the podcast, but it’s a charm that sort of went out of style for a long time. Sort of an evil eye charm. Now it’s very much back in fashion. I was in Greece recently and I saw it absolutely everywhere, on absolutely everything. And you know, that means something and it’s a little reminder of her identity and where we are in time and place. Then it wasn’t so fashionable, so it was unique. Now it’s almost like overdone touristy. Now I wouldn’t necessarily give that to someone because it’s everywhere. But then it was unique.

You can do it in so many subtle, small ways. They’re driving, “Oh my gosh, the snow is driving me crazy.” You don’t have to – you shouldn’t be hitting anyone over the head with a hammer. With any element of your writing. In other words, if the reader is conscious of what you’re trying to do, then you’re the magician who’s revealed his or her tricks. So you don’t want that. The reader is just there. You just took them there, and there they are.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (41:38)

Yeah, you want them thinking about the story. (Crosstalk.)

Gila Green (41:40)

You can combine it into the plot, into the climax. There are certain plot resolutions that can only happen in a certain place. Because, you know, the squirrels aren’t going to come out and eat your dinner in Mexico, but the squirrels in Ottawa can ruin your picnic, really. And the raccoons. But that’s not going to happen. So it’s your plot, it’s your humour. You can be putting it in anywhere, including plot. Plot twists, anything.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (42:10)

Yeah. Is there anything that you wanted me to ask you or that you wanted to say about this before we wrap up? What did I miss?

Gila Green (42:25)

Well, I think you did amazing. I think that hopefully that’s put that to rest once and for all. There are no stories that take place anywhere, anytime unless that’s part of your world building that there’s no time and no place. That would be really difficult, I think, to pull off more than a flash fiction. So I think that that’s... Again, I’m not saying that this only applies to international fiction. I know we talked on a very broad canvas here, but I do want to stress that most people are not necessarily jumping all over the globe, and this still a hundred percent applies. This is for everyone.

Boni Wagner-Stafford (43:10)

Wonderful. Thank you very much, Gila Green.

Gila Green (43:13)

Thank you so much.

Outro (43:14)