I watched We are Marshall last night. Great movie – loved it, and even down to the outright frightening 1970’s styles. It a nutshell, it’s the story of Marshall University and their fight to find hope again after the death of their entire football team in a terrible plane crash. The movie is narrated by a cheerleader who loses her fiancé in the crash. Usually a football movie is about the coach, or one of the players (think: Friday Night Lights, or Rudy). In this movie, however, the main character is the TOWN. Yes, it features two coaches – Matthew Fox and Matthew McConaughey (two very good reasons to watch this movie), and a football player named Nate, but really, it’s about how a town moved from grief to hope.

How can a town be a main character? How can we watch the growth of a collective group of people without cluttering the movie with point of views? If we collect the grief of only one person whose lost a child, or fiancé, then we risk making the movie about their personal growth. So, what do the creators do?

They catalogue the attitude of the town through the actions and behavior of three peripheral characters, a young girl, a former football player, a board member/father. We don’t’ know anything about these characters except through the lens of loss. But as we see them reacting to the loss, then to the decision to hire a new coach, then to the odyssey of assembling a new team, to the launch of a new season, we capture the feelings of the town at large. The povs of the coaches and the players give us an inside look at how they are fighting the battle of despair, but through the lens of these three peripheral characters, the town is given a pov, and we see its growth through the healing of these people.

I wondered how this might work in a book. If they are given a pov, the danger would be to give their lives depth, and make the story about them. As onlookers without an inner voice, enabled only by dialogue and significance in the landscape of the plot, they embody the healing of the town at large.

Ask: If the setting is a character in your book, who gives it a voice? Is my setting characterized by a person, or an array of people that can give it attitude, and offer growth? Look for someone to come out of the woodwork of place and speak on its behalf, and you’ll have a story with a dynamic landscape that gives your story life.

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