Writing About a Place You Have Left Behind

Most people who have moved away carry a town around with them, and they can describe it in surprising detail: the hill up from the station, the shop that smelled of paraffin, the sound of the school bell from the back bedroom. Ask them to write it down and the result is usually warm, vivid and slightly untrustworthy. They are describing a place as it stood on the day they stopped paying attention to it, and they may be the only person left who remembers it that way.

We have looked at the place you pass through in Writing About a Place You Visited, and the place you still live in with Writing About the City You Live In. The place you have left is a third case. You know it as deeply as a resident does, but you cannot step out of the door and check.

Your memory has a date on it

What you remember of a place you left is a picture taken from one spot in one stretch of years, and the date is easy to forget. If you left at seventeen, you may know the back of the sports hall and the timetable of the last bus in great detail, and almost nothing about the rents, the council or who was struggling that winter. That is not a flaw in your memory. It is the frame of your piece, and readers should be told what it is.

So begin by dating what you know. At the top of a page, write the years you lived there, how old you were, and which street you lived on. Underneath, list what you could not have seen from that position. The list will rarely reach the finished piece in that form, but it will stop you writing with an authority you never had.

Then watch your tenses. It is very easy to write the market is held on Thursdays about a market you last saw twenty years ago. Use the past tense for what you saw and keep the present for what you have confirmed is still true.

Nostalgia and its opposite

Leaving gives you a story to defend. If you miss the place, everything turns golden and the summers grow longer. If you got out, everything shrinks: the small minds, the narrow streets, the people who never understood you. Both versions are tidy, and tidiness is what should make you suspicious.

A useful exercise is to write the paragraph your opposite would write. If you are homesick, set down what you were glad to see the back of: the boredom, the gossip, the sense that your future was settled by twelve. If you left in anger, set down what you still miss and who was kind to you. What survives them is usually closer to the truth.

Be careful, too, with the scenes that arrive already polished. Nearly everyone wants to write the last look from the train window. Ask whether you really looked, or whether you were checking your ticket and worrying about the connection. A memory with a perfect shape has often been retold into it.

Checking a past you cannot walk through

Memory is a good place to begin a piece and a poor place to end the research. Old maps will tell you where the road really ran. Local newspaper archives and library collections can settle when the mill closed. Family photographs are useful less for what they were taken of than for what happens to be in the background: a shop sign, a parked car, the height of a tree.

The best source is often other people who were there, partly because they will disagree with you. Ask a sibling or an old friend to describe the same kitchen or the same street, and you may hear about a different one. Keep a simple record of what is confirmed and what is only remembered, and where you cannot check something, tell the reader so.

Distance has never excused anyone from this work. James Joyce left Dublin in 1904 and wrote Ulysses, set on a single day in that city, while living in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. He still wrote home to check small things, including asking an aunt whether an ordinary person could climb over the railings of a particular house. If he wanted the railings right, the rest of us can look up a bus route.

Going back, or deciding not to

If you can return, treat the trip as reporting and not as a pilgrimage. Before you go, write your version of the place in full, without checking anything. The visit will overwrite your memory faster than you expect, and that draft is the only record you will have of how it stood in your head.

Then go, and take notes as a stranger would, with the date, the time and the exact spot. Often the gap between the draft and the notebook is where the piece lives: the hill is shorter than you thought, and what you called the centre of town turns out to be three minutes from the edge of it. Try not to turn that gap into a lament. The place did not change to spite you. It changed for the people who were living there, for their own reasons, and those reasons are worth finding out.

Some people cannot go back, because of a border, a war, money or a family rupture, or because the place itself has gone. Say so plainly. Readers accept a limit that is stated openly, and sometimes that limit becomes the subject. What you should not do is fill the gap with recent news reports and write as though you had seen those things yourself.

The people who stayed

A town you left is still going on without you. The people in your piece, or their children, may read it in the very streets you describe. It is much easier to be unkind from a distance. Your old neighbours will recognise a teacher or a family from a single detail. Our community guidelines ask writers to keep other people’s private lives out of their pages, and that includes people you knew at fourteen.

There is a quieter unfairness in using the whole town as a backdrop for your own departure. The story of the person who got away is an old one, and in it the place exists only to be left. Before you publish, ask whether your town has any life in the piece that does not depend on you. A street that looks finished to you is an ordinary Tuesday to someone who lives on it. If you can, show the draft to someone who stayed. They may tell you that you have it wrong, and they may be right.

A shape, and somewhere to start

These pieces often work best with two timelines, then and now, set side by side so that each one questions the other. Another option is to follow one thing out of the past and into the present: a route, a building, a family recipe. Headings help readers keep track of when they are, and on FullySky a long piece gets a table of contents built from them (see features), so the route across the years is visible from the start.

If you want somewhere to begin, draw a map from memory of the walk you made most often in that place. Don’t look anything up. Label every shop, gate and short cut you can recall, then lay it beside a real map. Start writing at the first place where the two disagree.