The characters in most of the fiction I have written, for example, inhabit settings that are opposite in the polarity of their ‘thereness’ to those which are found in, say, William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Flannery O’Connor’s Taulkinham or Toni Morrison’s Ohio, or James Joyce’s Dublin or Virginia Woolf’s London. Which isn’t to say that the dialects and manners of my characters are merely different than theirs (for theirs, too, are different from each other’s), but that, to the extent that it is possible, mine have no dialects or mannerisms to speak of.