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How do you write about a place--a building, a city, a forest, a house--without putting your reader to sleep? It helps me to remember that stories are about people. People doing things. Stories happen in a place, yes, but they don't happen in an empty landscape, devoid of people. If you are writing about a house, or a church, or a school, remember that these are places with life happens. The building is only a building, a set or a stage on which the action occurs. So as you are thinking about the house, or the church, or the school (hospital, nursing home, store, Main Street), don't forget to populate it with living, breathing human beings. Don't forget the people.

The writing prompt I used for the following exercise was this: "Write two pages in which an empty building comes to life." I started by imagining myself entering my childhood home after it was sold. Here's what I've done so far.

The front door of 36 Highland opened onto a large hall that was bathed in sunlight on summer afternoons, thanks to a west-facing window halfway up the stairwell. The staircase, with its ornately carved wooden bannister, made two right-hand turns as you ascended to the second floor. At the first turn, the ceiling was low—visitors were routinely warned to watch their heads. Beyond this point, however, it rose all the way to the third story, well beyond the reach of a broom, so that upon entering the house, you immediately had a sense of its grandeur. One evening, my parents were in the downstairs living room with guests when they were surprised to hear a trickling sound, rather loud, coming from the front hall. Following the sound, they discovered a small puddle below the stairwell. Looking up, they beheld its source, a small figure clad in pajamas, standing just behind the handrail on the second floor. The child, a known sleepwalker, apparently thought he had risen from bed and made his way to the toilet. It is the only time that I know of when the majesty of the staircase was so fully appreciated, although the cascade of marbles—a game my brother invented—comes close.

Next to the stairway was a grandfather clock, easily seven feet tall. My father, who had a passion for antique furniture, acquired the clock and maintained it, winding it with a key every few days. The bells chimed on the hour and the half hour, and I grew so used to them I barely heard them. After my father died, the clock was less frequently attended to and often silent. It was at this point that Squeaker, one of many family cats that came to us over the years, developed a special fondness for it. The top of the clock, securely edged in crown moulding, was perfectly flat and just the right size for a nap. To reach this perch required two leaps, one from the stair landing to the bannister, and another from the bannister to the top of the clock, roughly three feet away. Hesitation between the two leaps could prove fatal, but Squeaker did not seem to think in those terms, and it was not uncommon to glance up at the face of the clock and see the black-and-white face of Squeaker gazing down.

In the corner of the hall nearest the front door was the coat tree, a wooden pedestal fitted with iron hooks. For years, when my father was home, it invariably held an olive green felt fedora. My mother’s coats were usually in the closet under the stairs. This closet, which was L-shaped and went way back, was a favorite hiding place for winter-evening games of hide and seek—favored, that is, by my older brother and sister. The younger children, myself included, were suspicious of this dark cave. My mother was the one who fearlessly explored it, with a flashlight, several times a year, emerging with boxes of Christmas ornaments and winter clothes. The closet was also home to a projector, a screen, and boxes of 8-millimeter films featuring Tucker children, dogs, and cats.

Three doors led to the interior—one to the front parlor, another to the living room, and still another to the dining room. An excess of doors was one of the houses many quirks—the rooms to which these three separately led were all connected internally by doorways wide enough to allow the passage of a Steinway grand with room to spare. The downstairs layout provided a smooth flow of traffic; it would have been a great party house when my parents were young and childless and the neighborhood was full of couples who, like them, were celebrating a return to normal life after the war. At that time, however, my father’s medical practice took up most of the downstairs rooms and my parents lived upstairs.

Apart from its function as a coat room, the front hall was used mainly by children. We invented game after game to be played there. Chalk Move Up, a guessing game, required a minimum of three participants—the exact number of children in our 1950s household who were young enough to enjoy it. It was my brother John, the youngest, who invented this game. Martha was a year older than John, and I was a year older than Martha, and she and I tired of the game before John did. It went like this: One person, normally John, presented to the others, seated on the stairs, his two curled-up hands, one of which held a small piece of blackboard chalk. The sitters competed in a race to the top, gaining a stair each time they correctly guessed which hand held the chalk. Sometimes I played the games John liked—trucks and cars, flying animals, marbles—simply because amusing him was easier than dealing with a whiny little brother, and I remember playing Chalk Move Up when it was just John and me (thus eliminating what little suspense the original game had going for it), John’s little knuckles staring up at me, and me pointing at one hand or the other, then either moving up or not moving up a step.

The front hall, with its relative grandeur, was also a good performance space. On rainy days, it was the only place in the house where I could execute a pirouette in my baby blue Sears Roebuck taffeta tutu without bumping into the furniture. I was a writer even back then, and among my compositions were scripts for plays and puppet shows. The puppet shows were staged behind a card table that was stored close enough to the front of the hall closet to be retrieved without encountering any of the monsters that lived there. This table was positioned just inside the front door. My audience—Mom, Dad, Aunt Hilda, and any other adults handy—sat at the opposite end. To get in, they had to present the handmade tickets I had issued, free of charge, a few minutes earlier at the dinner table. The plays I enacted, with help from Martha and John, were mostly variations of the fairy tales my mother read to us at bedtime.

John was a great inventor of games—he had to be. My sister and I would have been content with dolls and dressups, and my mother, his other family playmate, had limited time for games. In addition to Chalk Move Up, several other games with which John sought to engage our interest were played in the front hall. One of these was flying animals. Like Chalk Move Up, it was pretty rudimentary. We simply rounded up all the stuffed animals in our possession, tied lengths of string around them, and stood at the top of the staircase, dangling the furry flyers over the bannister and swinging them back and forth. That’s as much as I can remember. Maybe this action was accompanied by some sort of dialogue—cries of heroism and distress—but I cannot say for sure. Once again, it was often John and me and the flying animals; Martha was somewhere else. Another invention of John’s was to gather up all of our glass marbles—hundreds of them—and load them into a cardboard box, which we positioned at the top of the stairs. We then simply overturned the box and delighted in the sight and sound of marbles crashing down the stairs to the landing. Because of the configuration of the stairway, and because most of the marbles did not make the lefthand turn on their own, we were required to advance, twice, and forcefully encourage the recalcitrant marbles to finish their journey to the bottom of the stairs. This was not a contest, as there was no attempt to keep score by, say, counting the number of marbles to reach the bottom of the stairs unaided. We were in it simply for the thrill--the excitement, that is, of seeing, and hearing, a glittering cascade of glass balls tumbling, rolling, and popping down a wooden precipice. We did not play this game when Dad was home.

You might think of the front hall as an empty place, a place where not much happens. A place where coats and hats and boots accumulate, silently filling the space with their odors. A place whose sounds are a low ticktock punctuated now and then by the march of scampering feet or the creak of wooden stairs, the opening of a closet door. A place that smells of wet wool, rubber boots, women’s perfume, mothballs, and tobacco smoke. But a lot happened there, besides children’s games.

The front hall, you see, was a place of transition, from downstairs to upstairs, and from inside to outside. It was where we, as children, began our exile when we were banished to an upstairs bedroom or when we voluntarily fled, to sulk in privacy when things didn’t go our way. Usually these incidents involved nothing more serious than foot stomping, tears, and a few (very few) words of protest. If you resisted, however, you risked being helped up the stairs by my normally mild-tempered father, whose sudden and swift reaction to insolence or disobience was all the more intimidating because it happened so rarely.

Although we didn’t use the front door for routine comings and goings—those took place at the kitchen door—important entrances and exits happened there. When I eloped at age nineteen, running off to the big city with a man my mother loathed, we left through the front door. When the house caught fire in 1968, the neighbors whisked my mother’s grand piano and most of the furniture through the front door. And it was through the front door that two stretchers left the house forty years apart, one carrying my father, the other my mother. My father returned. My mother did not.