If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, is there any sound?  If a scene occurs in a vacuum, in a great nebulous nowhere, is there any life to it? 

As a writer, I don’t know about the tree--when I was a child the question often led to long, circular tedious speculations about the vague abstraction of some tree possibly falling somewhere sometime.  My brother and I would plot ways to test our various notions on the topic.  But the problem defies testing by its very nature.  

As a writer, though, I do know about scenes.  And I know this:  A scene that has no specific time or place is dead.  Dead as a doornail. And this notion can be tested.  Just watch an audience shuffle their programs and rattle their candy wrappers in a theatre where actors are in no particular place, just sometime somewhere, illuminated by a pin spot.  Or watch a development executive read a screenplay where the locations are so generically described that he or she can’t visualize the script as a movie and is provoked only to yawn.  Or watch a reader flip back and forth in a book to try to figure out where the characters are or what the context is.  

The audience for a play, movie, or fiction wants to care.  And they can’t care about vagueness.  Or half-baked locales.  Or inconsistent time.  Or inaccuracies.  

The audience--whether viewers at a theatre or movie house, or producers, or editors, or readers--wants to feel as if the writer knows and is in control of the subject, wants to feel as if the writer is driving the train and driving it well.  Otherwise, they’ll hop off instead of going along for the whole ride.  There is a paradox in writing: When you are specific, the work more easily goes to the realm of the universal.  But when you are general or generic, the work doesn’t really go anywhere.  The writer needs to know where the scene is taking place, what time period or era it is, what time of day it is, what the place looks like.  Even if your audience has never been to a cornfield in Iowa or a Chinese restaurant in Monterey Park and won’t know if your description is false or not, and even if the scene is very brief, YOU should know the locale like the back of your hand.  Use your specific knowledge when writing the scene.  Make sure the scene is true to its place and time.  --Paula Cizmar, THE ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT