Writing Right with Dmitri - Location, Location, Location
Created | Updated May 26, 2013
Writing Right with Dmitri: Location, Location, Location
Where's your story?
Yeah, in your file. Or in your notebook. Or in a bottom drawer. What I meant was, where's the action? City, town, or countryside? Aboard an ocean liner or the iSS? Unless it's in space, it's probably somewhere you know from experience. That way, you can visualise it better. And so can your reader.
The thing about familiar places is that you run the risk of their being recognised and critiqued. On the one hand, you can get letters of praise. 'That passage summed up exactly the way I feel walking through that park.' On the other, you can get complaints. 'It's not like that at all. How DARE you say that about my favourite café?'
On television, there are other concerns. Why do most of the stories take place in London or Cardiff? You know why: that's where the studios are. In the US, it's New York, Chicago, or LA. Sometimes, though, it's Vancouver, British Columbia, pretending to be somewhere in the US. We chuckle. We notice the little differences that tell us it's Canada.
The television show The Guardian was set in Pittsburgh, a hilly city with cobblestone streets and three rivers. To pull this off, the show's makers went to Pittsburgh once a year and shot exteriors. Then they took a lot of bric-a-brac, such as Iron City beer taps and Steelers caps, back to LA with them for local colour.
Another show, Hack, tried to shoot in Philadelphia. It wasn't easy. When they filmed a scene in my neighbourhood, they took up our whole street with their sound and catering trucks. We had to park blocks away. I'm sure that's not the only reason the show wasn't a hit, but filming in a busy city can be difficult. It didn't matter: they didn't know the area, really. It added little to the ambience.
The main problem for a fiction writer is to get the feel of a real place without alienating the reader (and opening oneself up to possible lawsuits). A major city is easy: get the place right, then make up the specific locations. But what about smaller places?
Lie, Lie, Lie
Make them up. Robert Thigpen, the nice guy h2g2 loves to hate, lives in Acme, North Carolina. There is no Acme, North Carolina, thank you very much. It's a composite locale, like those TV places. See, I learned from Faulkner. Faulkner wasn't welcome in Oxford, Mississippi, for a very long time.
He made up Yoknapatawpha County, but he didn't make up enough of it. People could figure it out. As my mother, who grew up in neighbouring Bolivar Country, put it, 'There may be people like that. But you don't have to write books about them.' Which is true, I guess, but the man won prizes. And moved to LA.
How do you get your location? Try this checklist:
- Have you given your town a name that doesn't belong to a real place? Say, call your village 'Little Carryon', or 'Niederhinterpfuiteufel'.
- Are your characters sufficiently composites? If you based the grocer on Uncle Willy, throw in a bit of your high school gym teacher, just to muddy the waters. Change the name of the store.
- Are the landmarks distinctive? Say you always liked that gazebo. Why did you like it? Put that part in. Then change some other salient detail. Then you can say, 'See? It's completely different.'
- look at what Terry Pratchett did with Ankh-Morpork. Mix and match, that's the ticket.
Finally, remember that writing a landscape gives you carte blanche to rearrange nature. Amerigo Vespucci should have been so lucky. You can move that lake until it's conveniently near your side of town. You can get that dual carriageway far away from your favourite tea shop, once and for all. You can, literally, move mountains. All it takes is faith.
And a little bit of descriptive prose.
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