Location Location Location

[OhMissScarlett]

I'm sure there's been a thread about this before. How do you scout location for a story? Do you write what you know; where you've personally been? Do you research it on the web? Or is it purely a product of your imagination?

For me it's been a bit of all of the above in the past. Right now the story I'm writing takes place in places I've never been. So, I've done more virtual location scouting and daydreaming than usual.

 

[carsonshepherd]

Being terminally lazy, I either use locations I know well enough not to research, or fictional ones.

 

[yui]

I'll sometimes read books by regional authors--fiction, essays, humor--things that give me a flavor for the area, written by people who know, and typically love/hate, the area.

Local newspapers can also give you a feel for an area – stores, types jobs available, community information/concerns, local names from obits, what types of crimes are committed, etc.

Guide books could provide specific landmark references.

There is also a Writer's Guide to Places.

 

[OhMissScarlett]

There is also a Writer's Guide to Places.

How cool. I didn't even know there was such a thing. Local newpapers have been very helpful to me. Also, I try to look up bed and breakfasts and realty ads to try and get an idea of what local property looks like.

 

[Guest]

The stories here are purely from my twisted imagination. Even the technical details are from my own experiences but there are few details of that sort in my erotic shorts.

My novel on the other hand I have done a good bit of research on so that it is historicly and geographicly acurate even though it's fiction.

 

[Op_Cit]

Wow that's got to be a tough one. I think I would hesitate to write much about locations I'd not visited at least.

So many different places I've been are nothing like I imagined. Often the city may be exactly like I pictured it, but the experience, smells, essense, attitudes are not nearly expected.

The areas of Detroit that look like pictures from Beirut. The stink of Hong Kong. The cold of San Francisco (and lack of as many really heavy people). A German restaurant in Guadalajara. The friendliness of mainland Chineese. Thick Bostonian accents that were almost unintelligible. The amount of makeup worn by women in the southern US....

These are things I know that would bring life to descriptions. I think I'd do the research mentioned by you and others, but also seek out locals and visitors and ask them for impressions to add color.

 

[ElizabethWest]

Being terminally lazy, I either use locations I know well enough not to research, or fictional ones.

*snort*

Or pass it off to someone else, or need I remind you.

 

[Guest]

I've never been to Japan but my Elevator Girl stories are set there, in Tokyo. One of my brothers lived there for 18 or so years and we corresponded regularly all that time. Through him I learned about the place and was interested enough to read about various aspects of Japanese life and culture. I've rec'd many feedback notes from people who know Tokyo or lived there saying I had well captured the place and people.

For my story "Drunk on Wednesdays", set in Yorkshire before I traveled there, I received help from a Yorkshireman.

So, it depends on the research or experience, even if it's only reading or knowing someone from a certain place, whether I'll use it in a story. I've never had the urge to write about a place I don't know at all.

I've rec'd several inquiries in my time on Lit. from people writing stories set in San Francisco. Mainly they ask me to read a passage and see if anything's not right. Often it's obvious so I explain the weather or geography to them.

Perdita

 

[scheherazade_79]

Great thread!

More recently, I've started researching pretty much anything that goes into my stories. It's half the fun. Every place, building or district that I mention is real - or at least based on a real-life place.

I prefer writing about regions I've been to, and then expand my knowledge with maps, transport plans pictures from the internet and visitor's guides.

The way I look at it, unless a story is set in a very obvious imaginary LaLaLand, you run the risk of having your story read by a person from that actual place. And I know that when I read a story about a place I'm familiar with, it can make me lose a bit of respect when something basic doesn't add up.

I know - I'm sloppy with most things in my life, but this is where I become a super-perfectionist.

 

[Green_Gem]

Locations

I've written a story that takes place in Amsterdam. The seething carnal atmosphere and open mindedness there was central to my story, and I've never been there in my life.

I spoke to someone who had visited a few times, did a little research and blended it in with the creative writing in the story. The best feedbacks I got was from someone who said they knew exactly the place I'd described because they lived quite close by and someone else who said the Dutch tourist board should give me a free trip for promoting the place so well.

By and large though, it is easier to write about places you know and have experienced, but I really did enjoy the Amsterdam challenge.

 

[NoJo]

I spent five years on a historical story set in Prague, even visiting the British Library. Then I went there, with my laptop, and edited furiously for a week (which is not why most people go to Prague, which has overtaken Amsterdam by a long way as the sex capital of Europe).

In my last story about Edo I read "Edo, the City That Became Tokyo", a brilliant illustrated history of the architecture and culture of Edo from the middle ages to the 20th century. I also read "the Making of Modern Japan."

I spoke with a couple of Japanse people too. It's made me a Japanophile. When I go there, I'll try to Tokyo as a product of its history, but from what I've heard, that's pretty hard to do nowadays.

 

[neonlyte]

The stuff I post here tends to be based around places I'm familiar with.

For longer stuff, I visit, read and research. For the novel set in Norway, I've visited and photographed all the locations except one. Another novel stems from a chance visit to an abandoned Artists studio, an accumulation of a lifetimes work. Never managed to take pictures but I can see (and smell) it vividly. Third novel is entirely ficticious in location terms, takes place in Southern England so I'm familar with the parameters in framing the location.

Internet is useful, but I wouldn't want to rely upon it for framing a story.

 

[Guest]

"Location, Location, Location" is a great home buying show on BBC America.


i love researching things. did some research for Sensual Sabbatical because i had never been to texas. i wanted to know what it was all about so i did look up the topography and the climate...so on...interesting schtuff! most of the stories i have here on lit are based around the water because its my 'life blood'.
oh...and for She Had Had Enough, i did look to see if there really was a Nowank Kansas...info on Carnegie hall and all that.

i wrote a romance novel when i was....'younger' ...horrid...*cringe* but i was fascinated with margaret mitchell. anyway, i did research harriet tubman and the underground railroad. you learn an awful lot when youre not even aware of it at times.

 

[cloudy]

My stories are mostly set in places I know. I tend to gravitate towards New Orleans as a setting, because I love the atmosphere of that city, and it lends itself well to storytelling.

I still do a good bit of research for my stories. The one I'm working on now has a main character that is Chickasaw instead of Cherokee, and although a lot of the customs are similar, there's enough differences that I'm having to do a LOT of research.....and the dragon has helped.

 

[wornoutkeyboard]

Well... it depends (doesn't it always?... I'm very wishy-washy).

Sometimes I feel compelled to go to a place. Because I write fiction for war journals I have taken the time to spend some time in certain areas (Okinawa, Perl Harbor, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the bikini atoll). When I am writing about an event, I need to know as much about it as possible. Although my writings are humorous, they are pretty historically and locationally accurate. (And when they aren't... I adore those people who write me scathing letters about my ineptitude.)

However...for other stories I do a minute amount of research (enough not to botch the whole thing) and I go from there.

I think it just really depends for me about how much the setting serves as a character in the story. If I'm writing about an English Lord in 1774, I do more research on what it was like to be an English Lord at that time than about the specific location in England his estates are on (I have been to a good deal of England, but I'm not always able to have instant recollection about the minute differences of one place compared to another...because I'm slow like that). However, if I am a Captain aboard a ship watching the first Nuclear test launch in the Marshall Islands... I need to know about what direction the wind was going and the fact that the mosquitos can be so thick that you can part them out of the air like curtains.

So... it is really varying on the story.

~WOK (Proud to never take a frim stance on anything)

 

[Lauren Hynde]

Two of the three stories I have posted:

Letters from Pohjola - Set mainly in several locations in Finland (hence, the title), and including a cross-continental journey. I have never been to Finland, or Belarus, I have never been to Paris, or Amsterdam, or Warsaw, or St. Petersburg. The only place mentioned in the story that I have physically been to is Berlin. My research for the story (other than the Finnish language and culture classes that I took for a year and a half) included planning the entire journey as if I were actually taking it, knowing which train I would have to take at what time to get where; it included travel guides to the cities mentioned; it included looking at as many photographs as possible of the locations, as well as their local history and culture; it included talking with native Finnish friends about the final result.

Plastic Love - Set in Cannes. I have never been to Cannes. My (location-related) research for the story included several hours of examining websites about the City of Cannes, its history, the tourist attractions (because the main character is a tourist, not a native), about the technopoles in its outskirts, about the Palais des Festivals. I chose the hotel where the character would be staying, each restaurant and nightclub he went to during the story, I analysed the city maps in order to figure out which routes he would take walking from place to place and what he would find.

A lot of the feedback I received for both stories as about how real the locations felt, how I had captured their essence. Don't tell them!

 

[bloodsimple]

I set a story "The Eyes Have It" at the London Eye - a huge Ferris wheel by the Thames. I wrote that story as Steve W. Have never been on it, but I've seen enough pictures. Hey, I made London drizzly, miserable, and full of tourists - how could that be inaccurate?

I set "To Those Who Wait"in Barcelona, even though I've never been. While I've been to the Mediterranean a few times, I've never visited Spain. The only research I did was to check on a city map to get the correct name of a suitable road. I wanted one that ran towards the Nou Camp football stadium. Readers seem to have found it evocative and atmospheric, so maybe we don't need to research locations to the nth degree, or maybe I just got lucky!

 

[strickland83]

Location

Almost all of the settings in my stories are based on real places that I have visited. This adds realism to what I write. While someone here mentioned the risk of a person who lives in that area reading the story, I look forward to that. I've received many e-mails from fans who ask if I really live in their area. I take it as a special compliment that my description of their hometown was so accurate that I could be mistaken for a native.

When I need to refresh my memory for a few details, or I need an updated fact because I visited there some years ago, I have been able to find a fan who lives in the area and who is more than willing to help out. I also use web sites and maps to help with small details. For example, when I was writing "After Fidel", I already knew the area where I wanted the characters to live but I didn't have photographs of residential areas. I checked the online real estate listings until I found the perfect house. Writing about places I've visited also helps when I want photographs of the area to illustrate the story.

I have sometimes combined two real places to create one fictional place that better suits the story. I had to do this with "Yellow Lambswool". The river was in another town from where the rest of the story took place, but the descriptions of each were true to the real places on which they were based.

While the situations in my stories are not always things I have done, I am familiar with the places. Being able to casually yet accurately describe the grocery store down the street or the inside of a hotel is something I consider essential to my writing style.

Realism is key to making a story believable.

Strickland83

 

[oggbashan]

Real or imagined?

Most of my stories are set in an imaginary location that is an English country town. The model exists but I do not know it intimately. What I have made of it is a composite. I 'know' the geography of my town.

Some of my stories are set in real places - only ones I know. The problem is that I know those places as they were when I was there. A current resident wouldn't necessarily recognise them.

Even a place that I know now can be difficult. What do you know of your town, your community? You know things from your own interaction with the inhabitants, the traders, the community leaders. Another person in your town may have a totally different view of it and their view can be equally valid.

I don't know anything much about the Freemasons in my town except that they exist and do good works. If I wanted, I could contact them through my friends. They could contact me if they wanted my help. My daughters went to one of the six junior schools in the town. I know the headteacher, many of the staff, most of the school's governors and the active members of the PTA. For one of the other five schools I probably know one or two individuals in those groups. Each school has a different nucleus of people and is in a different part of the town. Each nucleus probably has a different view of the community as a whole. All their views, and mine, are valid now. None would be valid in 20 years time.

A specific story's location, if realistic, is a combination of viewpoint and timeframe. Even if you know a place would someone else recognise it from your description?

Og