Settings…
Harry Bosch is an LAPD detective because Michael Connolly lives in the LA area. Inspector Rebus is an Edinburgh detective because Ian Rankin is from there. A lot of Geza Tatrallyay’s thriller Twisted Traffick takes place in Vienna; he doesn’t live there now, but he did (see the previous interview). My new book The Last Humans (to be published by Black Opal Books in 2019) is a post-apocalyptic thriller set in SoCal; I grew up there. Is the best way to come up with realistic settings to live in the place for at least a time?
I’ve lived in many places and visited many more. Maybe it’s unusual that my only novels that take place in California are Silicon Slummin’…and Just Getting’ By (Carrick Publishing, 2015) and The Last Humans. Most of the books in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” either take place in the NYC area (where I live now), or start there, although I’ve only lived in this area for about eight years.
What about sci-fi? More than Human: The Mensa Contagion starts in NYC too (it ends up on Mars and beyond). Much of the first part of Survivors of the Chaos takes place in a dystopian NYC.
I’ve lived in the Boston and DC areas as well as Colombia (South America). Part of my first novel, Full Medical (2006), takes place in the Boston and DC areas; parts of Muddlin’ Through (2014) and Soldiers of God (2008) take place in Colombia, and one villain in The Midas Bomb (2009) comes from Venezuela (in both books, I predict the far left chaos produced by dictators in that country). Am I also writing novels with settings corresponding to where I live or have lived?
Not really. I doubt that many writers put settings over plots and characters. In other words, I don’t think any novelist says, “I live here, so I have to make ‘here’ my setting.” Connolly’s Bosch could work in any major city in the U.S.; Rankin’s Rebus could work in any major city in the British Commonwealth. (For example, Jill Patterson’s character, Inspector Fitzsimmons, works in Australia—Rebus could live there too.) Settings can be anywhere, and with Google you can send your readers anywhere in the world. (I dare any reader to determine what places I’ve actually been to in Rembrandt’s Angel. You might be surprised!)
Of course, fiction has to seem real. Part of that fictional reality is setting. When we write our stories, we have to transport the reader to the story’s setting—the more real it seems, the better. Yet there is no doubt that it’s easier to describe the venue of the story if the author has been there. Some authors even couple leisure travel with studies of potential settings. I never had settings in mind for initiating my travels, most of them for business, but I’ve certainly wrote notes and accessed the hard drive in my head about the places I visited.
I know other writers who live in the tristate (NYC) area—Jenny Milchman (Wicked River) and Harlan Coben (the Myron Bolitar series), and many others. I should ask Jenny if her settings are local. I know many of Harlan’s are.
There are settings where readers know I’ve never visited. New Haven, a planet in the 82 Eridani solar system (Sing a Zamba Galactica, 2012) and the planet Eden (Rogue Planet, 2016) are examples. Most places in sci-fi tales weren’t visited by their authors, but they still seem real in a well-written story (Niven’s The Integral Trees is maybe the strangest example). But you never know! Maybe I don’t write about time travel because I’m really from the future!
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Comments are welcome!
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In libris libertas!
