Location, location, location (#3 in the series of “classic posts” on writing)…
Last Tuesday’s post was a bit heavy on Catholic humor—I’ll admit it. [Note from Steve: I don’t have any idea about what I’m referring to here, but I must have had a brain fart.] All churches, synagogues, and other places of worship are often home to well-meaning people who enjoy giving a helping hand to people in need. The emphasis is on “well-meaning people” and not the actual building, of course. (In Soldiers of God, for example, one of the main protagonists is a priest who thwarts a terrorist attack by radical Catholics.)
No, in line with the interview yesterday [ditto ?], I thought that today I’d stay on the topic of writing and the writing business. Don’t worry, though. The title doesn’t mean that I have an old Borders or B&N store to sell you, though they’re generally in great locations for anything from an Apple store to a Victoria Secrets store or S&M store featuring “Fifty Shades literature.” No, I’m going to write about setting or choosing locales in your writing.
You can find one aspect of how stupid the advice “write what you know” is in an author’s fiction locales, those settings where the action and drama take place and transport readers around the world, through the solar system, and into the far reaches of the Galaxy. While it’s clear that I know nothing about what will be found in the 82 Eridani star system (a location or setting for my “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy”), for example, I can imagine it. Even if it’s hard sci-fi, that just puts logical constraints on what I can imagine, but doesn’t hinder me otherwise. The same holds for more earthly venues of my fiction. In short, what I know is what I can imagine!
The realtor’s ubiquitous adage in the title speaks to the importance of location when buying property. Location is also important for your fiction. Gross mistakes you make can annoy your readers as much as users of the new iPhone were annoyed by Apple’s error-prone mapping software where bridges didn’t connect to roads and roads ended arbitrarily. If you make a mistake, it’s likely some reader will find it. The important point is: Will a mistake ruin his reading enjoyment? That’s a hard call to make, but it’s wise to error on the side of caution.
Location is important in your fiction because it adds realism and ambiance. Tom Clancy perhaps said it best: “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” Even if you’re writing fantasy with a young sorcerer doing battle with a troll, it has to seem real within the context of that magical universe. The rules of that magical universe need to be laid out and your settings made consistent with them. The worlds you build in your hard sci-fi must have some logic to them too. For example, in spite of illogical and overly zealous critics of Darwinian evolution, your world-building is not believable if your locale has no competition between species. The Giants’ world in James Hogan’s classical sci-fi Giant trilogy [an otherwise excellent and classic sci-fi series, though] suffered this fatal flaw. Mysteries and thrillers are even more restrictive.
World-building, in fact, is a difficult thing to do in sci-fi. Many of the Star Trek and Star Wars episodes receive failing grades. (No, unlike President Obama, I don’t confuse the two.) Edgar Rice Burroughs can be excused because, when he wrote his John Carter series, our knowledge of physics and biology was not what it is today. The screenwriters for Star Wars, however, have no such excuse, except maybe the fact that they stole many ideas from Burroughs. Ice planet, indeed. And, from the point-of-view that Star Wars is a fantasy, not sci-fi, the magical rules in that magical “galaxy far away” are not consistent—but that’s Hollywood for you (Avatar had the same problem, and why didn’t the alien in Alien just eat everything on its home planet, including its own offspring?).
Even when you confine yourself to Earth, it’s easy to make mistakes in describing your locale. If your protagonist goes to Barcelona, for example, street names, parks, and so forth have to match reality, even if you or your reader has never been to Barcelona. Sure, you can change restaurant and hotel names sometimes (especially if you say something bad about them and want to avoid legal action). If your action takes place in the future, though, name changes of establishments do take place in real life. Who knows? Even airports change names (Reagan for National, for example). But, generally speaking, place names don’t change.
A fiction writer doesn’t have to be a world traveler “to get it right.” With Google Maps and online encyclopedias and travel guides, you can travel almost anywhere via the internet. In my most globetrotting novel to date, Evil Agenda [I’ve written many more since then, including the third book in that trilogy, No Amber Waves of Grain, and the recent Aristocrats and Assassins], I’ve mixed up places I know with places I never visited. I challenge you to decide which is which. 82 Eridani is on a list of close-by G-type stars (our own Sun is G-type), so I at least know that in the E-zone of these stars, an E-type planet might be hospitable to creatures like us (E just means “Earth-like,” so the E-zone is a comfortable distance from the star, and an E-type planet is something about the size of Earth with similar gravity, atmosphere, etc.). Some information is more esoteric, but you can find it.
Angels Need Not Apply hops around a bit too. I found information about the Guantanamo Naval Base right on the internet. The only thing missing was the location of the high security camp where we keep the most dangerous terrorists, so I made that up. Only people who have actually been there can complain, and they won’t because of security! [At least they shouldn’t—signing security clearances doesn’t seem to mean much anymore after Snowden.] If that makes you smile, please realize that fiction writers do this all the time—what I don’t know, I invent. If that makes you frown, please realize that the plot required terrorists freeing other terrorists—they’re going to free their dangerous buddies, not Goldilocks. Of course, if we ever close Guantanamo, I’ll have to say that Angels takes place in a parallel universe!
I now live in the tri-state area. You would think that coming up with the locales for The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, which takes place in New Jersey (except for the all-important ending), would be easy. Not so. While I’ve been in Hoboken on Frank Sinatra Drive, for example, on one of those jetties or quays, admiring the New York City skyline, I’ve never once been to the Hoboken Police station. I imagined what it would be like. Most police stations [I know the one in Montclair for purely bureaucratic reasons] are frequented by unsavory characters, from violent individuals to pimps and prostitutes, so they’re not glitzy showcases of urban life like a Four Seasons Hotel, for example. You walk inside to pay a parking ticket and there’s an old staff sergeant to direct you to where you have to go. Etc, etc.
The locale or setting is an important part of storytelling. Sometimes it’s like another character. The Singer, the planet-wide composite intelligence at the end of Sing a Samba Galactica, is a case where the whole planet is one character! There the trick was to make the components of the Singer reasonable. I took the easy way out by making that planet a water world. If you’ve ever watched schools of fish, you can imagine the whole business working together as one huge entity. At least I could. Tom Clancy might not find it believable, though!
[Tomorrow, “Naming your characters…”.]
In libris libertas….
