I just got back from my honeymoon in Costa Rica. It was wonderful; I got a ton of writing done.
Naturally, none of it ended up on paper, as I had my hands full; but every waking minute contributed fresh fodder for a mill that has been grinding out the same second-hand crud for much too long. My brain chemistry is still radically altered from a stampede of new experiences and sensations, and I came back with a (mental) commonplace book filled with ideas for a new collection of short stories (and just in time! Somebody had to do something, to fight this desperate shortage of horrific short fiction…)
Everyone knows that the shock of being saturated in an alien environment is a wondrous kickstart for cracked-out creativity, but while many of us draw inspiration from the peculiar nature of their hometowns, secure in writing what they know, many of us can’t resist the urge to write ourselves into places no sane tourist would ever want to visit. My first book is set largely in California locales I know by heart, but the sequel chewed through its leash and rambled from Idaho to Iraq by way of a radioactive atoll in the South Pacific, and I am told I did a decent job of painting those locales, by people who have experienced them in vivo.
But there is something tangible, yet elusive, that informs a real sense of place. No scattershot use of street names and italicized jargon will truly nail it, and no parading of contrived local color will ever really nail the soul of a city or a jungle or Roman catacomb, unless you’ve gotten its stink in your hair, and left your sweat on its stones. But people who believe that probably also can’t look a loved one in the eye and lie with complete conviction; and I’ll bet their books aren’t all that convincing, either.
Because experiencing an environment and relating its genius loci are two distinct skills. Living there does not naturally empower the writer to make the reader live there. If I’ve read one book that trots out the mystique and magic of New York, I’ve read a hundred, and a skeptic could convincingly argue that only a handful of the authors need have lived there, and the rest have all been cribbing, and getting the rest out of travel books and maps. I get it! Greenwich Village is a decayed bohemian mantrap, crawling with aging hippies and skeevy punkers, and the limousines cruising the feeding frenzy of Wall Street are like sharks.
Yes indeed, New York is really that awesome. A huge part of its mystique is that every corner of it has been immortalized in stories, song, movies and TV, so that we all feel like we’ve lived there, and actually visiting it feels like stepping into mythology. Double ditto with Los Angeles: every genre writer who lived there seemed to see it through Raymond Chandler’s eyes until David Schow rediscovered what an unspeakably seedy mutant hell-hive Hollywood had become.
So please, if you live in New York, set your book somewhere exotic, like New Jersey. And remember how much an exotic setting can serve as a backdrop for an amazing story. It takes a lot of work, but it’s not impossible to make the reader feel like you’ve been there, and bring them into it so they feel they have, as well.
In Song Of Kali, Dan Simmons conveys a traveler’s familiarity with India to rival Forster’s Passage To India, the sights and smells and sickness interwoven with a keen eye for the details that betray the spirit of the place that few can capture by imagination alone. In Lucius Shepard’s Life During Wartime, his surrealistic Central America is a fever dream of detail born of vividly recalled life experience. But is evoking a sense of place without having experienced it really that much harder to pull off than any other kind of lie?
9 Comments, Comment or Ping
John Skipp
Dear Cody — Oh, great. How am I supposed to work with somebody who makes up HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE LIES?
Dear gang — I think there’s one key difference between writers who nail the heart of a location — whether they’ve ever been there or not — and those who skate by on the obvious.
As in most things, it comes down to passionate engagement with the world.
Does knowing a little make you want to know a lot? To dig into the depths, slip down the side streets, talk with the locals as if their lives and insights mattered?
Do you get excited by exploration, investigation, fresh raw experience in general? Does rubbing up against the world set off showers of sparks, both inside and outside your head? Does it make you want to capture the most amazing details, so you can write them down in ways that help others see them through your eyes?
ARE YOU EXCITED BY LIFE? I guess that’s the question.
If you are, I’ll probably want to read what you write.
If you aren’t, I’ll probably take a pass.
In the case of guys like Cody, it goes waaaaaaay past intellectual curiosity, transmutes into an INSATIABLE NEED TO KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT EVERYTHING, and then spin it all back out in the weirdest, most revealing possible forms.
To me, that’s what great writing is all about.
Too bad I don’t believe he actually even WENT to Costa Rica…cuz he’s such a BIG FAT LIAR!
Yer pal,
Skipp
Jun 10th, 2008
Janet Berliner
I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t pull it off. Good thing I roamed the world while I could. A friend of mine wrote multiple bestsellers set in a country he’d never visited. When the time came to go there, he was terrified. –J.
Jun 10th, 2008
Brian Hodge
>Too bad I don’t believe he actually even WENT to Costa Rica…cuz he’s such a BIG FAT LIAR!
If you’re gonna put it like that, Skipp, then I don’t believe he even got married.
Nahh … happy nuptials, Cody!
If that’s even your real name.
Intriguing topic, truly. I’d always rather have a been-there checkmark next to the name of any locale, but I’m never too proud to fake it if that’s not feasible. And it CAN work out. Faked one city well enough that the editor, who come to find out had lived there, turned around and asked when I had.
Never underestimate the power of pumping people who DO know a place for weird and sundry facts, then extrapolating the rest from the aether.
>A friend of mine wrote multiple bestsellers set in a country he’d never visited.
I thought of you mentioning this one time, even while I was in the middle of the essay. I’m still itching to know who you’re referring to.
Jun 10th, 2008
Janet Berliner
Here’s the thing, Brian. If’n I told you, you wouldn’t tell me any of your secrets….
–J.
Jun 10th, 2008
Cody Goodfellow
Dear Skipp––
I’m a FANTASTIC liar, but don’t just take my first wife’s word for it. It takes a great liar to concoct a whole vacation, but it’s the hallmark of truly sublime dishonesty, to hide in the closet while your friends come over to housesit. (And I saw what you did on my couch…!)
And thanks, Brian. While I doubt you ever really skulked around Weimar Germany, your depiction of it in On Earth… captured, at the very least, the soul of a Dr. Mabuse movie. Well faked indeed, sir…
There is one cardinal difference I’ve seen, between faking a locale and having lived it… When you go to a place, the idea that pop up tend to be uniquely of the place and time, and impossible to dream up from reading books and stuff, while picking and faking a locale––while it might sample the rich local texture of Easter Island or Antarctica––still tends to be the kind of story you could set elsewhere, with little or no plot repercussions.
For a World War 2 story I recently did that was set in the deepest South Pacific, I spoke with Wes Ochse, who’d been to New Guinea and seen firsthand the cargo cult craziness I was writing about, and he offered the singular gem of insight that I believe pushed the setting out of the background and made it crackle. He told me, “Make it smell worse. WAY worse.”
And it does!
Janet: That picture is kinda hard to make out on my monitor, but… you know China Mieville?
Jun 10th, 2008
Brian Hodge
>While I doubt you ever really skulked around Weimar Germany, your depiction of it in On Earth… captured, at the very least, the soul of a Dr. Mabuse movie.
Thanks. I’ll take the compliment even while copping ignorance on who Dr. Mabuse was.
I owe that backdrop entirely to a fascinating and profusely illustrated book called VOLUPTUOUS PANIC: THE EROTIC WORLD OF WEIMAR BERLIN. It’s a Feral House title, so you know that as a travel guide, it ain’t Fodor’s.
Jun 11th, 2008
Cody Goodfellow
Holy cow, Brian! Dr. Mabuse was only the most nefarious, er, fictional villain ever to slink out of Germany. A hypnotist, gambler and underworld mastermind, he was like Moriarty, with no Holmes. Fritz Lang made a couple Mabuse films in the late 20’s and 30’s, but the character creaked on into the 60’s, and is spoiling for a rebirth. Also the subject of a nifty Propaganda song.
And speaking of music, there’s a space rock station in Liberty City for GTA4. Now, you can run over pimps to the deeply meditative strains of Steve Roach…
Jun 11th, 2008
Brian Hodge
Re: Dr. Mabuse … I stand duly shamed.
>there’s a space rock station in Liberty City for GTA4
Hmm, and here I have that Xbox 360 just crying out for something new. A Steve Roach soundtrack — yeah, that *could* be fitting counterprogramming. I suppose Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’ would be just too obvious.
Jun 11th, 2008
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