Storytellersunplugged

by John B. Rosenman

– The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
(Milan Kundera)

I’m going to start with maybe a surprising statement: In over 90 percent of my fiction, real-life settings are not very important.

How can that be? Well, in the first place, a lot of what I write takes placeon other worlds or in other realms where I am the sole owner and proprietor. There, I make the rules and decide whether the planet has one moon or three, heavy gravity or light, green unicorns or blue, and so on.

In other stories I write, there is a real-life setting but it’s fairly general and generic. A little description establishes the room or house. If it takes place on a beach – well, we all know what a beach basically looks like, right? One tale transpires in a Wal-Mart clone where a man tries to return a purchase. Okay, it helped that I went to a Wal-Mart and actually “researched” the setting by returning a product and noticing both the procedure involved and the fact that there was a line on the floor behind which customers waited. Still, the amount of detail was modest. There was no need to describe the type of wood or metal that the service counter was made of or the precise arrangement of products available for sale in the store. Elaborate, intricate local color was not only missing but unnecessary.

Recently, though, I began a novel that takes place in a “distant” city. San Luis Obispo, California is a whopping 3,000 miles away from my home in Virginia Beach. It’s located between Frisco and LA roughly ten miles from the Pacific Ocean, and when my sister and parents were alive, I visited it about eight times to visit them. It’s a lovely, scenic small city with lovely scenic mountains or hills surrounding it, and I roamed about and liked it a great deal when I was there. Though I haven’t visited it since 2001, I thought there would be little difficulty in using this city for the location of my current novel. After all, I had visited SLO multiple times – right?

No, wrong.

Doubtless, my fellow contributors to SU have eidetic memory and never forget a detail or a face. Every street corner, every sensation, ever salient and minor impression is preserved in an imperishable form in their steel-trap minds. I’m sure that after Joe, Janet, or Justine, Skipp, Sully, Sarah or both Beths travel to New York or Paris or Rome with Dave, they return with a nearly perfect map of the place imprinted forever in their cerebral cortex or wherever the hell such things are stored. They can also describe the precise color and arrangement of the jasmine blooms outside their hotel rooms and the name of that quaint, fascinating boutique they found three blocks away.

The trouble was, I couldn’t.

One thing I’ve learned is that for me, memory fades and degrades. Hell, an experience fades and degrades even while I’m having it, or at least an instant later. Of course, I had already known that memory erodes and is even erased by time, but I have been surprised by the extent to which even treasured or repeated experiences in a favorite place pass through a similar process. C’mon, what was the name of that first gal or guy you kissed, and what was s/he wearing? What were you wearing and what did you have for lunch that day? Get my point?

So, when I began writing Dark Wizard, I found that local color had faded, the details sparse in unexpected places. But that’s okay. Like an aging pitcher with a lot of junk and a bag of tricks, I compensated. In fact, my spotty memory dovetailed rather nicely with my protagonist’s, for Kan (who can not remember his first name or much else for that matter) has
amnesia. Also, for some strange reason, he’s not very observant of his surroundings. Something’s out of kilter with him; perhaps he’s an alien or a guy who’s taken too many drugs. Whatever the case, he can’t provide street names or even a rudimentary map of parts of the city. Therefore, I don’t have to either.

But I did have to have some local color, some resonant details that would distinguish San Luis Obispo from say, Flatland, Kansas. One thing I did recall were the beautiful mountains or hills which are called the Seven Sisters. A little research on-line gave me their names and in a few sentences here and there, I was able to establish the general scenic features of the area and the city’s location near the Pacific Ocean.

So for sixty pages or so, my hero walks around in a mysterious fog. Trouble is, eventually that fog has to lift, and he and we have to learn something more about the terrain and street numbers.

SLO is a quirky city, and I wanted to get some of that into the novel as Ariel Carter, Kan’s attractive love interest, gives him a guided tour. One unusual feature is the Madonna Inn, a monument to bad taste, not only because of its garish, color-clashing exterior but because its insides would make an interior decorator scream. The Inn has a world-famous men’s bathroom (What? You didn’t know?) with a urinal that participates when you pee. An electric eye or sensor records your presence and sends water cascading down the back wall. During one of my visits to the city, I used this service. I saw the water run down the wall and laughed. Under the circumstances, you would think I would have no trouble writing the scene. Right?

Again, wrong. What did the urinal look like precisely? Were there other stalls in the room and where were they located? What floor was the men’s room on anyway? Maybe I didn’t need to use all this information and more when I wrote the scene, but at least I wanted to have it in my head. You see, when you describe a city like SLO, you can use a little poetic license and add things that aren’t there, but when you describe a local, well-known motel or landmark, you’d better have your facts right. Otherwise, somebody’s bound to say, “Un-unh, it ain’t like that at all. I’ve been there many times, and it don’t look that way.”

So, what was the solution? Should I open my wallet and spend a wad of cash to revisit the city? Book a flight and become a tourist again, complete with a camera and a laptop to record all my notes?

Fortunately, I didn’t have to do that. Instead I used an invaluable tool that is available to all writers who need to research a place or subject because they lack sufficient information or a good memory. It’s called the Internet.

Right now, under my “Favorites” tab, I have one site filed that reads, “The Urinals of the Madonna Inn.” No, I don’t have a fetish, unless it’s for accurate description. This site, which is one of several on-line, comes complete with photos, information, local lore and tradition, the whole nine yards, and it does what my faulty, fading memory can’t: It puts me squarely and securely into that men’s room, so I can describe it convincingly.

One thing I didn’t remember is the sheer size and precise appearance of the urinal. Here’s what Kan sees after giggling women leave the men’s room with cameras (it happens!) and he enters the place:

He stared at the massive stone structure that dominated the room. The rugged floor-to-ceiling urinal was made of slabs of white and brown flagstone and formed two lower walls or wings to the right and left. In the middle was an open area about five feet across. Unlike the smaller, more conventional stalls in the room, it provided no door for privacy.

Kan stepped closer and stared at the beige-and-white tiled floor and drain. As far as he could tell, there was no device to flush with.

I’ll spare you the rest of the business. Suffice it to say that Internet sources provided a wealth of detail about this motel. Did you know that it has over a hundred rooms “with elaborate decors and designs that embody specific themes? The Old West and Old Mexico, Golfers and Gypsies, Showboats and Swiss Chalets” [from my novel]. You can even SEE photos of each and every one of these rooms on-line and read their descriptions.

One more example from this motel, and then we’ll check out. One night I dined at the Madonna Inn’s Gold Rush Steak House. It definitely was not the Brown Derby or the Lone Star. Trouble is, after ten years, I was short on specifics. A few on-line photos and background information solved the problem, even providing a menu. Here is Kan when Ariel shows him the restaurant for the first time.

Upstairs [Note: the restaurant is UPSTAIRS from the men’s room], Kan stopped as soon as he entered the Gold Rush Steak House. It was the most amazing room he had ever seen, a visual bombardment that far surpassed the motel’s flamboyant exterior. At first, seeing the pink-rose carpet and the round and heart-shaped dining booths, he thought that everything was a lurid, flaming pink. But then he noticed the golden floating cherubs and the enormous, floor-to-ceiling central “tree” with twisting golden limbs and even more playful cherubs. White, red, and green blooms changed color even as he watched. The dazzling effect was enhanced by shining mirrors on the walls that reflected the heated décor.

After dinner, Kan participates in disco dancing (forty years from now it’s a fad again), and sources on the Internet helped me to get the specifics right. Probably the best thing about the Internet as a research tool is how quick and easy it is. When I was in graduate school, it took me hours to learn who ironed Queen Elizabeth’s ruffs. Now I can find out in minutes.

One last example: SLO is also known for Bubblegum Alley. I visited it once and recall an alley with a lotta gum on the walls that people had stuck there for decades, perhaps generations. Yes, it’s unsanitary and perhaps gross, but do you feel disgust or delight? One thing is clear: it causes greater foot traffic and more $$$ for merchants.

I wanted Ariel to take Kan to Bubblegum Alley, but even though I had visited it, there were too many things I didn’t know. Where, precisely is Bubblegum Alley? How long and how high is it? What are the walls made of? What is the alley’s history, and what kind of gummy patterns and symbols are on the wall? Who started the damn thing in the first place, and why? Again, I didn’t want to use all this info; I just felt I needed it at my command.

Once more, the Internet rode to my rescue. Bubblegum Alley is 15 feet high and 70 feet long and located downtown at 734 Higuera Street. There are many different brands and varieties of gum involved, including Bazooka, Hubba Bubba, and Orbit. Fraternity and sorority letters grace the walls, along with occasional gum wrappers, and there are multiple layers of different colored designs with embedded coins going close to the top. Sometimes someone attaches a condom for laughs.

That’s just a little of it, but I feel such detail makes my scene real, makes it seem that I’m an expert native. Did you know that some people believe that if a person walks through the alleyway while chewing gum and does not stick it on the wall, bad luck will befall him? Or that some couples show their love for each other in their gummy designs?

So, if your setting is vague and vanishing, search your memory by all means. But human memory fades and is often unreliable even about the things that matter most to us. Fortunately, especially for writers, the Internet can be a godsend, a vast, amazingly fast library at our fingertips, conveniently providing details we may never have known even in the first place.

—– John B. Rosenman