Clamouring to become visible...

This is adapted from an article that appeared on the Write Anything website on February 17, 2008. The original text can be found here.

I know it like the back of my hand...

I've asked about character names, and now I’m asking about locations. It’s relatively easy to come up with a character. You can let your imagination run riot, and there really aren’t many restrictions on how they look, behave, think etc. Settings for writing however are a completely different ball-game. It’s one thing to come up with the psychological landscape of a main character, but quite another to create a geographical landscape. Still, in the realms of fantasy writing you are God, and can create any vista you want. Who is to tell you that the little hamlet of Corshyn is anything other than you imagine it? If you want the walls surrounding the Imperial capital of Tynatus to be 100 feet high, then you make them 100 feet high!

But what if the location you are writing about is real? How well do you strive for exactitude when writing about a real location? Do you carry out much research - visit the area, read books, view photographs etc? If it is an area you know well, do you rely purely on your own memory, or have you ever specifically visited a street or a house to confirm an idea?

Some of the stories I am working on take place in London, the city I live in, and know fairly well. And yet sometimes when I am writing a scene, the background becomes very general - it is London, but I am vague as to what street, where the landmarks are. I feel that to force references to specific streets, well-known buildings etc would make it sound like a tourist guide, and so instead the streets become very generic. There are right turns, and left turns, and dead ends, but you could never point them out on a map - it is enough to know that they are "London".

In The Long Watch, Gideon flies into Glasgow Airport en route to visiting his father in Glenspey in Scotland. Glenspey does not exist, but Glasgow Airport is in the town I grew up in. I could see it in my mind as Gideon walked through the arrivals gate, but I still had to check with a friend who lives in the town and flies out of there regularly to make sure that nothing had changed since the bomb attack last summer. My doubts about my own memory of the airport, and my vagueness in writing about a city whose streets I walk daily show that memory is a tricky thing, and is seldom wholly trustworthy.

More difficult is writing about a place you cannot visit - if you set your novel in the past, you can only rely on old maps and photos. The last thing you want is a kindly reader pointing out that the house your main character lived in was merely a field at the time when the story is set!

I also write about places I have never visited. The Long Watch has scenes in Rome, San Francisco and Prague - I have never been to Italy or the Czech Republic, and the longest I’ve been in California was a transfer at LAX. Do I feel guilty about writing about places I’ve never been before? Again, as with the London locations, the descriptions of the areas are vague. In San Francisco the action takes place in a generic American suburb. In Rome, the action is confined to the Vatican, and mostly to the "hidden" (i.e. made up) areas of the palace. Prague is more problematic, as the scenes revolve around one of the most well known tourist locations, but online tour guides and maps provide a wealth of information.

Should I be doing more research on my locations? Should I, indeed the reader, be able to visit each location and recognise it from the story? I have always considered that the story is paramount, and that inaccuracies in locations are really only of interest to pedants and trivia hunters. Perhaps I owe my readers more though?

What do you think? Should a writer aim for realism in real life locations, or should they strive only to give the reader a general feel for the location?