Can You Put Us There If You've Never Been There?--Reb MacRath
Say you're writing a novel that's whipping along when you find yourself at a narrative block: a small but critical section--maybe just five to ten pages--must take place in a small town that you have no way to get to. You can't believe your rotten luck. The town is just eighty miles away and though you don't drive yourself, surely you can there by train, city bus, Greyhound bus, Greyline Tour bus. No such luck. Alright, then, what about Uber or Lyft? Well, they charge $150 each way. And if you have to spend the night, when all you want is a day trip, throw in hotel and maybe pet-sitting fare.
I found myself in precisely the same situation as I reached the home stretch of my WIP. I'd done a ton of research on Tombstone, the setting for a short scene. And Alex Shaw, a good FB friend and a terrific thriller writer, has recommended Google Earth to get the layout of any place and picture streets and buildings. Another friend, Cathy Geha, send me a link for an airport shuttle that may handle non-flyers.
One way or another, I'll get the telling details I need to bring my Tombstone scene to life. In the past I've always been 'boots to the ground' for all research pertaining to place. But I've begun to wonder now if more can be accomplished by infusing the setting with a handful of salient details than by flooding the zone with thousands of words on the heights of buildings, the widths of streets, statistics on statistics. Which approach serves a story better?
I'm not the first writer to tackle the challenge of unvisitable place. Lacking a time machine, any historical writer must choose between salient details and relentless floods of facts and stats. Colleen McCullough, in her huge Roman sagas, drowned her stories in such floods while Steven Saylor writes crackling mysteries with just-perfect telling details that put us in Ancient Rome. Martin Cruz Smith wrote Gorky Park with far more time libraries than he'd spent in Moscow. Think of the legions of writers who triumphed without time machines, making their lost places live: Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Bram Stoker's Dracula...
Resourcefulness, artistry, and research will see me through my challenge--with a little help from you know where.
How about you? Have you ever faced this challenge and what strategy did you employ?
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Comments
I think it's hard for a writer to visit every place he/she writes about. Ian Fleming, however well-travelled, can't have been to all those exotic places he sends James Bond.
Anyway, I hope you get to Tombstone. It'll be all dust roads, saloon bars and horses tied to posts, with a punch up every now and then bursting through those swing doors... won't it? See, I haven't even been there.