Sometimes I can be dense.
My friends will raise their eyebrows and say “this is news?” I am, it’s true, one of THOSE people; full of learning, but can’t change a tyre. (WordPress just told me that tyre is spelled incorrectly. I had to look it up. 15 minutes and 4 dictionaries later, and I’m right, so there.)
Yes, I have 4 dictionaries. You never know when one of them will tell me I’m wrong. That says more about me than you should know.
Not only am I occasionally dense, but I can derail my own train of thought with frightening speed. Let’s get back on track then; I can be dense, and never more so than when it comes to writing.
I started a new short story yesterday, and immediately made the biggest rookie mistake of them all. In my haste to get the story down on paper when it was fresh and hot, I didn’t think enough about setting. I threw my characters down in the United States (nowhere in particular, just “the US”), gave them names and ranks (they are policemen) and let them go.
Why is this a mistake? Does it really matter where you set the scene?
Yes it does. Where you set the scene, and what you say about the scene, matters more than most beginners realise.
(The world is conspiring today to prove that I really am dense. Halfway through this post, my keyboard batteries died in a spectacular way, taking half of my post with them. I’ve been wondering what that little picture of a battery on my screen meant.)
Back to the topic again. Setting my story in the US is a mistake, because I have never been there. I don’t know how things work there, and if I persisted in writing in that setting, my story would reflect that; it wouldn’t feel real. I would slip up on little things, and readers would notice.
This tendency to set stories in foreign climes stems from the fact that home is not, in general, exciting, unless you happen to live in a war zone, or on the edge of a volcano. So we set our stories in places that we, personally, find different or alien, or that we think will appeal to readers.
We forget the most important point; far, far away is home to someone. So home for me is a foreign, exciting place to someone who has never been here.
I can’t capture suburban life in the US with any degree of accuracy; my scene would only be a collage of culture and place from what I have seen on TV, and it wouldn’t be real. My readers would feel that, even if they, too, had never been to the US. I can, however, paint a picture of life in an Australian city that will give my prose the solidity it needs to hold up the bigger lie; the story.
Readers can tell when you lie. The trick in fiction is only lying some of the time. Give them truth in part, and they will swallow the lie whole.
This is not to say that you should never set your stories anywhere except your home town! But if you must set your steamy romance in a mongolian yurt, be sure to do your homework. If you have never set foot in a yurt, mongolian or otherwise, then you are unlikely to be able to make your readers believe that your heroine is happy to trade her expensive life in Paris for goats, blizzards and mongolian barbecue. No matter how sexy your hero is.
6 Comments
September 17, 2008 at 12:37 am
I thought it was “tyre” in British English and “tire” in American.
September 17, 2008 at 12:48 am
Also upping and moving helps. Being from England and now living in the United States gives me the opportunity to dance with American social settings and British ones…
…not that I have set anything in either ;)
September 17, 2008 at 3:40 am
[...] it lets me get around the familiarity problem. No matter where on Earth I set a story, someone else will live there and know a lot more about it [...]
September 17, 2008 at 4:48 am
This post illustrates something I’ve long believed — that the people who write historical fiction are among the bravest writers in the world. Imagine having to conjure up not only the place, but also the time — and I don’t just mean horse-drawn carriages instead of Jaguars, but attitudes, language the social context, the areas of common knowledge we take for granted now but were completely unknown in, say 1840. Research will tell you stuff like whether window glass was common or how a cold might have been treated, but the interior life of the characters, while the same as ours in some ways, was completely different in others.
I’d never have the nerve to try. And all respect and credit to those who do.
Tim Hallinan
(Who wrote almost 20 novels before he had the courage to write a scene between women with no men present. And then he made it really short.)
September 21, 2008 at 3:50 am
Merrilee, good point!
I agree with Timothy on the difficulty of writing believable historical fiction. I have book on my shelf entitled “Life Along the Silk Road” which I hope to actually read one day ;) because it seems like such an exotic location and I’d like to maybe set a story there. But of course I know next to nothing about it, so writing such a story would entail an intimidating amount of research.
Until now, most of my stories have been fantasy and sf, and so I was able set them in made-up locations. Of course, that requires world-builing, which in my opinion is more fun than research.
How is your story coming along now?
September 23, 2008 at 3:29 pm
wow four dictionaries! That’s awesome… I don’t even have one, I think that explains why I seem to have such a limited vocabulary… I’ve never set a story in my hometown but one, and it didn’t come out the way I wanted it to.. it was too “dense” (if I may use your word) and bland… but this next story that I’m writing (which seems to be longer and not yet finished) I’m setting it where I’m going to school and spend the last five years at, it’s doing pretty okay… the thing is that I can never describe as good as if it was made up. Why is that???