Conveying Location Remotely

How to write about places when you can’t go out

 I took part in a virtual historical fiction panel the other day. (To be shown at myvlf, a virtual literary festival, - Theatre - from 29th April). I perched in front of my computer for two hours trying not to waggle my head too much (I was told that would appear blurred on camera) and resisting the temptation to scratch my nose or fiddle with my hair (I’m clearly not cut out for a career in television). But there was a point when I became so impressed by what my fellow panellists were saying that I forgot my self-consciousness and became enthralled. Maggie Brookes, Neil Blackmore and Nikki Marmery all described the efforts they went to in order to ensure their settings were realistic: painstaking trips to their novels’ locations in order to check the authenticity of their words. Some of these are feasibility studies: Maggie spoke of a long debate between her and her husband as to whether hundreds of world war two soldiers could have been billeted in a particular barn they drove past. I remember forensically checking the Jewish cemetery in Prague to check whether a dramatic prologue in ‘The Child on Platform One,’ when a Jewish girl is attacked by a group of Hitler youth, could realistically have taken place there. All three of my co-writers described the amazing lengths they went to, to ensure their descriptions were accurate.

So what can we do now we are all locked down because of the virus? Will our readers still trust us when they realise we wrote our scenes during a period we could barely leave home? I am currently researching my third book, some of which will be set on the Channel Island of Jersey. We were just about to book a trip there at the end of May. But now I will have to write those scenes from my imagination. Or will I?  When I was writing ‘The Oceans Between Us,’ some of which was set in Australia, I had neither the money nor the time to travel there. So I did several things to make my scenes feasible. I contacted people who lived in the parts of Australia I was writing about (friends, relatives, friends of friends – it’s amazing how many connections you can find) and asked them to describe the flora and fauna of their area. Then I sent them the scenes I had written based on their descriptions to check they sounded realistic. (I ran a scene set in the King’s Park in Perth past a bush walker for example). I also plundered the internet for contemporary maps to get street names and landmarks of the areas I depicted. Google earth was another amazing resource: I travelled down the Suez canal on it, zooming in on its left and right banks to discover what the area either side of the canal looked like. I also read books set in my location (Trip Fiction is a great resource for this). I discovered Tim Winton’s amazing novels set in Western Australia and based some of my observations on his scene-setting.

So there is a lot we can do to make our scenes come to life remotely. In my current work in progress, I will mark the sections I have described without visiting in order to verify at a later date when I will hopefully be able to discover them for real.

In these challenging times when we are all getting fed up with the same four walls, being transported to other locations, albeit remotely, may just save our sanity! Suddenly I feel compelled to do some research on the Bahamas….!