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Using real towns?
| cornflakegirl |
Using real towns?
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Joined: Jul 21, 2010
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 14
Posted on:
Oct 11, 2010 – 22 47 |
My plot involves a California coastal road trip, where a good chunk of the novel happens. I’ve been on this road trip once, although I’d want them to stop more places than I did, and my memory isn’t amazing. Should I use real towns and do heavy research or just make up a bunch of towns for them to visit? I’m worried making places up will cause the novel to have a false feel since it’s such a well known area and route. Any opinions on this?
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I always use real towns, always towns I know well or have visited enough to feel comfortable writing “about” them. That said, I don’t stick 100% with accuracy either. I mean, if my story needs a mini-mart on Main Street and the real town doesn’t have a mini-mart on Main Street, well, I just drop one into my story anyways.
I’ll tell you what I do in this sort of situation, because it’s exactly the sort of thing I deal with all the time.
For some reason, I just can’t write about a place until I have actually visited it, walked around the buildings, seen the people, taken note of the types of trees and flowers that are growing – ect, etc. I mean, I can read about the town in books and I can look it up on Google and everything, but somehow it’s not the same as actually standing there. To make this just a bit more difficult, I’m a borderline agoraphobic; I’ve only left the house on a few rare occasions in the past 30 years, and when I do leave the house, I can’t go alone and I can’t go very far. So, this results in some problems, since I can’t write about places I haven’t been, and I can’t leave my yard without a massive panic attack sending me back into my garden.
Well, when it comes to my books and stories, they are pretty much, almost always, set in a small coastal Maine town somewhat cut off from the rest of the world, by the ocean to one side and a forest to the other. Guess where I live? Yeah, in a small coastal Maine town somewhat cut off from the rest of the world, by the ocean to one side and a forest to the other. 
Problem is, my stories are not always suited to my town. Sometimes I need a bigger town with a lot more bustle. Sometimes I need a smaller town, a lot more secluded. Sometimes I need the house to be a beach cabin right on the sand. Sometimes I need the house to be a castle on a rocky cliff battered by the shore. Sometimes I need a dense forest, sometimes a busy city. Sometimes I need deep dark caves. Sometimes I need sprawling swamplands. Sometimes I need huge deserted cemeteries. But no matter what I need, always is my story set in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, whither it has what I need or not. Always.
Whither it’s an accurate description of the town or not, does not matter. I could give the town a different name, say Rockland, and suddenly I find I can not write about it anymore, even though it’s the same setting it was when I was calling it Old Orchard Beach! It’s the weirdest case of Writer’s Block I’ve ever heard of and I can’t explain, it, but it happens every time. If I don’t set my story in Old Orchard Beach, I just can’t write about it.
So, if you read my stories you’d think the real Old Orchard Beach was everything from a big city to a tiny fishing village, with beaches and mountains and thunder-holes and castles. You’d also think it was overrun with werewolves, vampires, phookas, faeries, aliens, ufos, serial killers, ghosts, haunted houses, morbidly depressed emo-goth Edwardian dudes, and psychotic sex crazed mermen. What is the real Old Orchard Beach? The real Old Orchard Beach is nothing like I write it as!
Here is the real Old Orchard Beach, the one I actually live in: When I was a kid, it was a tiny Victorian beach front township, complete with amusement park and a train station, cut off from the world by a 3000 acre forest. By the time I was a teen, out of state developers bought the forest, cut it down and put up skyscraper condos.
Today, 30 years later, I still live in Old Orchard Beach, I live on the last farm, in the middle of the last 26 acre section of forest. There are no mountains or cliffs or castles. The Thunder Hole is real, but it’s not in Old Orchard Beach, it’s about 100 miles north of here, on the Canadian border.
Old Orchard Beach had about 2,000 residents when I grew up, most of them farmers and rifle toting lobster men.
Today there are 12,000 residents, most of them souvenir shop owners or hotel managers.
Voted the World’s Finest Beach (scientifically – meaning it has the world’s tiniest grains of sand; not meaning it’s the best place to visit!) Old Orchard Beach, now gets an average of 2 million tourist visitors each and every summer.
Our winters are cold, fierce, and last nearly 8 months, and filled with blizzards, snow squalls, and Northeaster Atlantic Ocean Ice Storms, when the power goes out it could be out for months, and so our tourist season is very, very, VERY short, averaging 2 to 3 months. The town is shaped like a horse shoe, and so while neighboring towns of Biddeford and Saco get cold at 32F, we get cold at -48F due to ocean ice storms getting trapped in our bay and blasting us. In the winter Old Orchard Beach is a ghost town, with only a few thousand residents braving off the sub zero winter season.
This town has grown and changed a lot over the years. It expanded and evolved. A hundred years ago, it was predominantly “Black”, being a safe haven for escaped slaves, and most of the business owners and town council men were Black (a rare thing in the early 1900′s). It’s most famous residents were the Jazz singers Louis Armstrong and Billy Holiday and writer E.E.Cummings. . . I live 4 houses down from Louis Armstrong’s summer house, which was owned by E.E.Cummings, and am a 15 minute walk from The Pier (a casino 2 miles off shore and standing in the middle of the ocean) where both Louis and Billy got their start, and had concerts every Saturday night.
Today the town is .0001% non-white! The Pier is a little over 100 feet long and Casinos are illegal. What a turn around!
My town has a hell of a long history, since it was settled by my pirate great-great-great-great-great grandfather Thomas Rogers in 1657. The land I live on is the oldest in Maine to still be in it’s original family. (Very original, since he married a local Native American girl.)
So, now that I’ve told you all this, how does it help you and what was my point?
My point is this – write what you know. It may seem that you can’t remember enough details from your trip to write your story, but if you are writing fiction – what does it matter whither or not the real village is exactly the same as your fictional one?
So, you want to write about your road trip but you can’t remember the details good. I say, so what? Write it the way you DO remember it, and if you forget a few details, well, write it the way you would have liked it to have been wither it really was that way or not!
Take what you know about these towns/cities/villages and blend them together, and create a town that perfectly suites your needs, out of something you already know about. You will write it best, if you stick to writing what you know, and being a novelist, you can move buildings/trees/lakes/etc around to fit your story, you can take a mountain out of France and stick it in a Georgia swamp if you want to! (I grab mountains out of France and drop them smack in the middle of Old Orchard Beach, all the time. I also grab castles out of Scotland, caves out of Tennessee, trees from California, volcanoes from Oregon, and snowstorms out of the North Pole and stick them in Old Orchard Beach, too. Damn – half the time it seems like I’ve condensed the entire United States and squished it into my tiny 7 mile long by 2 mile wide home town! LOL!)
Remember: it’s fiction, you can write it any way YOU want to. You only really need the ESSENCE of the place, not every single detail about it. You don’t have to be exact, you don’t have to stick with the facts – you would only have to be exact and stick to the facts when you are writing a NON-FICTION story. In fiction you can take real places and do whatever you want to make those places fit your story.
Remember it’s YOUR story and you want the town to match the story, not force your story to match the town. Story first, town later. And if all else fails and the town no longer resembles the real thing, just give it a new name.
The point is, don’t feel that you have to write the village just exactly as it really is. You are a novelist after all – no one expects you to write an accurate travelogue – they expect you to tell a good story, set in a world that SEEMS like the real world, but is a place they would rather be instead. I know it’s not exactly the answer you were looking for, but hopfully this will help you take the villages you like best and find a way to make them the village you are looking for.
Hope this helps you out some. I think all of that made sense – it made sense in my head at least. =/
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