The write what you know idea seems more suited to literary than crime fiction. Dysfunctional families, ennui, chemically assisted gropings for meaning in stygian suburban dystopias? We’ve all been there. But a knife sliding between the ribs and into the heart, the tremulous vibrations of a fading life communicated down the blade and the handle so that you hold the secret of mortality in your own sweating palm? That I’m making up – I mean so far as you know.
What I know, however, carries a lot of water when it comes to settings.
My novels are set in Chicago. I’ve lived in the city’s shadow my whole life, and worked in its bowels for nigh on thirty years. As a matter of practicality, this knowledge saves a lot of work. Comes time to write a scene, I’ve got a place in my head. I know what the character’s gonna see out the windows, what the weather’s like any given month of the year, what expressway he’s gonna jump on to get wherever. I still make places up, of course – a couple of churches I needed for this book, for example. But I just transplanted ones I’ve been to, so I know the layout, the color the brick, the way the light falls in the windows. I’m a little amazed at fantasy author types who have to make up entire worlds – new flora, new fauna, new races of folk. Seems like a lot of pick and shovel work, and I’m glad I don’t have to do it.
But more so than the physical setting, places with which we have intimate familiarity carry some psychic baggage that also flavors our work. Just like the real Chicago, the Chicago in my story is rotted through with corruption. That sense of civic degradation is present in the words like a stench – it informs the characters actions, their moods, their beliefs.
And there is a northern urban-ness (new word I made up, and its way different from urbanity). It’s a kind of grubbing, shallow banality. It’s a different sense than I get when reading things set in rural settings, particularly southern settings. In those, there is a sense of the earth, a connection to the land, the shadow of history like a miasma in the air. Characters have folk drifting back into the mists of antiquity, great grandfathers who fought with Lee, slavers, ancestors on either side of the race line – it seems to make for a rich and muddled stew of motivations and regrets and secrets. Here, ancestors are a later wave of immigrants – usually just a generation or two back. They left dire circumstances there for dire urban lives here. None of that has yet settled into any real culture – the blender is still running. It makes for hard, shallow men willing to do brutal things for little reason, almost a kind a nihilism. It is, I suppose, the contrast between steel and earth, between concrete and a wooded holler.
But that’s just my take, how I react to what I’ve experienced. And I’ve done the rural thing a bit in some shorts lately – played with my new familiarity with Southwest Wisconsin. A whole different feel.
So what say ye? How does where you’ve lived affect what you write?
I like this quite a lot.
I’d also argue it goes on to not just Where you know, but Who you know. While we may not take real people and transpose them directly, the people in our fiction (I believe) are quite often pastiches of those people we’ve met in our lives.
I speak on the subject of Write What You Know here, in a far less elegant manner. 🙂
http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2010/03/08/write-what-you-know-yes-or-no/
— c.
I run up a pretty good body count in my book, and one of my secret joys in basing characters who are gonna get it on people I don’t like and then offing their avatars. Petty and juvenille, I know, but a man’s gotta have his fun.
Arkansas informs every word I write, and so far, has been the setting for all of my novels. Except this weird ass fantasy/western deal I’m writing. But that don’t count.
I think when I write about places I’m intimately familiar with, I’m freed up to focus on the stuff that really matters, the conflict and characters. The way I describe things are more spare and natural, and tend toward better writing.
I’m starting to realize how fucking hard this fantasy shit is. I’m having to come up with fake history for everything, just so I can refer to a town or call the local lawman a sheriff or vigiles. I might’ve bit off more than I can chew.
Does calling it ‘The Windy City’ refer to an inordinate amount of curry houses or the prevailing climate?….;-)
I write whatever the hell comes into my head personally although I can’t really claim to be a writer at all. Just a blogger who likes writing.
Been in a couple of short fiction contests and had respectable results.
Just started ‘writing’ on a new blog I started (http://dinnerswrit.blogspot.com )
As you are an experienced writer I would genuinly appreciate your thoughts if you have a spare moment. – Good or bad! Don’t worry I’ve a hide like a rhino and, if I want to write I need to take critisicm on the chin!
My first ever real attempt is proving far tougher than I imagined it would – albeit I am enjoying ‘giving it a go’.
It’s a sort of good v evil thing written in dialogue only – which is bloody hard after a while as you introduce more and more characters!
Still. Soon as I get a chance I’ll have a read of your stuff old bean.
Hope you find a short time to help a struggling novice!
I lived a few years near Chicago (Woodridge) and worked in The Loop. This was when I started to write, so my early stories are all based in Chicago. It was easy to check things out, and it’s a great city for crime fiction, for all the reasons you mentioned, plus the rich wealth on unique neighborhood that are still inside the city.
My more recent shorts and current novel-in-progress take place in Western Pennsylvania, where I grew up. I’ve been away from Chicago for almost 15 years now, so I’m out of its rhythms and atmosphere, but Pittsburgh is part of my genetic makeup, even though I’ve been gone 30 years. As I became more thoughtful about my writing, I realized the Rust Belt sensibilities and sensitivities I grew up among have always influenced my writing. Taking them home allows me to give them the fullest range of expression.
Fantasy is ridiculously difficult to write, but immensely fun to read. Never realized how much work goes into a fictional place’s history until I had to invent one.
What I find interesting is that when folks write about a place they know well, they often don’t even think about detailing the place. They just say this place was here and it looked like that, or there’s a church where the movie theater used to be. But even when they’re not trying to “invoke place,” the end up doing that. Just because they’re speaking from what they know and not just what they find in the google street views.
I’m not real big on description overall — a quick phrase here or there to set the mood or scene, and then get on with it. There are some writers who can pull off longer descriptive passages — James Lee Burke comes to mind — but you gotta be real good at it or it’s just sand in the gears.
I often find I want to “mythologize” (or perhaps “immortalize”) a city myself, making my own take on it the thing that people will remember, especially in places that don’t seem to have much myth already shrouding them. I used to live in Montreal, for example, which doesn’t seem very well-known in the States–except as a party town with hot French broads. So, to me, I always want to bring out some otherwise unknown side of the cities I’ve lived in, to be the first to tamp down a flag and yell “MINE!” even if, in reality, there are likely hundreds of others who’ve done this. I just think it should be unique. And, of course, that my description is the best one ever written. 😉
I don’t know if it’s mythologize or demythologize. So often, when writers or filmakers use Chicago, it’s all Wrigley Field, Navy Pier, the Picasso and then some public housing project for whatever bad shit has to go on. Might as well save yourself some time and just buy postcards. So yeah, you want to get out from under the public perception and find something fresh. (Hey, for me, Montreal will always be Wolfe and the Plains of Abraham, but I’m OLD.)
For me, place is a metatag for things lost. Landscape is the least important part; it’s the whole schmear of people, values, talk, and memories but without the physical place that stuff starts to float away. I’ve also found that the DVDs I buy are both movies I like but also places I like to visit, though I’m not sure about their real world equivalents: late 50s Baltimore in Diner, 1970s New York in Annie Hall.