Making Real-Life Settings Seem Real

 

The round robin this month is a wonderful subject... making real-life settings seem real!

Using real-life settings for books is a fascinating mixture of joy and consternation. As with writing fantasy and science fiction, using a real setting appears to offer a lifeline. In fantasy and science fiction we can make anything happen—right? Don’t have a gadget to repel gravity? Invent one and hand it to our characters. Can’t think of a blood-pounding challenge for our weedy hero? Introduce a dragon into the playground. Yeah. That’ll do it.

Yet of course, it’s not that simple. For every greasing of the wheels switching to a speculative fiction genre offers, it tosses at least as many spokes into the same wheels.

It’s the same with real-life settings. On the face of it, using a real place means we don’t have to invent stuff, right? Maybe, but we still have to solve some thorny problems. For one thing, we have to be familiar with that setting because failing to research is going to mess things up. Just as an example…

I live in Tasmania. Tasmanians tend to give distances in times. I say… I live an hour out of Launceston and forty-five minutes from Burnie. This is accurate. It’s around 100 km to Launceston and 65 or so to Burnie. However, if I decided to set a book in a place I’d never been, I’d probably get it wrong. It might take an hour to drive 30 km in some places. If I looked at the map, estimated distance and translated that to time in my head using my Tasmanian yardstick, then that would immediately make my real setting seem unreal… and deservedly so.

Another problem is that few real-life settings have all the attributes we want for a story, and even those that do may not have them in perpetuity. It’s all very well to choose Devonport for a setting, but isn’t the person who really lives at 15 Hiller Avenue going to get annoyed if I plant a murderer there? And what about shops and landmarks? Who’s to say they’ll still be there when the book is published?

Using a real place and including identifying detail is just as dangerous as including real people in your stories. Who’s to say the boyband your characters see performing won’t break up next month? And what if the iconic shop that draws people long distances to visit burns down?

That’s the downside.

Life happens and the advancing years and events can render your once-authentic real setting all wrong. It’s fine if you set your story in a specific year, of course… as long as you check the weather and local events… (Um… exactly which bridge did we use to cross the Mersey in 2011?)

It’s not the whole picture, though. We can use real states, towns, districts and areas as long as we blend imagination with the reality. Grafting on new streets or renaming an existing one is one way around it. Using details such a state forest, a mountain, a cave or a port will be pretty safe, because, catastrophic landslips and bushfires aside, they tend to stay put. And using a familiar setting will allow you to write with intimate knowledge.

In the early days of my writing, I set almost all my books in NW Tasmania, which is where I’ve always lived. My early stories were mostly farm-and-family, so I used our family farm under other names. I wrote about the places I knew well, describing them as they really were even if I didn’t necessarily use the real town names.

As the 80s progressed I started to run into opposition from publishers because my stories not only featured real places, which was fine, but also real attitudes and real local culture, which was not fine. The way Tasmanians thought, acted and lived just didn’t match up with the expectations of publishers who mostly hailed from capital cities on the mainland. I got flack for having nuclear families in my books. At that point, every child except one in my son’s school class lived with both original parents. I was reflecting reality as I experienced it, and as it was.  

I couldn’t use city or outback or overseas settings with any authority because I had rarely left my little corner of the rural landscape and a couple of days here and there would never be enough. As with the map-distances and the time-to-drive-from-A-to-B, reading about a place or briefly visiting didn’t give me enough experience to use an unfamiliar place in an authentic manner.

Is it any wonder I turned to writing fantasy?

 That wasn’t the end of the story, though. When I wrote Sneaking up the Snake in the 1990s, I deliberately set it in Devonport, which is the city 12 km from where I live. Annabel visited real shops and walked down real streets. She took her driving test in a real setting and visited the library in the street where it was back then to borrow audio books (Hear-a-Books then…) which were available on cassette. It was interesting. I knew Devonport, but I walked the streets my heroine traverses myself and took note of how long it took to get places, and exactly what she would see and hear and notice on her way. I even used real businesses, which I wouldn’t do now. (Writing Tasmania: A Guide cured me of that. When the second edition was due, far too many of the iconic businesses had closed or changed.)

My story was about the gradual derailment of my heroine’s life when she developed a debilitating but not life-threatening condition. As her surroundings and her opportunities shrank, the distances she could walk became shorter and the activities she could carry out became fewer until she was virtually confined to her room. Meanwhile, her busy family made allowances, tried to believe in her invisible illness, and tried to get on with their lives. (Active teenagers just don’t become almost crippled with pain and fatigue for no discernible reason, right?)

Sneaking up the Snake (the title refers to cheating in Snakes and Ladders) never made it to publication and, because it was written as a WPS file on a floppy disk and a dot matrix printer, all I have of it is a 1500-word fragment which somehow survived multiple computer and software upgrades… (goodness knows what happened to the other 50K of it), but it sure gave me a good mental picture of central Devonport. I can still walk with Annabel in my mind, visiting the bakery which is no longer there and the library which was deserted a decade or more ago and recently demolished. I just glanced over the fragment, and it is a thing of its time. Annabel, if she popped in to visit me today, would be well into her forties.

My next essays into real-life setting came in the 80s and 90s when I spent six or seven Book Weeks in libraries, mostly interstate, as a guest speaker with the Nestle Write Around Australia Program or various speaking agencies. I had a splendid time, and, for almost the first time in my life, I got to spend a week or so in some very different settings. I learned to make my way around Sydney by train, and I went to Alice Springs, Kalgoorlie, Townsville, Werribee, Wentworth, Gundagai, the Rock, and a good many other places. My husband and I did a couple of self-managed driving school-visit tours too, along the coast in Victoria and into South Australia. We got lots of takers for a talk or a workshop along the way.

These ventures coincided with the flowering of reading scheme series where the stories were what I call bonsai novels; full-featured adventures, mysteries, fantasies, sci-fis, and historicals etc. that did not have to be tied to the curriculum. They were splendid sets of books, bursting with imagination and enjoyment. Because of the short word-count, I was able to set stories in lots of the places I’d been, and I could write with fair authority having researched the settings along the way. I probably couldn’t have set a 50K novel there, but 4, 5 or 6K? Not a problem. Some of these tales were Aliens in Kalgoorlie (a fantasy set in Kalgoorlie, 2002), The Anti-Tourist (a family story set in Townsville 2003) Where Would I Be? (a science fiction story set at the Remarkable Rocks, Kangaroo Island, 2004) Visiting Day (a school story set in inland Queensland 2003) A Horrorday to Remember (a travel story set partly in Alice Springs, 2002) Sandstorm in a Sleeping Bag (a school camp story set near Cairns, 2001) Rockfall (an adventure story set along the Great Ocean Road 1999), The Mangrove Mystery (an adventure set in Townsville, 2002), Trip to the Tip (a road trip to Cape York, 2003) and Creature Cottage (a comedy set in Wagga Wagga, 1999). In such use of settings studied intensively over no more than a few days or weeks, it’s the detail that brings in the authenticity. I remember the stickiness on the walls in a room in the inner city, the shudder of the building when they blasted the pit in Kalgoorlie, the constant scurry of the crabs under the mangroves along the Bohle River, the salty smell of the air on Magnetic Island, and the weird sparkle of the dry River Todd in Alice Springs. I remember the squashy fruit of the feral olive trees in Wagga, and the peculiar feeling in the air near the Remarkable Rocks. It’s so windy on King Island and South Australia can turn on the chill just as well as Tasmania! Who knew the sand at Broad Beach (where I partially set In Search of a Husband in the 1990s) was gritty and beige in contrast to Tasmania’s glinting white grains? I did, after I visited. Had I not been there, I might have rhapsodised over the golden sands…

Without knowing these places from personal experience (or, in one case, from my husband’s detailed descriptions written at the time of visiting), I couldn’t have made them seem real and I would inevitably have made a miss-step that would have jolted readers who knew them right out of the story.

   Boy Down Under, (2004) is a much longer book than the reading scheme titles, but I was able to work in a lot of places I’ve been to as the very strange Patrick Carroll shows the American heroine his country. I even got to use the Rockslides in Queensland where I went swimming a time or three.

I’ve used real places in historicals too, and again stubbed my toe on the tyranny of distance. I can work out how fast a horse can travel now, but back in the 1800s the roads made journeys much slower, and a horse and cart might make four miles in a day. Also, although some real towns existed in the period I wanted, research told me that many of them were no more than two or three houses so letting my Scottish heroine shop in any of them would have been unrealistic. I did set The Powerful Pickle Problem in Tasmania in the 1930s, but that was easy. I herded together my older relatives and their friends—the ones who were schoolchildren in 1932—and interviewed them at length. The resulting story is far sunnier than it would have been if I’d relied on modern-day research into the years around the Great Depression. Times were dreadfully hard, but these people almost all agreed they had been shielded from the worst of it by their parents. In our district, almost everyone had a garden to grow potatoes, cabbages, rhubarb and gooseberries, and hey—there were rabbits about the paddocks, blackberries on the vines and fish in the river! Shabby clothes? So what? All their friends were shabby too! I described the setting they remembered; quiet streets where horse manure was a constant, and where all the kids poured out to gawp if a car drove down the street. In the absence of eye witnesses, historical settings can be researched on TROVE, where newspapers show life as it was, as perceived by people who lived it at the time, and not as the history books and revisionists want to interpret it.  I can’t say it often enough; if you can get there and if everyone who was there is gone, then get you to the primary sources and read the impressions of the locals. You might be offended, astounded, disbelieving and cringing… but you’ll be visiting the past in the best way possible… especially if you have some photos or contemporary drawings as a side dish.  

In the 21^st C, I’ve set dozens of books in and around Sydney and the Victorian coast, but although the areas are real, the actual streets and towns and even some suburbs are not, so that’s a story for another blog post. I have, in fact, claimed fully half of Australia (the whole east) as my own and my network of towns, stations, mountains, properties, rivers and such overlays reality like a glittering web.

One real place I did use was a certain terrace house in Hereford Street, Glebe, where I used to stay while doing workshops in and around Sydney. I renamed the street, but the description is all there.

My most recent (and most blatant) use of an absolutely real setting was in Meet Dooley on the Farm in 2020. This was a wonderful case of not only being allowed to use the real Tasmania but being mandated to do so. I was asked to write a story set in my home state as part of a series of books written and illustrated by creators from different states (and, I think, the NT). Tasmanian illustrator Christina Booth was chosen to do the illustrations. Gleefully, I planted my hero, Dooley, on the farm where I grew up, near Latrobe, Tasmania, under Dooley’s Hill. It’s all real, even down to the barn where Dooley and his cousin spend the night and the creek (Bonney’s Creek, named after one of my ancestors) where Dooley and his dog Jess are playing at the beginning of the story. The hawthorn lane is there (I walked down it only yesterday) and so is the Mersey River, and even the next-door property where my grandfather’s family once lived.

To use a buzz term, I can’t tell you how validated I felt at the ripe age of sixty-something, to be told, at last, that my part of the world was just as valid as any other as a setting for a story. I can’t say anyone ever mentioned how realistic the setting was or said anything much at all about the story but hey—in this business I am grateful for any crumb of validation I can get.

And no… Dooley’s place is not the setting of my childhood, or even of my children’s childhoods. Attitudes and cultural mores have changed. The place has changed since the huge flood of 2016 and the council’s um… what did they call it? Flood mitigating earthworks???  Yes. Yet—hill and farm, river and creek are still there and still real.

Until next month when I get to write about fictional settings!

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