Vicarious Senses: Setting Conundrums

If you’re like me in any way, you don’t always have the opportunity to go to the places you set your stories in. If you’re lucky, you’ll visit a place and find yourself inspired to write a story set there. If you’re luckier, you can travel to your setting destination and explore. Otherwise, you have to get vicarious senses.

In October, I am actually fortunate enough to be going to the city where I decided to set my current project. The trip was planned well before I decided on the setting for my brainchild. I don’t think the trip had any influence on my choice, but who knows? The subconscious is a fickle beast. However lucky I am, I only have less than a day to explore that city. Most definitely not enough time to visit all the places my story will cover. And not just because it’s a huge city. Also, my trip isn’t for a month and a half (as of this posting; a little under a year since this project got underway). I’m not waiting that long to get into the researching and writing of my story.

Conundrum, much?

Maybe, but I’ve gotten around worse problems. Kate will attest to the fact that I take my research to an unnecessary level. When I want to know about anything I go into finite detail. This includes urban centres I’m trying to successfully convey.

Do you know how many different aspects there are to the average city? More than anyone who has never worked for a municipal government can possibly imagine. For instance, I had to research police divisions because one of my side-characters is a cop; I had to research trees because my protagonist has to climb and hunt in one and I needed a species tall and sturdy enough for her to set up gear in; I had to look up tree climbing gear because the biggest thing I’ve ever hauled my butt into is a 50 year old poplar with low hanging branches; I had to research gun and weapon laws; I had to look up different city parks; the list goes on.

Instead of scouring the World Wide Web for all of these details and getting lost in pages and pages of material, I’ve uncovered two major tricks to help my learning*:

Google maps, specifically “street view,” is a resource that has saved my butt a million times. How can I not be over the moon for something that can give me a relatively recent image of basically anywhere in the world? Need to walk down Park Avenue? Well, I virtually can.
Municipal websites are amazing. The bigger the city, the more likely it’s going to have a very useful website with lots of links devoted to anything and everything in that city, like parks, bilaws, festivals, travel ideas, police presence, urban planning…

Otherwise, I do scour the web looking for specific details I need. But I try not to waste too much of my time doing it anymore. If I can’t find one little item in the course of an hour of research, I’ve learned to let it go and think in a different direction.

I have a third item to list but I have yet to try it out, and I don’t want to mislead. My next approach is to read other people’s books set in my urban centre in order to get a feel for how detailed they get about the setting. I have no desire to copy their locale descriptions or emulate their descriptive style, let me state that outright. I just need a model. I’m also going to read more books in my genre category and less that branch out. I’m also sticking to fiction because the place itself is not crucial to my story at this point.

Those are my means of getting a sense for places vicariously through images and text. Does anyone have another way they’d like to share?

 

*I had to insert an asterisk because I don’t want to mislead. Even with these two resources you may have to scour the World Wide Web- HOWEVER, with Google Maps and municipal websites your hunt can be very well directed and far less time consuming.

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