Travel research on a dime and on a dollar
you don't have to be rich
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If you follow me on Instagram, you’d know that recently I was in Croatia researching my next book. This is the first time I’ve taken a “big ticket” trip to do research for fiction, so I thought about the variety of different ways you can research location for setting, whether you are willing or able to spend money or not.
Let me set up a clear and fundamental rule: You do not need to go to a place and spend a bunch of money researching in order to realistically set a book in a particular location. (please note that I am not talking about historical fiction and saying that you don’t need to do research. I’m specifically talking about setting and whether or not you need to go to a place in order to write about it.) When it comes to fiction, the only thing that matters is verisimilitude. By “verisimilitude” I mean “creating the perception of reality” regardless about whether or not that thing is real.
If you can’t afford to or don’t want to travel to the place where your book takes place:
We get it—times are tough and time is short. But you absolutely don’t have to spend money researching a place in order to write about it. There are just two rules here:
Don’t be lazy.
Don’t be stupid.
(both of these rules, incidentally, count for when you ARE spending money on travel to research a place, but I digress.) By “lazy” I mean you are setting your book in Paris and spend nine nanoseconds thinking, “Ah, what does Paris mean?” so you throw in a reference to the Eiffel Tower and people drinking tiny cups of espresso at outdoor cafes. Yes, the Eiffel Tower is in fact in Paris and people DO drink tiny cups of coffee but sometimes when I’m reading a book I can 100% tell that the author has either never been to that city or doesn’t care to have some sense of verisimilitude. By “Don’t be stupid” I mean at LEAST take a few seconds to do basic fact checking. (I won’t name names, but there is a very popular science fiction author who has an ethnically Indian character—first person—who references speaking “Indian.” My friends, there is no such language. The thing that is sad is that there was no one knowledgeable—from author, to agent, to editor, to copy editor, to second copy editor—who knew that Indians speak many, many languages, none of which are named “Indian.”)
Here’s an example of me being kind of stupid and lazy but not in as much an offensive way. The first novel I wrote (unpublished) involved a professor who worked at MIT. I pictured and wrote about MIT as if it looked like Harvard. If you have been to Boston, you know that MIT is actually pretty weird looking (or at least the physics department I was focusing in on.) I had written about it as if it looked like this
when really it looks more like this:
Many of the buildings the characters would be walking by or talking inside of look hyper-modern or brutalist and were not brick buildings covered in ivy. Luckily, I have some lovely friends in Boston who I visit about once a year, and one year this included a reconnaissance trip to MIT where I took a bunch of pictures. Also, because my friend lived in the area, he was able to answer questions about what sort of people live in which neighborhood, whether such and such commute made sense or not. But I didn’t actually have to take that trip to see what the university looked like—I just had to understand that my assumptions about what it looked like could be wrong.
Despite the fact that it is horrifying and from a Black Mirror POV that absolutely everything is being documented all the time, this is very beneficial for writers. I wrote a novella called Twelve Years, Eight-hundred and Seventy-Two Miles, which is about two brothers going on a road trip to see their father executed on death row. The road trip goes from Los Angeles (a place I have lived), to Lake Havasu (a place I have not been to), to the Grand Canyon (a place I have been to, but after I wrote this novella), to the Arizona State Prison Complex Eyman (a real place that I had not been to where the execution would take place.) I used Google Maps to plot out a reasonable route they would take and literally dragged around the little orange guy to look at the roads. But the highways looked really similar to drives I had done in real life: barren desert, lonely cactuses, the occasional weird roadside store selling “alien” jerky. I combined what I knew to be real from different things (other desert roads I know), with things I didn’t know but could look at online (a restaurant along the way know for its date milkshakes), and things I completely had made up (there is a reference at the end of the novella to the Blythe Midwinter Pie Festival—a thing that felt real enough that the copy editor told me that she could not find this Pie Festival, but could find similar ones in other towns. This is because the pie festival is made up.) This reminded me of a a science fiction book I was writing—I went into detail describing this metal that has a low melting point so that it looks like mercury you can bathe in, and one of my readers was like, “That’s a real metal, right?” No, I just made you feel like it is real.
For A Step Past Darkness, which takes place in coal mining country, I did no travel at all. I built the entire town from the ground up, giving it my own specific strangeness. I did do some research about coal mining, and where specifically in Pennsylvania coal was located, and the history of mining in the late 18th century. Someone who did a podcast with me asked me if I was from PA, because he was, and felt like it very much felt like the town he grew up in (a wonderful compliment!) I felt comfortable doing this because while I am not from suburban PA, I am from a place that is very much like suburban PA.
It doesn’t matter, ultimately, if the road stand you are writing about is real, it matters that it feels real. The thing that makes that feeling of verisimilitude is specificity and strangeness. It’s a roadside restaurant where the food looks like it will give you food poisoning but the bathroom is immaculate. The waitress has a peculiar attitude about your desire for ketchup. There are four men having a conversation that is either about cattle or some people they have murdered.
You can read other people’s first person descriptions of having been to this place, you can look at Yelp reviews of restaurants, you can move that little orange man around on Google maps, but ultimately it’s your job to build a place in my imagination while I’m reading. Give me things to hook onto.
If you are willing to travel
If you are willing to travel, don’t go too early—go when you’re at the point that you know what you need / want to look at and why. I have traveled alone a lot myself, so I’m quite comfortable with it, but in this case, I had some friends who were also interested in going to Croatia. I already have a more than the average person understanding of the Balkans, but what I was looking for was what does it feel like, what is the specificity and strangeness. So yes, I was going because I was specifically interested in the Homeland War fought in the early 90s, so we did visit a few museums and tours that had to do with that. Do your history stuff. And if you’re never been to Paris, fine, go look at the Eiffel Tower, but for the love of god, don’t use it as your “hey we are in Paris” signal unless you’re going to do something very, very interesting. (a body is found impaled at the top of the Tower..???) So this history of Croatia was really important to me- specifically in the 90s, but in order to understand the 90s, you need to have a good understanding of what led up to the war. I can read books about that, but better yet, hear Croatians themselves talk about it. But beyond that, what is it like there, what does it feel like to be there, how is the past reflected in what is there presently?
Here are some examples of non-Eiffel Tower “strangeness”:
We were in Zagreb, one of the safest cities in Europe. It felt extremely safe to me, coming from someone who lives in a city with a high murder rate. We all thought the amount of graffiti seemed odd. Ultimately, I think it was a mismatch between what graffiti means to us and its placement in another city. I associate non-mural graffiti with crime, and, specifically crew tagging. A street in DC where there is a lot of graffiti is also likely to be a street where you see a lot of broken glass on the ground, where you can smell where people urinated. Sadly, a lot of people will tag over beautiful murals. This was not the case in Zagreb—you’d see a perfectly nice buildings on clear streets with graffiti.
We also went to Dubrovnik and stayed inside the Old City, which is walled off from the rest of the city. I noticed that there were quite a few stray cats, yet they seemed well fed and a couple of them wanted me to pet them. (Did I? Yeah, I’m stupid like that. I was psp-psping at every cat I saw.) We did a tour there and the tour guide mentioned two things that I filed away in my head. One of them was that every night they wash the streets. We had all noticed that the main street of the Old City is ridiculously smooth and shiny. The other was that cars are not allowed inside the Old City, which makes doing anything complicated: if you want to buy a couch its expensive because you have to pay guys to move it in by hand, if you want to renovate you have to follow all these rules to make sure to preserve the historical character of the city. As a result, many residents leave out food for cats to get rid of it rather than have to deal with more volume of garbage. So cats everywhere! Sitting on a chair at a cafe: a cat. Loafing inside a bakery: a cat. Chilling on the stones of 15th century walls: cats cats cats.
Though I knew a bit about the war, I mainly knew about it from a larger “first this happened, then that happened” at the 10,000 foot level. I knew about Vukovar, but I didn’t know that Dubrovnik, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was bombed during the war. I am still mulling this over because this is very very interesting to me— the combination between extremely old world history and modern conflicts. They literally build this massive, impressive wall around the city which effectively kept out raiders for centuries, but they could not of course anticipate a future where attacks could come from the sky. (This is, ironically, exactly the problem dragons introduce in Game of Thrones).
We took a day trip to Mostar, Bosnia, which I didn’t realize would involve driving through Republika Srpska. (If you’re not familiar, this is one entity within Bosnia, with the other entity being the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.) You would see signs as you passed from one to the other, different flags, signs in one place that were in Bosnian, then in the next place they’d be in Cyrillic. Even the buildings felt different. When we were in Mostar my friend found a little shop that featured the art of this artist who was sitting there actively painting while smoking a cigarette. When we came inside, he stood up, welcomed us, then said, “Sorry for the smoke… but this is Bosnia.” (I thought that was super funny, and yes, there was a lot of smoking.)
Whether your book is set in your home town, and some place you’ve never been, take a second to think about what creates that feeling of realness and three-dimensionality. Are you doing the equivalent of a TV show that shows the standard drone footage of the Washington Monument, Capital Building, and the White House to show that we’re in DC, or are you showing me that you actually know the city beyond the things that are sold in souvenir shops?
Photo by Timo Stern on Unsplash