TAKING PLACE

Salad Bowl Saturday welcomes Matt Iden today to talk  his experience of finding the right place to set his novels.

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Like any other would-be John D. MacDonald or Robert B. Parker, I’d studied enough writers’ guides to hear the old saw, setting as character. The concept gets drummed into us as much as show don’t tell and get to the action and write what you know, but sometimes it takes more than just hearing or reading to learn the lesson.

For some reason I still can’t explain, when I started writing, I set my novels in places I’d never been, or only had been once….briefly. I had a particular penchant for choosing Phoenix and rural New Mexico, though I once plunked a detective down in east Philly (for the record, I’ve been to Phoenix once for four days, New Mexico never, and the only part of Philadelphia I’ve seen are the suburbs an hour west of the city where my mother-in-law lives).

I had the sense, which I think we can all relate to, that my own environment was too boring, too pedestrian, too known to be the setting for a whiz-bang story. How could I possibly thrill the reader—and make the setting as character—with such a ho-hum, try-not-to-yawn location?

Where does this guy live, you ask yourself. The Gobi desert? A bubble? The moon?

I live across the Potomac River from Washington DC.

Yes, you read correctly. Washington DC. The most powerful city in the world. The home of the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and other Neo-Classical buildings used on the cover of far too many spy novels. The murder capital of the country, once upon a time. This was the place that I was afraid wasn’t thrilling enough to keep my readers’ attention.

Even more importantly, I didn’t have a sense of the other places at all, the ones that I thought were more interesting. I was using Google Earth, travel blogs, and local newspaper websites to cobble together the feel for places I was pretending to know intimately.

As wonderful as these resources are, they don’t give you the little details that often make the story. What’s the local grocery chain? Where does traffic back up at rush hour? What neighborhood can you visit during the day…but not at night? Where other writers were getting stuck on character or plot, I was getting tripped up—maddeningly—at a much more basic level: where my book took place.

National Law Enforcement
 Officers Memorial

The epiphany hit when I found myself at the library, looking for Lonely Planet guides for Arizona and New Mexico. This was stupid, I said to myself. I wasn’t going to get my setting from a book or a website. I needed to find it by putting my shoes on and walking it. And I could only do that, for the most part, in the place where I lived.

Since then, I’ve set four novels, one novella, and several short stories in and around D.C. Readers who know the D.C. Metro area often cite the accuracy of my descriptions, while people who don’t, say they feel like they do after reading one of my books. From my side of things, I’ve stopped agonizing about the where of my scenes and instead get to spend time on the quirky and memorable details of a setting instead.

Sure, I hear you say, you live in one of the most identifiable cities in the world. Setting is easy. I’ll admit, it’s easier to plug into reader expectation when you’re dealing with a place like our nation’s capital than trying to describe a failing steel town outside Pittsburgh or fisherman’s village on the Chesapeake Bay.

But I actually find myself avoiding the clichés of my city. The Capital building is stunning at night, but what use is it when describing a murder scene? We all know what the White House looks like from news reports, but it might as well be in Phoenix for all I know about it personally (like Phoenix, I’ve only been there once).

So, instead I’ve found myself walking the DC waterfront or the revitalized neighborhood around the new baseball stadium. I’ve discovered landmarks that never make it onto the six o’clock news, like the moving National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, which figures prominently in my second novel, Blueblood. I get the feel for a neighborhood by being part of it, not by ordering up tired views of monuments the world knows already from CNN.

If you’re having trouble with setting, my best advice is: go for a walk. Write where you know. Someday you may be lucky enough to take a research junket for that thriller you’ve set along the canals of Venice, but until then, I guarantee you’ll find it more rewarding—and your reader will, too—if you write where you are taking place.

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Matthew Iden writes crime fiction, fantasy, science fiction, and contemporary literary fiction with a psychological twist. His debut detective series–A Reason to Live, Blueblood, One Right Thing, and The Spike (Fall 2013)–features retired DC Homicide cop Marty Singer.

VITAL STATISTICS

The Marty Singer detective series

A Reason to Live  - http://www.amazon.com/Reason-Marty-Singer-Mystery-ebook/dp/B0081MW9LM/

Blueblood  - http://www.amazon.com/Blueblood-Marty-Singer-Mystery-ebook/dp/B009CAV2RO/ 

One Right Thing  - http://www.amazon.com/Right-Thing-Singer-Mystery-ebook/dp/B00BSMRE80/

SOCIAL MEDIA

Website/blog: http://matthew-iden.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/matthew.iden

Twitter: @CrimeRighter
Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.com/Matthew-Iden/e/B00642SZQO/

Goodreads author page: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5313211.Matthew_Iden