Made-up places

Another thing I wrote a few months ago, also inspired by Daniel Handler, but not about him.

As a writer, one of the things I’m always most interested in is place. As in location. That I currently have various ideas for stories that take place in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Colorado is not simply because these are places that I have been to often enough that I feel comfortable writing about them, though that’s certainly a factor. The real reason is because each story has to be set there. Consider that in my own mind I refer to at least two of them as “the Los Angeles story” and “the Las Vegas story,” despite the fact that both have perfectly good working titles (“Screenwriter’s Blues” and “What Happens Here,” respectively). (The stories set in San Francisco and Colorado have no definitive working titles but I don’t tend to think of them as “the San Francisco story” or “the Colorado story” so much as the one is “Aaron’s story” and the other is just “that Big Thompson thing.” This is because the stories could take place in locations other than where they’re currently set, but the intertwining nature of all four books makes the current locations necessary.)

The Las Vegas story could technically take place anywhere, but the point of the story as it’s framed in my mind would be completely different. (When I become famous and dead and my writings are a part of the great American canon, this essay will no doubt be a boon to all those poor graduate students who want to write their theses about my brilliance.) The same goes for the Los Angeles story – sure, people can go crazy anywhere but there’s a whole tradition of “LA makes you crazy” stories that I’m emulating and, besides, the kind of crazy LA drives you is so different from the kind of crazy you get from living in Phoenix that it really would make for a whole different novel.

But this interest in locations gets sticky because I’m writing fiction. I don’t have any idea if there’s an apartment complex in any of the places I need apartment complexes to be in any of these stories. I could drive around and take lots of pictures and get places and crossroads and times just right, but – dammit, why? It’s fiction. Even if I get the right street corner, I’m still putting a fictional person in an apartment that is in fact lived in by a real person. And if the timing of a story is also important that brings up a host of other problems – like, what if it wasn’t in fact rainy in San Francisco that day?

I used to avoid all this by creating my own worlds. Somewhere (I think) I still have a very thick notebook from high school with more details than you can imagine about a fictional metropolis named Harrison City along the southern coast of Oregon. Here was an urban center not unlike San Francisco, a sprawling suburban canvas reminiscent of the suburb I grew up in, a university, a small liberal arts college, a military base, everything I needed. When I set stories in Harrison City (there was some figure of Oregon history who leant his name to the place) I used to sort of imply that I was inspired mostly by Faulkner and his astonishingly complex (given that it was entirely made up) Yoknoptowhatever(who knows how to actually spell this word?) County. Which, I mean OK, I was probably inspired by Faulker a little bit, but in retrospect I had a lot more experience with the fictional Maine towns created by Stephen King (Jerusalem’s Lot, Castle Rock, and Derry, which are themselves apparently based on the trio of fictional town created by HP Lovecraft).

More and more, though, I realized that sometimes the university where a story was going to be set couldn’t be in Oregon – it needed to be in the desert, or in New England – or that the story was about Las Vegas as much as the characters in the story. My reaction was typically overblown. Suddenly every detail had to be right. There’s some use in this. My LA story character is the sort of obsessive who would know everything about all the possible freeway combinations and who would never once tell you how his morning was without relating which route he took to get to work. But ultimately this is inconvenient when you’re me and most of your experience with LA freeways is knowing how to get from the 91 to Disneyland. Moreover, it’s just not important. Sure, there will always be a reader who knows you got a detail or two wrong, but it’s fiction so the nit picky stuff doesn’t matter.

Or then in the middle ground of those two extremes is a place like the fictional San Francisco of Daniel Handler’s The Basic Eight and Adverbs. It is recognizably San Francisco, would be even without being named as such (though it is), with all the landmarks and weather and topography we expect from that city. But it is not San Francisco. It’s Handler’s own unique world. There are band names and terrorist acts and supernatural wonders that are unique to his world. This is all appealing to me and to some extent I emulate the idea. Of my four novels mentioned above, at least three share characters or reference each other in one way or another, and there are short stories that also branch off from those same characters. These are all the same people living in the same world at the same time. If LA is experiencing extreme wildfires in the fall of 2003, it’s something my characters in San Francisco are aware of. If an earthquake hits San Francisco, LA might feel the shock as well. At the same time, I’ve gone back and forth on just how fictional to make my world. Consider my main character in “the San Francisco novel:” He’s an unabashed music lover, virtually everything in his life (all his memories, most of his relationships) is based around music. If I base him on me (and he’s certainly not in full but I’m allowing him much more of me than any other character I’ve ever written), for example, he’ll be a Pearl Jam fan, and a great many of his memories will be traceable to major moments (and concerts) in Pearl Jam history. This is both useful and a detriment to the narrative, potentially. It’s useful in that it’s identifiable. If he wants to compare a feeling to the sweeping chorus of some hit song, there’s a literal equivalent there that the reader can relate to. It also creates a solid timeline around which the narrative can be built. But these are also the potential detriments to the book – Pearl Jam is a known band, so every reader brings a preconceived notion of what it means to be a Pearl Jam fan with them and this may influence their perception of the character more than the actual characterization as put forth in the book. Moreover, the timeline of the real world is often inconvenient for fiction – Pearl Jam’s huge, free (and then aborted) concert in San Francisco was in July of 1995, they have had tours and albums in many but not all years, and their popularity has declined massively over the past decade (it makes me feel so old to write that) … so what if none of this fits the needs of the book? What if, to work with the character’s age and life, Pearl Jam needs to be on tour in San Francisco in 96 or 97? It didn’t happen, so do I look for another band that was touring in San Francisco, then? It gets complicated.

But on the other hand, while you can mold a fictional band to whatever career path and tour schedule you need, you can’t use them as any kind of reference point with the reader. You might love U2 or hate U2 or be indifferent toward U2, but if I talk about U2’s song “One,” you know what I’m talking about. There’s a key scene in the book right now which takes a cue from Better Than Ezra’s “At The Stars.” I could create a fictional song, a fictional band – even one that is self-consciously Better Than Ezra- and “At The Stars”-like, but I can’t guarantee that, as I describe a song about the joys of driving around in a convertible late at night with no cares in the world that the reader will actually think of “At The Stars.” Maybe they’ll think of “Pink Moon,” a great song, but one with a decidedly more somber feeling. Maybe they’ll think of some other song I’ve never heard.

It all gets very complicated, and so the urge to just distance the entire story from pop culture becomes strong. This works sometimes. The Las Vegas story, to the extent I’ve conceived it so far, has no reason to make reference to much of pop culture (the where is more important than the what). But both the San Francisco and the Los Angeles stories rely heavily on pop culture, and I think this is important because pop culture is such a part of all of our lives. The songs we listen to really do say something about us, they really do influence our moods and our decisions.

(As I write this it has just occurred to me that if the LA story and the SF story take place in the same universe then they need to be governed by the same laws of pop culture. The final scene of the LA story (which is all very cinematic) is set to a Beach Boys song. It has to be. So the decision is either maintaining consistency throughout all the novels or letting them be creations unto themselves. Hm.)

The songs we listen to even influence the way we (as writers) write. One of the novels I wrote in high school was completed on an adrenaline-fueled night when the last hundred or so pages came rolling out of me all at once, as I stayed up late into the morning, with The Refreshments’ “Mekong” on repeat virtually the whole time. When I later went back and read parts of the end of that book, I realized the language actually could be read to the songs, it had the same rhythms. Or, for another example, consider that when I write fiction I always listen to music – usually music that is deliberately reflective of the mood I’m looking for in the work. The playlist on my laptop for the LA story includes a lot of Nine Inch Nails, but also Oingo Boingo, 70s Elton John, and Soul Coughing. The Las Vegas story’s playlist is heavy on early-90s U2, Ryan Adams, and Ben Folds. But if what I’m writing is academic I cannot listen to pop music – really nothing with lyrics is appropriate. Film scores, orchestral “tribute” records to pop bands, and classical are my choices then. But no matter what I’m writing, it’s always much easier with music.

And, to bring us full circle (did you catch that? I didn’t even plan it! I am so awesome!), the other thing that has always encouraged my writing is travel. There’s something about being in a different (not even new necessarily) place that intrigues my mind, encourages writing. Day-to-day life at home is uninspiring. Even when I want to write, with work (and now school), and a house to take care of, it’s all but impossible to find the time. I was writing sporadically in the spring and summer but once my classes picked up heavily in July the fiction/creative writing pretty much stopped (that’s also, you’ll notice, when my blog became a ghost town). All of the reading and analyzing was stimulating a different part of my brain. I was reading a lot, even a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with school, and thinking about it a lot, but the creative part of my mind was dead, which is always dangerous because as I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that not writing tends to result in depression. (When I was younger I had it backwards: I thought that when I was depressed, I could write to pull myself out of it, but writing’s not the cure so much as it’s the symptom. I don’t have much in my life to be depressed about, but sure enough I was depressed just a few months ago, because I wasn’t writing.)

Then I went to California for two nights and suddenly it was bursting out of me quicker than I could possibly write it all down. Even still, weeks later, all those ideas for scenes and conversations crowd my mind, begging to be put to paper before they are forgotten. But real life is again in full effect. I go to work in the morning, I go home and clean and cook and do homework. I write academic papers because I must, and all the while the ideas in my head are forgotten, they trickle away. I lay in bed at night and the ideas come and I must choose between hoping they’ll still be there in the morning or getting up, writing them down, and getting even less sleep than the too-little I already get.

It’s not that I write about foreign places (LA, Las Vegas, San Francisco) because they are more special or better suited to stories than home is. It’s just that home is home. It’s boring. One day I’ll write stories that take place in Phoenix … but not until I’m inspired to write them because I’m here on vacation.