I've never been to the UK but I've watched films and grown to love the place. I particularly love London! I would like to write a story with it's setting in London. What can I do to make sure I've best described London in my story?
I've never been to the UK but I've watched films and grown to love the place. I particularly love London! I would like to write a story with it's setting in London. What can I do to make sure I've best described London in my story?
Hello Esther
I think it's tempting to feel that a story set in another country would make for interesting reading, and I can see why you'd like to set a book in London - it's a vibrant mix of ancient and modern. But the rest of the world might be waiting for an amazing book that perhaps only you can write, and it would be real and alive and effervescent with the uniqueness of Kenya as only a real Kenyan could know. I personally would love to read a book written by a Kenyan about Kenya.
I wish you every success and hope that one day your dream will come true and you will have a chance to visit London.
I find that if I write places I know then the story often contains my experience of the place in some shape or form. My best fiction is always written about places that are entirely of my imagination. I even seem to be able to describe them better than somewhere I know. Because I have to build the picture in my mind, I have to fill every gap in the frame and understand the image I put there. You think far harder than seeing a place you know and take for granted daily, and the experience of that place you write about belongs to your characters, seen by the reader through their eyes, not yours. A genuine fictional character won't see what you see. If they do, it's time to question how fictional your character is.
But I do get a real kick out of accuracy. When I write about a real place I haven't been, there is no day so wonderful as the day I finally visit. I stood on the millenium bridge and felt the warm morning sun as my characters did. I walked Las Ramblas in Barcelona and smelled all the food and harbour smells they had experienced, but none of it was important to my story, so it had no place in the script and I made no alterations.
However, when they stepped off the plane in Cairo, the heat, view and smell was important, but my experience of that wasn't, so I asked everyone I've ever met their experience of departing a plane at Cairo airport, took a little google earth tour, and then built my own fictional picture. I've done that with several other places too. It takes some practise and you need to look out for things like factories nearby that could pollute the air and other environmental factors, but if you spend enough time on Google Earth, you eventually know what you are looking for.
The only gap left is your main character, and actually he or she is really where you need to start. Now there I am not so open-minded. You have to know the culture and background of that character inside out, so unless you know several Londoners and understand the way they think, your lead character shouldn't be from London.
Good luck! Vxx
PS If you visit London on Google Earth, don't forget to look out for the aeroplane in Russell Square. No really, very funny glitch!
I'm British, and now live in Bangor, Maine, with my husband, Jacques. I know London well, as I do with most parts of the British Isles, especially Northumberland and the Scottish Border country where I was born. It is impossible to write with conviction, in my view, about a place you have not seen, nor become familiar with to some degree. I believe it to be an advantage to know the history of a place ~ even in a small way ~ first hand. By this, I mean knowing those special places ~ such as restaurants, parks, and theatres ~ that have a great history in their own right, but are not tourist attractions in themselves. Although Cosmopolitan in culture, there still is a fierce British stamp upon the place: an innate Englishness that never fades despite the passing decades. A place famous for its reputation in the fashion Industry, the pageantry of the Monarchy, wonderful architecture (many medieval buildings still stand), and, of course, the actual age of the place ~ the Londinium of Roman times over 2000 years ago. I agree to some extent with the other contributors above, that it is possible by other means to get to know a place sufficiently well to write about it; but it's the small things, I think: the extra-attention to detail that comes from *knowing* which creates realistic atmosphere, does it not? Sebastian Faulks might not have achieved such acclaim for his novel, BIRDSONG had he not visited the Somme, and felt for himself the devastation and loss of The Great War 1914-18.