jennickels | book settings

book settings

It always cracks me up when I read a book from a city I've lived in or visited a lot and they get the geography and stuff all wrong. I was just reading a book that is supposed to take place in a small town outside of Portland, OR. So far so good. At some point the kids go to the coast. They take buses which makes sense since it's like a two hour drive, although they never mention how long it takes. They make it seem like it's a short trip.

The one that really got me, though, was when they all take a bus into the city (aka Portland) to go to "one of the malls." Um, Portland doesn't have a mall. Not in the big building with lots of stores in it sense. At least none that I know of. The big mall around here is in Vanvouver. The other is in a town south of the city which is like an hour+ drive from us. It was the one that had the shooting right before Sandy Hook.

I found it really funny that the descriptions did not fit with Portland. Funny enough, another book I read this week had the characters fly into PDX (Portland International Airport) and then drive 250+ miles to southern Oregon for some Shakespeare festival or something. They at least got the geography better. Since the characters were supposed to be big name TV stars (of a recently canceled teen show) I think they could have sprung for a commuter flight to a small airport down state, lol. That's a pretty long drive. I know, I've done it.

Luckily, Veronica Roth is from the Chicago area so all the geography in the Divergent series is spot on. She even uses correct street names and landmarks. I watched a behind the scenes look into shooting the ferris wheel scene in the movie which was pretty neat. I had no idea they actually climbed the thing. They're all nuts. I've been on it and it's freaking high. I believe it's 150 feet at the peak of the wheel. The thing rocks like crazy and for someone afraid of heights--I thought I was going to pass out from the vertigo. It's not about the fear, it's about feeling really, really woozy when I get up high.

Oh, and then there's movies that get the geogrpahy hilariously wrong which only adds to the movie like in The Blues Brothers. That movie cracks me up on so many levels. I love the huge chase at the end where they leave the concert in the middle of the night. It's supposedly 103 miles to Chicago (as stated in the scene: It's 103 miles to Chicago, we have a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. My favorite line in the movie) which at the speeds they're driving should take them like an hour. But when they get there it's lunch time. Um, okay. Not to mention the suburb I believe is supposed to be up north, but they show them coming into the city from the South then driving all over the place. Also there's like no traffic. At all. Anywhere in Chicago during the entire chase.

And they wreck and absurd amount of police cars.

Okay, it's almost 5:30am and I really should get to bed. I need to finish a ton of homework tomorrow... er, today... so I can relax and watch football tomorrow.

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Maybe because the Twilight movies were shot in Portland, it's become a popular YA setting? Although with Google Maps, there's no excuse to fuck up local geography that bad.

LOLOMG, The Blues Brothers car chases. Deliberately inaccurate & ludicrous & HILARIOUS

Hadn't thought of Twilight. Portland is an excellent place to set a book in. There's so much there. Plus: couple hours to the coast, an hour to the mountains. Thick forests everywhere, hills, city, suburbs, small towns, colleges, etc. Lots to choose from. That's why I set most of my stories in the area.

The first novel I wrote last year was set on the Oregon coast and I did a ton of research to get the town right. The coast is really rocky, high cliffs, not a lot of sandy beaches. Most of it's taken up by state parks. I ended up kind of mooshing a couple little towns together to create my own. I didn't want people from Oregon going, has she ever even been here? there's no way that town could exist. It's so much easier to just make up a town in the Midwest somewhere because there's so much space.

Edited 2014-09-06 18:48 (UTC)

Oh yeah, the other thing they got wrong was the weather. The kids kept talking about how muggy and hot it was. Which it can be, but it's not a normal summer thing. We actually don't get a lot of moisture in the summer so it's rarely muggy (we're actually under a fire weather watch/warning--can't remember which--because of lack of rain and heat--in the 90s again). It gets hot but our average highs are in the mid-80s.

When they go to the beach they act like it's 90 degrees out, everyone lounging in their bikinis, etc. Last time I went to the beach it was 100F in Vancouver/Portland, but only 67F at the coast. We were FREEZING, although we still went in the water. It was kind of hard to dry off and warm up after, though, because it was cloudy.

People still go to the beach, but a lot wear hoodies and just hang out. There's only been once in 4 years I've gone where it's been hot enough you wanted to go in the water and it was in the upper 80s, I think. Burnt my feet on the sand.

Haha. That's how I feel when I read SG1 S/J fics set in Minnesota. I've had people drive from CO to his cabin in a day and I'm like - ha. HAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

A friend of mine from St. Cloud totally critiqued Juno because of the comments with regards to highways :)

I do a ridiculous amount of research when I write Stargate fanfic. Probably more than I do on my original works, because everyone knows the details and I want to get them right.

I've read some fics that talk about going up to Jack's cabin and the way they describe it leaves me wondering if they even know where Minnesota is, lol.

I do remember a fic where they drive from CO to the middle of nowhere MN in a day and I'm like... uh, no. I guess I've done way too much driving because little things like that stick out. I know it's about 6 1/2 hours from Chicago to Pittsburgh if you take the toll road (I-80). It's about 5 hours from Chicago to St. Louis on I-55. About 3 1/2 hours from Chicago to the Quad Cities in Iowa on I-80. And I know it's another 3-4 hours to Kirksville, MO which is only like 100 something miles away, but it's all 2 lane blacktop with a 55mph speed limit and you're constantly stuck behind tractors, slowing down to 25mph for little towns, and crap like that. It's a little over 300 miles from Chicago and takes 7 hours to drive to! It's 500 to Pittsburgh. I've had way too many cross-country moves.

Those are the kinds of things I look up when I'm writing so I don't sound like a fricking idiot.

And there are a massive number of fic writers who don't seem to have grasp the fact that Jack owns/owned (2) separate properties in two (2) separate states, a domicile in The Colorado Springs area, which he was saying he was selling along with his truck and his motorcycle as he takes on Landry in chess at the start of Season Nine, and a cabin in Northern Minnesota. This confusion may be in part because both structures appear on camera only briefly, and both have a log sided (as opposed to clapboard) structure. For people who are not visually minded, it might be easy to conflate the two.

And some writers are from England or other Commonwealth countries. With the exception of Canada, most of them are probably not too aware of the relative position of and distance between U.S. states, with the probable exceptions of New York (That's on the Atlantic Coast, right?), California (On the Pacific Coast!), Florida (That's the dangle-y bit on the bottom!), Alaska (That big thing next to Canada and Russia), and Hawaii (In the middle of the Pacific Ocean). Many, many Americans have read Pride and Prejudice. How many can accurately place Hampshire and Derbyshire in relationship to London and each other, let alone keep Devonshire out of the confusion?

Yeah, writer should research the issue, but I am inclined to cut more slack for that kind of error than for writers who offer dialogue like this:

"Hold on, Daniel! We're at the gate. We'll be home in a sec, and Doc'll soon get you sorted!"

or

"Crap! The batteries are out in my torch! Carter, gimme yours!"

"Mac stooped to unlace his trainers . . . "

Well, better than "Sherlock needs a fresh napkin" I guess.

Very true about foreign writers, although if they are serious I would hope they'd at least look at a map. Actually, I probably expect the foreign writers would do more research than our home-grown ones. Americans seem abysmally ignorant of just about everything.

When I was writing Ashes of Tulsa I was going about my merry way when it hit me that I might actually want to look up Tulsa on the map so I knew what the hell I was talking about. Luckily I found some kind of nature park outside the city that was perfect for half of the setting and small towns are plentiful in the Midwest so I just made that up.

Recently I was playing around on Google maps (why oh why do they keep changing it?) and was looking around Colorado Springs. It was interesting to see how long the road from the entrance to Cheyenne Mountain to the highway is. And it's pretty far outside of the main part of town. That's why I never gave details when describing any of that. They would leave the mountain and at some unspecified later time would be driving around town or arrive at home. That way I couldn't screw things up.

But they're probably driving to the cabin to have sex so they'll be driving pretty fast...

ROFL! I get to see a lot of this, especially with anything set in Seattle, or in New Mexico. There's a joke that the TV/film version of Seattle has magic windows in every house -- no matter where you are, you can see either Mount Rainier or the Space Needle from every window in town!!

My all-time favourite is a Tom Clancy novel, The Cardinal of the Kremlin. Clancy is supposed to be the Nit-Picky God of Research, the one who gets every dust speck correctly placed. Well, a chunk of the novel is set in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where I grew up; and I can tell you, he never went any closer to Los Alamos than Albuquerque. Never looked closely at a map, either. He has one character leave the Lab grounds and turn onto the freeway -- which is a neat trick, since it requires teleporting the car a good 25 miles. There were other howlers, but that was the best.

I remember one of the Stargate novels -- one of the supposedly professional publications, mind you! -- has a segment of Daniel doing illegal (and highly destructive) digging in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. I've been to Chaco Canyon (which is a very cool place). Setting aside the violation of just about every ethical component of an archeologist's soul, the sequence also screws up basic geography and climate details. I mean, c'mon. It takes thirty seconds to look up typical weather info online!

When I was writing Reverb in particular, I actually hiked Mount Pilchuck several times after I'd selected it as a location, looking for just the right details for settings. I did end up fudging a couple of minor points, but at least I fudged from a position of knowledge. And I have lovely pictures of the trail, although none of them actually show Mac.

I've only driven through Seattle once which is kind of sad since we only live a few hours south of there. It's very pretty. But, yeah, I noticed that in movies they always have a view of the sound no matter where they are. It sure moves around a lot.

Last week (I think it was) I was writing a little story about a couple of teens that end up sneaking off for a night on the town in Portland. I got all the way up to the point that they arrive in the city on the bus and stopped because I really don't know Portland all that well. I've been there a lot, but only certain areas and I really have no idea what to do at night there.

I decided if I wanted to finish the story I would have my brother give me a tour of all the fun stuff that a teen might do. He doesn't have a car so he has to walk everywhere which works great since the kids are on foot. Now I just have to find a time neither of us is busy.

The geography in the Divergent series may be spot on, but the third book made me want to stab my own eyeballs out. :)

I wish I could unread the ending of Allegiant.

I otherwise liked the book in that I finally got to find out what the fuck was going on with the fence and all that crap even if it made little sense.

There's a fucking war and everyone is starving but they have the time and money to build a giant fence surrounding Chicago? Do you have any idea how long that fence would be? Not to mention all the other cities they have experiments in. *shakes head*

I can't wait to see people's head's explode when Allegiant part 2 releases (can't help but notice the trend of making the last book into a two part movie). I told Brenna to just stop reading at the end of Insurgent so she wouldn't get all upset.

Edited 2014-09-08 01:29 (UTC)

Allegiant made me want to stop writing Cliffton forever. It was like a fucking manual of what not to do in a dystopian series, lol. Also, if you're going to write two different character POVs in first person, it's a good idea if their voices are at least a little different. I had to keep checking the first page of the chapter to remind myself who the fuck was narrating.

Also, if you're going to write two different character POVs in first person, it's a good idea if their voices are at least a little different.

OMG THIS!

I kept having to do the same thing. I was so confused half the time on which character was narrating.

I love stories that are from the pov of both the girl and guy, but this is not how to do it.

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