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[jennickels]

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.

Comments

[jennickels.livejournal.com]

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.

[thothmes.livejournal.com]

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!"

[lolmac]

"Mac stooped to unlace his trainers . . . "

[thothmes.livejournal.com]

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

[jennickels.livejournal.com]

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.

[syxp.livejournal.com]

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