My family settled in Minnesota when I was seven. You’d think the Laura Ingalls Wilder books set in the prairies around the state would be the perfect fit for a book-loving, history fanatic. I liked them because they were set in the past, but I was obsessed with books that were both set in the past and in Britain
England, the land of my birth where I spent my first five years eating Smarties, going to Infants School, and hearing grownups grumble about Mrs. Thatcher. Then suddenly we moved stateside, first to California, then to Pennsylvania, and finally Minnesota. Life was becoming confusing and frightening, and I felt like an outsider. My parents had emigrated for a number of great reasons, but I wasn’t fitting. It was all to easy to build up the lost home in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne as superior to my everyday existence in snowy St. Paul. How grateful I was to escape to elegant London streets and wild Yorkshire moors in books by Noel Streatfield, Joan Aiken, Nina Bawden, and many more!
I kept up the reading habit, and gradually, my terrain grew. I came to take special pleasure in settings I don’t know at all, like the Singapore of Ovida Yu, the New York City Chinatown of S.J. Rozan, the Bangalore of Harini Nagendra. I got to India for the first time when I was nine, shown above at Golconda Fort--and my mind was now alight to read books about India. I like Elin Hilderbrand’s Nantucket and Alafair Burke’s Long Island. Interestingly enough, as a grown person, I’m eager to read books set in Minnesota.
When I decided to try writing a first novel, I was living in Japan: an hour south of Tokyo, is how I like to describe it, kind of the way people in New Jersey talk about their relationship to New York. Tony and I rented a typical middle-class house without central heat, but with some very interesting traditional features, like a cut out space in the floor meant for fermenting foods; a very hot bath; and tatami matted floors that required you to sleep on a futon and have no furniture with legs. Shoji screens and a lower-level entry area were other features to which I became accustomed and wove into my fictional setting. But I wasn’t home much.
Every day of the two years I lived in Japan felt like adventure. There I was, riding trains with a frieze of funny advertisements in every compartment. I walked streets that smelled of roasting sweet potatoes and mixed towering skyscrapers with tiny old shrines. Chic young ladies with Chanel bags hurried to their office jobs, passing tiny old men bicycling to the temple. Setting was easy to draw when you saw it coming to life in front of you.
When I came home two years later, the memories were rich enough for me to finish the book and write ten more after it. But it wasn’t as easy as in the beginning. I had to keep returning to Japan in order to refill my imagination tank, and I couldn’t afford to do it both financially and because of my responsibilities co-parenting two very young children.
My second series was supposed to be easier for me to manage, yet I set it even farther away, in India. What the hell was I doing?
I had been to India several times in company of my Indian father, but I’d never been a resident settled into a home and neighborhood. Yet I had so many Indian family resources—my friends, my parents and step-parents, and their generously welcoming families still living in India. So I took four years to learn more about India, including studying Hindi and reading a lot; dancing and cooking with my friends was part of it, too. With our children growing up and liking travel, it became easier to make return visits to India, sometimes with family members in tow.
In hindsight, I think I chose to set both my mystery series abroad because that’s the way my imagination comes alive. But it’s not an essential rule for everyone. People may love their homes and be able to explain them better than anyone else. The one wise thing I think a series writer should do is dive deep into one geographic setting, whether a region, town, or neighborhood. Readers do get attached—and the writer gets certain benefits.
The first is a buildup of intellectual capital. If you’ve dragged yourself through one novel, you have done lots of investigations of street names, buildings, and have put characters into cafes and police stations and homes. You will probably write even more richly about these places the second time around—because now you know them.
And that brings up the point; should a series setting be an actual village, town, or city—or is it wise to fictionalize? Do you want to write about a fictional in rural Canada or the actual U.S. city of Chicago?
A lot of writers feel emotionally more free and creative writing about a fictitious place. Obviously, there’s less of a chance of some person thinking they are being described in your novel, or you making an accidental geographic or historical error. However, if Whispering Woods (your fictional village) is entirely being built from your imagination, you probably have to work harder for story ideas, because all of it will be self-generated.
If I choose to write about Chicago, I can send characters into well-known ethnic neighborhoods, watching a basketball game at Northwestern, and eating Latin pastries at an up-and-coming restaurant in River North. Readers will love this! And ideas for plots involving the setting’s key features will bubble like seltzer from the tap.
Brilliant Laura Lippman writes books set in Baltimore and other real towns in Maryland. Laura's said that if an actual Baltimore restaurant is good, she will mention it by name if it seems like a good place to put in a book. Yet she wouldn’t put in a real restaurant that isn’t so good and talk trash about it. Below is a hotel restaurant in India that looks like an old-fashioned Irani place in Bombay, but is actually in Fort Cochin, Kerala.
I mixed reality and fantasy in my work by using actual restaurant’s name for a fictional restaurant in The Widows of Malabar Hill, my first Perveen Mistry novel. I decided to use Yazdani's name on a very good, fictional café of my choice on Bruce Street (now renamed Homi Modi Lane). The real Yazdani’s Bakery and Cafe lies about a block away from Homi Modi Lane. It is an adorable corner store bought by an Irani family in the 1940s, not the 1920s of my book’s setting. Still, Yazdani’s the oldest Irani café in the area with an amazingly charming elderly owner, and I imagine my readers going in might wonder if the white haired, voluble elderly owner once was the 30-something friendly and undeniably macho restaurateur, Firoze, in my book.
There are so many challenges of trying to recreate cities as they were a hundred years ago. It can never be done perfectly; and in my case, nobody’s still living who could make that judgment.
I’ve found Mumbai and Kolkata to be goldmines of gorgeous atmosphere that I can learn about through literature, maps photography, and best of all, in person. I’m working on a train journey for my character, and while I remember a long train journey as a child in India, I’m taking a 5-night trip in Karnataka early next year in a historically furnished train as a way to understand the experience.
Of course, there are those who have sold a lot of books set in countries where they haven’t visited. The late HRF Keating, who lived in Britain, depicted India in his novels, based on his own encounters with Indian people in England, and on his reading. John LeCarre traveled to a lot of countries in his lifetime—but he didn’t go to Panama for The Tailor of Panama and perhaps some other books. LeCarre was aging and at the top of bestseller lists, but instead of traveling to Panama, he sent a researcher. Now, I liked this book—but I imagine it would have been even better if he’d laid his own eyes on the place. When a writer regards a location thinking ‘a city or country is sooo like this’ it means they are working from other writers’ opinions. That puts the writer at risk for trafficking in cliches and ethnic stereotypes—the problem with H.R.F. Keating. He eventually started a second series with a British protagonist. Yet his affection for his first character never ended and resulted in just a few more Inspector Ghote books.
HRF Keating truly loved his characters and milieu. But he was living in a fictional India, because he wrote dozens of books without visiting. He finally traveled only because Air India sent him a free ticket, and his first words upon landing were about his shock at the heat. One hears that India is hot, but there’s a Dry-New-Delhi-in-July hot that’s different from Humid-Kerala-in-February hot. He was feeling that, for the first time.
And physical sensation brings a final question: how comfortable are you in it? It may seem gripping to readers for you to write about a very tough city and give your protagonist a shabby apartment on its meanest street. But if you don’t love a setting and feel comfortable staying there, it could be hard to sustain a series there. Another option is for your protagonist to be a traveler, a Jack Reacher or James Bond type, and have constant changing scenery and people. The reader experiences settings from the eye of a protagonist who doesn’t know it well…which can be an ongoing theme.
I write about Mumbai (named Bombay before independence) because I truly enjoy the people I know in the city. I have real friends here, built up over years of visiting and research. They always tell me the next place to go. I have a fondness and familiarity with a few buildings and neighborhoods that enriches my imagination. I’m writing about an era roughly 100 years ago, another reason I chose this place versus another city in India. Mumbai’s preservation laws will keep the façade of the central train station and its windows the same as before, which is crucial if I want to describe things accurately.
Finally, I feel a level of physical freedom and safety working in Mumbai that’s the same as in my home. I’m glad to come back there, in my books and in person. Traveling so regularly to India is a financial expense that eats up a lot of my book advance.
It’s ironic that the England I thought was perfect heaven in my childhood days now is an antagonistic idea to heroine of my series. How times change! And sometimes I think, maybe one day I will get away from the travels and write a book or even a series set in my neighborhood. But I suspect that I’m hard-wired to venture outside of the familiar, because I’m on the same journey that many readers are.
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