If I may ask ... do you do that because you love and enjoy doing that ? or in order to achieve total accuracy in locations ?
Howard, Don't look down on yourself for "not writing literature." The vast majority of literary magazines today are shoestring operations that either don't pay at all or pay only in author copies. They tend to give snooty preference to writers with MFAs and to publish fiction that strains pretentiously for effect instead of telling a story naturally and fluidly and sometimes managing to be naturally lyrical. I wasted some time buying sample copies of those magazines back when I was thinking of submitting to them but their content makes me barf. Detective/crime/spy fiction is at least honest fiction that tells a story without acting like it's better than everyone else.
Amen! Writing is hard. Plugging plot holes, making a story work and coming up with characters that work well, is hard so don't ever sell yourself short!
Thanks Actually that is the biggest unexpected challenge I have learned about. It's like a logistical operation keeping track of characters, plot lines, time lines. I've been creating a spreadsheet just for that. And now I am coming to the end I am finding the process of tying things up much harder than writing the body of the book.
Notes are good. I also have family trees for my characters and blank calendars where I note down all the big stuff that happens. I don't always mention the weather but the calendars help me keep track of the seasons and things that have specific timescales to follow.
Sure! I do that first and foremost for inspiration, but it is something that I like to do as well. I find that my favourite ideas come to me while traipsing through places that can seem almost mythical in right weather. I would say that because I am writing fantasy, accuracy in locations isn't at the top of the list of my reasons for doing so (the sense of place in my mind is quite different), but I do feel like it helps with creating more solid ideas using these places as a starting point. I once spent several hours getting lost in a forest I'd not visited before so that I could put myself in the shoes of a character I was writing that was in a similar situation - scary but fun!
I'm the same but slightly different in that I will spend hours on google earth, virtually driving (using streetview) through a certain town or city in order to get a feel for a particular location. Especially if the location is in another country. (I've lost count of the number of times I was just a credit card number away from booking a flight somewhere when I was researching flight times and airports!)
Maybe I'll be found out when I publish .... but I like just making s*** up The google street thing is great though isn't it ? I had a scene in my first draft where a prominent character was driving through Paris and was ambushed along the way. I was able to refer to the shops that the lady companion was looking out the window at And in the final draft there is a shooting outside a hotel in London and I was able to see a convenient laneway a 100 meters down the road. So cool.
