Something useful that writers can do when setting fiction in a real place is to leave. Choosing projects that allow us to write about a place after we’ve moved away from it can provide a liberating pattern and help us to create settings that echo the real yet feel more vibrant and can exist on their own. Maybe this is because distance creates permission. Rather than being directly fed by the spaces in our daily lives, when we see them through the rearview, we rely on memory and create a sort of “greatest hits,” one that best suits the story, less encumbered by reality.
After several years away from Soap Lake, during which time I completed my novel, I had the experience of returning to town for a quick visit. It was a dreary autumn day, midweek, and the downtown was quiet except for a pickup truck at the gas station. When I looked up the vacant sidewalk—the same sidewalk where I used to push my babies in their stroller—I had that jarring feeling of disconnect and mild disappointment. On some subconscious level, I must have been expecting the version of this street that I’d spent years creating to supplant this real one—like the feeling my students must have had when they visited the real Forks, expecting Twilight. The reason for this momentary glitch was clear: I’d spent more time lately in that imagined version than in the real place it was based on…a telling commentary on the escapism of our vocation.
A writer’s dream, of course, is that readers will close their book and look around the room, blinking as they sink back into reality, whether they want to or not. {read}