Writing fiction, doing research for all kinds of things.
Short post today because I’m in the zone, but once upon a time, if you were a writer, you’d have to actually go to places to experience them. While that’s a great idea for life purposes and potential tax write-offs, it’s easy to get complacent with just how miraculous technology can be when your attention directed and targeted.
Take today; I saw a trailer for a reboot of the horror movie, Wrong Turn. For those of you who aren’t into slasher horror, (and I’m not either, really,) it’s a film with a simple premise: the protagonists take a wrong turn, get lost in the woods, and then are picked off one-by-one by some inbred cannibal creeps.
I’ve no idea what the reboot is, but that’s the spoiler alert for a 21 year old film.
Anyway, like most horror films, it’s not exactly brilliant. A cult classic, sure, but we’re not ranking it up there with The Godfather and Star Wars.
Now… I write pulp novels on a pen name. Again, not particularly high-brow literature, but I figure, having seen the trailer, “I could use this as an idea…”
It turns out though that I don’t really know enough about rural America to pull this sort of thing off. Of course, I can go full pulp writer and just wing it completely, but it’s better to have some idea what you’re talking about because you need to transfer that to your reader. You can be slightly off, but if you’re completely wrong, then you lose the reader.
Examples that come to mind include writing that someone is wearing a coat in Arizona in the summer or describing someone as having a “Posh Scouse Accent.”
Anyway, far from having to go and book my flight to Nowhere, Tennessee, I hop onto Discord and ask some of my friends about places that you might set this small town horror.
They give me the advice, narrowing it down to certain areas, and then Google Maps does the rest. Not everyone works visually in this way, but I’m dropping the little Orange Street View Man down and these stories are practically writing themselves.
Not much more to add really, just that it takes a little work to do some research, and using a ton of technology that’s literally at your fingertips, you have the potential to do things generations of writers couldn’t ever dream of.