Realism and Sense of Place

[alixtii]

thefourthvine has recced nwhepcat's Lilac City, which is of course a classic Faith/Xander well-worth reccing. But there's been some discussion in the comments about the "sense of place" in it and other of nwhepcat's works. In particular, thefourthvine says

[Lilac City has a very tangible sense of place that works really well; it does not seem like Some Random Place That Isn't Sunnydale, the way Cleveland often does in post-canon BtVS stories. Spokane feels real in this story, at least to me[. . .].

lolaraincoat answers:

nwhepcat has the best sense of place of any fan writer I've read, ever, and she uses it to great advantage. I don't know about her Spokane, but she's written some great ones set in NYC, Cleveland and LA that are spot-on.

Now, I haven't written a lot of fic set in Cleveland, in part because I use Angel S5 canon, and a lot of the Cleveland-centric stories out there don't. (Neither does Buffy S8, of course, but that's a rant for another day.) In my Watcher!verse, the Scoobies do stop at Cleveland temporarily before splitting up to travel to the disparate corners of the globe. Faith takes Dawn to the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo there on the last day before Buffy and Dawn leave for Europe, in my "With Love and a Hippo," and much of the plot of that story (insofar as there is any) stems from my initial inability to find the hippopotami on the .pdf map I downloaded. But in general most of my Cleveland-based stories revolve around a totally fictional institution--St. Clare's Academy, a Roman Catholic boarding school specifically set up as a defense against the Hellmouth--which is deliberately generic, drawing both upon my (somewhat liberal) Catholic high school education and upon the boarding genre in film and literature. Cleveland is an urban metropolis with a Hellmouth. What else does one need to know?

Writing Sao Paulo, like Cleveland, did involve some degree of time for research for me; "Facing the Shadows" does drop a few true facts about Sao Paulo here and there, alongside some deliberately fictionalized ones to create a distance between today's city and the near-future one in which it is set. But neither Divine Interventions, in which the latter half of the story takes place in Sao Paulo, nor "Facing the Shadows" which is set entirely there, are about Brazil so much as America. Willow and Kennedy live in the suburbs of Sao Paulo, on the (completely unfounded) assumption that all big cities have to have suburbs no matter what hemisphere they are in. The image isn't really South American at all, but North American and deliberately so: the life Willow and Kennedy are living is one of white middle-class domesticity, an American Dream, and it just has to happen to be in Brazil.

Probably out of all the locations I've written, the one with the most sense of place is London. I lived in the West End for four months during my study abroad, and all the streets and addresses and, yes, pubs that I use are real. The Watcher's Cemetary is in Richmond, which is where Virginia Woolf went to get away from London but has since been pretty much eaten up by the sprawl of the metropolis. The Orange Tree Pub, where Faith and Kennedy get drunk after visiting Willow and Xander's graves in To Live in Hearts, is a real pub (and one I really liked). I have the Watcher offices located at 99 Great Russell Street, down the street from the British Museum, and some of you (looks hard at deliriumdriver) already know what's located there in the actual world. And of course we have the details of the demon attack in Shopping on Oxford Street which draws upon not only the geography of the West End, but its civil engineering as well.

Giles and Dawn's mansion is located in Bath, and is pretty much a total handwave, since I actually doubt it could exist as I wrote it (but don't know enough about Bath to be able to say for sure, having only spent a couple of hours there), since their backyard is apparently large enough to contain, alternatively, a bonfire (in "Bonfire Night") and hundreds of inebriated Slayers (in "After the Ball").

Indeed, the one time I wrote a character with a very specific sense of place in America, my South Jerseyan Slayer Kira Austin, who appears briefly in a scene in my Divine Interventions, it wasn't a very comfortable experience, in part because I could feel myself working too hard. Sure, I put her in a Flyer's Jersey and had a few snide comments about vampires in Camden. Part of the idea was to create a sense of versimilitude, to make the Slayers more real as individuals, especially since many of them were about to die and I had to sell the feeling of loss, but I think she works best if we think of her more as a shout-out to South Jersey than as a living, breathing human being. Of course, in the hands of a subtle enough writer, this needn't be the case: I never got the feeling from Lilac City that it was trying too hard. But neither did I get the sense that it was too tied to a specific location, too deeply enmeshed in a single sense of place; in the end the story was placeless in the same way that we say good stories are timeless.

The L.A. that "Anne" and Angel gave us is very different than the real Los Angeles, I have no doubt, and I'm told that the image of White Suburbia that Sunnydale presents is simply unbelievable as existing in Southern California (even if it reminds me a lot of my own suburban hometown, which was and is very white, although my hometown is lower-class when Sunnydale manages to present itself as upper middle-class, possibly because property values are so low). And of course the Rome, Italy we see in "The Girl in Question" is a combination of the stereotyped, the stylized, and the surreal--a quality I try to capture in my own stories set in Rome, such as "The Ransom of Andrew Wells." But Buffy and Angel operate on the level of the mythic, and the realities of geographical location has never been a driving force in them (or really in any of Whedon's work). In a universe where vampires fall in love with Slayers and nerds build sexbots, the only type of realism to be found is emotional--and it is exactly that aesthetic I try, I think, to reproduce in my own work. I do research to keep from getting things wrong, but that is a very different impulse, I think, than the one to get things right.

Comments

[amyheartssiroc.livejournal.com]

In a universe where vampires fall in love with Slayers and nerds build sexbots, the only type of realism to be found is emotional

That's a very good point.

There's also the difference between realistic and believable--the setting of Rome, to use your example, isn't realistic, but if you write it as it is in the series it will be believable within that context.

[beccaelizabeth]

*nods quite often*

[lokifan]

What an interesting post! I quite often try to put a sense of place in my stories, but I have an advantage in that my original fiction is usually in 'a world not quite our own' and I've yet to tackle any fandom except HP - I know my country.

I do research to keep from getting things wrong, but that is a very different impulse, I think, than the one to get things right. This is so true. And thanks for the Lilac City rec.