to Google Earth to YouTube videos – that it is perfectly possible to write a novel based in a foreign location without ever visiting it.
But it’s much better to visit the place if you can, for a number of reasons. Most obviously, your description will be better, not just because you will see more of the location, but also because you will hear it, smell it and feel it. Secondly, you will have a much better chance to talk to locals and ask them specific, useful questions. But also it will make writing the novel so much more pleasurable, and as I said before, a writer who enjoys what she is writing is more likely to be writing good stuff. When I’m at my desk writing about my detective Magnus in Iceland, I feel that Magnus is there, that I am there, that I or we are moving through the landscape I have visited. I love it.
I have found the ideal time to visit is just after you have started writing your first draft. You probably know where most of the action takes place, and you also know the locations you still need to find for various events in the plot – where to hide a body, perhaps, or where to locate a showdown at the end of the book. Then you go where your characters go.
Researching the country itself is fun. Your senses are alive, your brain buzzing with how you can fit what you see in front of you into the book that you see in your imagination. There are a few things to keep an eye out for.
Note your first impression of a location. How does it feel. Write it down before it is overwhelmed by second impressions.
Look out for anything that moves: people, clouds, birds, vehicles, machinery, patterns of light. Portraying these, especially if you use imaginative verbs for the movement itself, will bring your description to life.
Look for symbols of the place you are visiting. This is my single most effective trick to encourage the reader to feel she is in the place you are describing. Find an obvious landmark or feature and mention it several times. That way, as the reader works her way through the book, she will begin to feel that the location is familiar. This works. Frankly, you don’t even have to describe the landmark; repetition will do it. For Reykjavík, I usually use Mount Esja, which is a large rocky ridge to the north of the capital, or the big smooth concrete church on a hill in the middle.
And always talk to people.
You have read dozens of books, you have scoured the internet, you have spoken to people, you have visited your chosen country, and you have written it all down. You now have a lot of notes. It’s time to organize them. This next step can take a week or two, but is time well spent. I create a monster file on my computer, which I label ‘Research by Subject’, which is broken up into dozens of headings. These might be general categories such as history, farms, superstition or birds. There will be different headings for each location or neighbourhood. And there will be sub-categories for descriptions of bars, restaurants, cafés, parks – anywhere characters might meet. Police, crime, lawyers and police procedures have their own sections. I then go through all the notes I have taken, copying and pasting paragraphs from the original notes into the new file under the relevant category.
This file can become quite large. My Icelandic file is now 420 pages. Even my file for one book, Traitor’s Gate, which was set mostly in Berlin in 1938, is over 200 pages.
Organizing your research notes in this way is extremely helpful when you are actually writing the novel. Before you start on a scene set in a particular location you can quickly read over all your notes about it in one place, and you know exactly where to look when you need to find a detail as you write.
A few chapters of my novel Amnesia take place in Capri in the 1930s and ’40s. Initially, I wrote them without visiting the island. But they didn’t quite make sense to me, so I booked myself on an easyJet flight to Naples and spent two days there with notebook, voice recorder and camera. A couple of important scenes take place at the Villa Fersen, an abandoned mansion perched on the cliffs overlooking the Bay of Naples. It’s hard to describe how I felt as I walked through those musty rooms where my characters had fought and loved, as I looked out over the sparkling blue water they had marvelled at. It was beautiful, yes. I had got some of the details right and some of them wrong in what I had already written. But at that moment I felt a kind of sublime elation, an awareness that my book and my characters were standing there with me, a sense of being at one with the world around me and the world inside my head.
That’s why I write abroad.
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