David Nicholls: Google v old-fashioned legwork - how to research a novel
Writing One Day, Nicholls used places in Edinburgh he knew well. But in researching Us he made use of Street View to zoom around cities he had never visited. Not all authors know their settings at first hand, so what is the secret of creating a convincing sense of place?
Many years ago, while writing my first novel, I took a train to find the house where my fictional character lived. I brought with me a notebook, pen and camera and walked the streets from the station down to the sea, found a spot that felt right and took a great many photographs of quite staggering dullness. In retrospect, the expedition was probably little more than an exercise in procrastination. As with so many first novels, the central character was not unlike my teenage self, the house and town not dissimilar to where I had grown up, and the day might just as usefully have been spent looking at old photographs, or even writing.
Still, it felt important to make the journey, find the address and trace the character’s route from that house to the pier so that I could place pins in a map and know “here’s the house, the takeaway, the pub, it all happened right here”, even if it hadn’t really happened at all. Little of that research found its way on to the page directly. Reading the novel now, through the gaps in my fingers, there is nothing you could call descriptive prose and the fictional address I attributed to the house, 16 Archer Street, sounds horribly made up. But if the expedition was a little foolish and pretentious, it still felt important to go, because wasn’t this what proper writers were meant to do?
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Still, it felt important to make the journey, find the address and trace the character’s route from that house to the pier so that I could place pins in a map and know “here’s the house, the takeaway, the pub, it all happened right here”, even if it hadn’t really happened at all. Little of that research found its way on to the page directly. Reading the novel now, through the gaps in my fingers, there is nothing you could call descriptive prose and the fictional address I attributed to the house, 16 Archer Street, sounds horribly made up. But if the expedition was a little foolish and pretentious, it still felt important to go, because wasn’t this what proper writers were meant to do?
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