tuh-MAY-toh — tuh-MAH-toh
by Lynn Daniels on Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 8:53 pm
How do you research settings?
In the past, my stories have been set in fictitious places, usually in an area of the country I’m familiar with. It’s easy to make up your own cities and towns; nobody can point at your story and say, “That would never happen in [insert city name here]!”
In my current as-yet-unnamed WIP, I wanted to set a portion of it in a city I’ve never been to, but many people would be familiar with. Problem is I’m stuck on the research. I can ferret out business names and types, I can order literature from their Chamber of Commerce, I can even interview people who live or have visited there. But how do I get the feel of a place? The atmosphere? The nuances of an area you might not consciously notice but always subconsciously recognize?
A great non-writing example occurred for me during an episode of “The West Wing”. One of the main characters was supposed to be flying into Atlanta for a quick airport meeting. The fact that the airport in the episode clearly wasn’t Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport didn’t bother me a bit; I didn’t figure they’d actually come down here to film. But what did bother me was the character’s repeated mispronunciation of one of metro Atlanta’s counties. He was supposed to be talking to somebody from DeKalb County, but he kept pronouncing the “L”, like they do in Illinois (dee-KALB). Here in Atlanta, the “L” is silent, and the county is pronounced dee-KAB. And the character he was meeting with never batted an eye.
If I were interviewing somebody from here, I wouldn’t think to ask about that specific pronunciation, but as an area resident, I immediately registered the error. So my question is how do I avoid those errors? How do you avoid them?
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