But you do need to make it up in enough detail that your characters aren’t just walking through a vague indeterminate fog. Obviously you can make up a fictional town, or house, or battleship. But accuracy is worthless if it’s not conveyed in good, effective writing, and nobody’s romance-reading experience was ever enhanced by a paraphrase of the Wiki entry on Chatsworth House. You need to know because that means you’ll write with confidence, and also there won’t be snafus of the kind that readers inevitably pick up. This does not mean you should write paragraphs of detailed setting: nobody cares about your research. These things are important because they will give you a sense of place which you can then convey to the reader. There are a quite staggering number of resources online with searchable collections of watercolours and engravings, and loads of old maps available online/as reproductions. If you’re an American writing Tudor England, that’s a long way to travel in time as well as place. Of course, it’s not always feasible to make a trip. Crowmarsh in An Unsuitable Heir is based on Baddesley Clinton because it has a moat, dammit. Peakholme in Think of England is based on Cragside, an incredibly technologically advanced house for its time, and its special phone system and electric wiring were plot crucial.
CHARLES JETTISON BOOT PLUS
I like to steal stately homes from reality because it means I have mental and actual pictures, a ready-made floor plan to adapt, and a general sense of “this is the right age, right sort of place for this area”, plus there’s usually some delightful quirk that triggers a plot idea. The easiest way to get your own sense of place is of course to visit a real location, so you actually understand what the landscape looks like, how much sky there is, how it feels. Seems obvious, but it’s very easy to plonk your characters into Generic Village or Generic Stately Home without really thinking about it beyond “there were some houses” or “there were some rooms”. they’re probably in pretty rough shape.I have taken to soliciting on Twitter for blog post ideas, and today’s is an excellent one from books often have a really strong sense of place-how do you build the setting? (How do you keep yourself from getting lost in blueprints while your characters are wandering London’s back alleys/some fancy manor’s corridors?)įirst things first: if you want the reader to feel a sense of place, you have to have it yourself. "Now, imagine the extreme UV environment on the moon, and the hot and cold cycling. “You know how you leave a flag out over summer, how it starts to fade," Arizona State University scientist Mark Robinson, the principal investigator of LRO’s camera, told in 2011. Still, they’re not likely to look like the well-known images of crisp red, white and blue flags stark against the bottomless black of space.
According to images captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter during different times of day, shadows in the areas where the flags were planted indicate they’re still standing. (NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.)įive decades of exposure to ultraviolet radiation and 500-degree temperature swings probably hasn’t been quite the nurturing environment needed to keep the five flags that remain on the moon in tip top shape.Īpart from the Apollo 11 flag, which is believed to have been lost, the others were planted during Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17.
The shadows of the Apollo flags, taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera show the all but the Apollo 11 flag are still standing.
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