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f it s not in your own city be sure to check out his bio at the end of the post establishing setting is one of my favourite aspects of writing whether itâ s the world building involved in writing a secondary world or trying to capture the soul of an existing city setting draws the reader into the story creates its mood and when done well helps that story appear real normally i write stories set in or near my home or i just make up a city but my third novel too far gone needed be set in a city where i didnâ t live in this case edmonton alberta canada thereâ s lots of options to do remote research google street view travel guides following twitter feeds from that city or talking to friends or family who live there and i did do some of that but it also didnâ t feel like enough while it might not be an option for everyone i love to travel where the book is going to be set and to walk the ground myself you not only discover things you otherwise might not have but you get the sights sounds and smells down in a way that is otherwise impossible you also get to put your own stamp on them instead of regurgitating other peopleâ s ideas of the city iâ d previously visited edmonton on book tour and attended its convention pure spec a couple of times i knew by that time i wanted to bring the series to edmonton so i had a chance to do some preliminary scouting before my big official research trip iâ m glad things worked out that way as it gave me a plan for the full trip this is hard for me to admit especially as an avowed pantser but if youâ re going to travel for a research trip you need to have a plan otherwise youâ ll just be wasting time and money and generally speaking writers donâ t have a surplus of either know where you want to goâ and how to get there if youâ re counting on a friend to show you around make sure theyâ ll be available if you want to speak to experts or locals that arenâ t your friends and family make an appointment before i left for my trip i tried to think about a high concept for the story and for my characters where would they be at home where would they be fish out of water pretty much every city has a slogan which can serve as a starting point for a high concept edmontonâ s slogan was â œcity of championsâ entirely fitting for a story where a last stand against a three hundred foot tall giant intent on consuming the world in flames is taking place i was finishing up the first draft of too far gone at the time of my trip so i didnâ t have everything locked but i did know most of what i needed for the story and found some answers to a few plot quandaries while i was there by talking to locals visiting the edmonton archives and walking the streets if you havenâ t sorted out your plot before you travel look for locations that seem to have their own story or character locations that have action or conflict built in or tie into the themes and threats of your story is it scary to be downtown at night is your story about corruption in the public eye politicians and corruption often go hand in hand check out city hall writing about a vampire youâ re probably going to need a cemetery a plot can be built from research as easily as good research can bring a plot to life reading a bit about the history of a place will inform you why it is the way it is now you donâ t need to list every event that ever happened there down to the day month and year how much detail is too much you donâ t need to catalog every neighbourhood or landmark to bring your city to life a vibrant setting isnâ t about ticking off the top ten tourist sights on travel guide just sticking the empire state building in your book doesnâ t mean youâ re writing new york and neither does mentioning the oilers mean youâ re capturing edmonton it is tempting to want to include everything my initial draft had a lot more of alberta than just edmonton but it was too much the character conflicts were in edmonton and they were essential the side trips to the alberta badlands and steffanson house an early icelandic settlement in alberta and a provincial heritage site proved just thatâ side trips they were unnecessary diversions to the story no matter how cool they were to me rather than allowing them to slow down the book i had to cut the scenes but hey thereâ s always more stories to write and that research is already done if youâ re a pantser like me and you only start your research into after you have your story you only look for what you need to know but you wonâ t necessarily find the things you didnâ t know you needed which is why i like taking the travel option if youâ re doing your research before you think of your story thereâ s a different risk research is seductive and it feels like youâ re doing work but the real work of a writer is actually writing the book to maximize my trip i decided to set the book during the time of my stay if it was happening in edmonton in the third week of august 2014 it was happening in the background of the book would i have thought of including the fringe festival as background or the perseid meteor shower otherwise probably not having the heroâ s fight with a fire giant looming when the city was under the grips of a heatwave may have been out of my control but i think it really worked while i was in edmonton i kept a detailed journal of everything i did saw and especially what was happening with the weather relevant when your hero can control the weather but is trying to rem ain incognito i bought the local newspaper every day and saved clippings i thought were relevant to characters or plot to seed in as background not all of this made it into the text of course but it definitely informed my writing i took tons of photos for reference and used them as a slideshow while i wrote i framed big battle scenes in areas i thought would be dynamic not only visually but interesting locales so that even readers that didnâ t know the city would care about what was happening i kept maps fantasy loves maps even if your story is set in a real city and there wonâ t be a map of it at the beginning of your book maps can be useful i plotted out a map of the destruction cough cough sorry edmonton as it was occurring to keep things consistent that was my experience writing in a city not my own iâ ll definitely try it again but now i just hope edmonton will welcome me back after they see what iâ ve done to the place originally from morden manitoba chadwick ginther was fascinated by norse mythology at an early age today he spins sagas of his own set in the wild spaces of canadaâ s western wilderness where surely monsters must exist chadwick is a contributor to quill quire the winnipeg review and prairie books now his short fiction hasâ appeared recently in on spec â beast within 4 gears growls andâ the exile book of new canadian noir his first two novels thunder road and tombstone blues were nominated for the prix aurora award continue reading guest post itâ s supposed to hurt writing violence that feels real 10 september 2015 by christie in guest post writing by mike buckley a few years ago a student of mine asked me to read a novel that she had just finished â i agreed â what i knew about my student at the time deidre is her name was that she was a librarian who specialized in collections from the late eighteen hundreds she struck me as smart a bit quiet given to irony and a love for writing about florence her novel blew my mind right out of my ears it didnâ t fit with what i knew of deidre at all â it was a cold tactile detective work that took place between amsterdam and thatcherâ s london and followed a frighteningly badass schlub as he tracked down an art thief â thatâ s not the part that struck me of course it was well executed which knowing deirdre i had expected â but there was a scene in which the detective is cornered near a river and attacked by some corrupt cops â it was the most honest depiction of violence i had ever encountered â just reading it was very much like getting beat up â it held me and pushed me away in the way that very authentic writing can and when i finally could put it down i called deirdre who the hell are you anyway i asked her deirdre laughed it off â it turned out that she was a lifelong martial artist and a year after i read the book she brought a sword to a science fiction writing class that i was teaching and showed us all the right way to quickly separate a person from their guts the lesson that stuck with me though is that writing about violence is like writing about anything itâ s all context â sometimes you need characters to have a quick dust up or you need to toss a side character through a saloon window â sometimes you need the violence youâ re writing about to be quick and throwaway but other times youâ ll want to tell the truth i remember years and years ago i was reading an interview with salman rushdie and he was talking about the difficulty of writing sex scenes â i was a teenager at the time and completely did not get it â whatâ s so hard about writing sex scenes â theyâ re all over the place from movies to billboards â but as i grew as a writer i realized that was exactly the problem â when writing about sex youâ re not just writing about something that completely surrounds us and most of what is out there is polished and unrealistic and sometimes humiliating but youâ re engaging in a conversation thatâ s been going on forever â so the problem with writing sex scenes is to tell the truth with them to capture the feeling of the whole thing which is exactly the problem when writing about violence â â itâ s surrounded by clichã s â we already imagine a square jawed cowboy cocking an arm back and knocking out a black hat with a single easy punch â the black hat is unconscious for just long enough for the hero to kiss the heroine then ride away on a horse and when the black hat wakes up he displays no neurological symptoms of the head trauma heâ s just received â that sort of violence is something that we can pretty easily write thatâ s because it isnâ t realistic and it isnâ t meant to be â when you write a bar brawl in such clichã d terms youâ re not putting violence on the page youâ re playing ping pong with familiar signifiers the punch the fall the kiss the moral victory all fine and good but not honest that was the realization i had reading deirdreâ s novel â the fight scene made me feel overall bad for the detective character as he was desperately stomping toes and biting fingers as the three crooked cops pummeled him and the scene scared me and made me feel my mortality a little more closely â that character got his ass kicked in that scene â legitimately â not the way it happens in chandler and not the way it happens to bruce willis in so many of the movies he is in â deirdreâ s detective lost a fight and it almost cost him his life since reading that scene and seeking out others iâ ve put a lot of thought into effective ways to write about violence â itâ s a huge dilemma â depictions of violence are often types of arguments that are rooted to the needs of a historical cultural moment â consider the 2006 film 300 â it seems clear to me that that film was very much about the united states a nation that was at war on multiple fronts â it was about our desire to sing songs about the nobility of war our desire to put a villain like xerxes in front of a band of spartans that for all of the dialogue we hear from them might as well be marine recon â but real violence of course is an older type of argument â iâ ve spent much of my life studying different types of it â iâ ve wrestled played judo boxed kickboxed and practiced krav maga and brazilian jui jitsu it is unexpected but true that this type of â œviolenceâ can be deceptive â boxing kickboxing jui jitsuâ these martial arts are so immersive as to actually be worldviews â what i mean is that boxers train for a very narrow expression of the larger world of violence â they fight in a ring the ropes of which they bounce off of or slide away from they fight other boxers who throw only punches and only punches from the tradition of western boxing â when a boxer gets in a street fight he boxes â itâ s the same for a jui jitsu practitioner â the craft of this particular combat sports shapes the way the people who practice them see conflict the way they conceptualize their response to it and in every sense ends up becoming both their strength and their weakness â krav maga might be an exception to this but is definitely a subject for another post deirdre knew this â although she practiced tai chi she picked up a knowledge of street fighting from somewhere i have no idea where it came from and it scares me a little and as she wrote the scene in which the detective meets baddies down by the river she knew that it wouldnâ t be a boxing match or a sparring session â my own very limited knowledge of street fighting comes from the usual places â school and bars mostly â i know that street fights are fast and frantic â theyâ re more energy than technique â theyâ re a contained riot but back to writing â when weâ re writing a short story or a novel whether itâ s set on a spaceship or sidewalk how can we write violent scenes that feel real â the key is to stay away from easy â stay away from heroic â if it feels expected or like youâ ve seen it before stay away from it when you have a violent scene to write stay away from the language of sport â donâ t let your characters jab or hook unless theyâ re actually boxing â stay away from easy ways of telling the reader how tough your character is donâ t let her feel teeth crack or nosebones shatter under her punches â instead root the way you describe violence to your characterâ s frame of mind â maybe theyâ re scared which they probably would be itâ s pretty much the definition of rationality to not want to be punched by someone and so instead of jabbing and cracking teeth they panic thrusting blindly with their hands not noticing until their antagonist falls to their knees that they have accidentally poked him in the eye â have your character shout or throw something â have them bite the antagonistâ s nose or grab their genitals all in total panic or violent glee the guiding rule for writing convincing violence should be this it is never beautiful or elegant or transcendent â violent sport might be but thatâ s different â ronda rouseyâ s grappling is certainly beautiful but it isnâ t violence itâ s violent sport â its restrictionsâ read here as rulesâ make the beauty possible in the same way that the structure of a sonnet makes the beauty of that form possible â her grappling is to violence what sonnets are to words â â when your character is in a rough spot achieving the feel of desperation of high stakes will make the violence feel real â and then youâ ll have what any writer wants your readers will buy into the reality of what theyâ re reading the fight scene in deirdreâ s novel ends i think with the m...