You’ve set your story in the place where you live. You’ve lived there for years. You know all the back roads, and how to get in the spooky abandoned house with overgrown yard and sagging rain gutters. If you forget who the statue is of in front of the court house (because it’s not like you ever cared) you can walk or drive over there and read the plaque. It’s easy.
I didn’t want to put the Amy and Paul adventures in my town. Maybe I was afraid my friends would think they were in the book (which they are, but put ‘em in a different city and they’re not so easy to recognize). Or I’d have to go to the, uh, unsavory parts of town with a clipboard, looking like a geek just ripe for being mugged.
Instead I opted for New Orleans, where I had lived a million years ago. So long ago, in fact, that I have not been there since before Katrina, which was nigh unto ten years ago. Much of my memory is obsolete – in the first draft of A Different Kind of Twin I had Amy’s mom Tracey shopping at Schwegmann’s, until Wikipedia told me it closed in 1999; instead Lazlo uses a souvenir Schwegmann’s bag to haul his digital recorder to the motel confrontation with the guy who kicked Paul’s body into a coma. My other almost-anachronism was Jaeger’s Seafood restaurant, where Uncle Charlie buys dinner for the crooked parish coroner in exchange for the police file on finding Paul’s comatose body on the levee three years earlier. I liked eating there on Esplanade Avenue. Woops – El Interneto told me it had moved out to Metairie in Jefferson Parish.
So, what do you do if you have set your story in some place where you don’t live, or haven’t lived in umpteen years, and is not just down the street?
You fire up Google Earth.
Google Earth allows you to interact with sophisticated satellite imagery to see what a state, a region, a city, a city block, or a particular house looks like from the air. At some point that I don’t understand yet the view goes from aerial to diagonal, which is a lot more useful (unless you’re just counting air conditioning units on a roof). This diagonal or oblique view shows the walls of a building as well as the roof. If you play with the compass donut in the top right corner you can turn the view to see what the other walls look like, too. Does the building have a brick facade but siding on the other three walls? This function of Google Earth lets you find out.
The unique feature I depend on is Google Earth’s history setting. You can change your aerial view from today (or whenever their current pictures were taken) to selected dates in the past, maybe as far back as 15 years ago. Limitations of past technology mean the pictures are less detailed the older they are, but they can be a huge help. The building you’re imagining will be the site of some action in your story: was it an empty field two years ago? A gas station? The history setting can help.
In my research of New Orleans, I can see the aerial view before and during Hurricane Katrina, as well as more recent images. A Different Kind of Twin was set in 2011, and The Beaded Necklace in 2021. I believe it adds to the stories’ verisimilitude that I can describe areas by referring to that widely known event. Believe me, almost ten years on and there are parts of New Orleans and environs that have cleared the debris but not rebuilt. In an upcoming story, The Wedding Fatality, Amy complains to Paul about going to an outlying town. “I was six years old when Katrina hit,” she says, “and half of Slidell still looks like Los Angeles after the 2028 earthquake.”
Another useful capability of Google Earth is the enhanced Street View. Sure, Google Maps has Street View, I think some other applications make use of it as well. But in Google Earth, Street View tells you the (approximate) street address you’re looking at. This has been very helpful to me, one of the tools I use to give a non-existent but realistic street number to a story location (reverse address phone lookups and Parish property tax records are other parts of that research).
I look forward to the day when Google Earth combines the history setting to Street View, too. I am not holding my breath.
A final tool I use a lot in Google Earth is overlays. It is klunky to do it and klunkier to change on the fly, but you can tell Google Earth to show you locations by category. Bars and restaurants. Post offices. Schools. Churches. Currently I’m researching a story that has some action in a part of Orleans Parish with the demographic and crime levels I want – but there ain’t no bars nor restaurants in it! I’ll move the bar a few blocks from where I had intended to put it to make it more realistic. It’s that word again, verisimilitude. Not reality, just the verisimilitude of reality. I’m not going to invent a bar for a story and drop it in a part of town that is entirely residential.
Mapquest has a similar feature to Google Earth’s overlays. It is much easier to use, although sometimes I think they don’t clean out the obsolete information; it can show an out of business restaurant still being there. Mapquest uses buttons just over its map, for lodging, restaurant and bars, travel services, shopping, activities, and local services; each one has ten subdivisions. It is much, much easier to use than Google Earth’s version.
Bing Maps has a neat feature that is easier to control than Google Earth’s equivalent. That is what it calls ‘bird’s eye view,’ a diagonal or oblique aerial view they lease through Pictometry International, which seems to be changing its name to EagleView. Bing lets you choose overhead aerial or bird’s eye. While Google Earth includes some bird’s eye views, I have not learned how to turn it on and off.
In the first draft of Another One Like Us, Amy’s boss at a market research firm was an ex-hacker who, while in high school, got in trouble for hacking a government website. He knows how to access satellite imagery at a higher resolution than the free internet sites and applications provide. But the booger wouldn’t tell me what the URL is! I want to find that website. Maybe even enough to pay a subscription, but let’s not get too crazy here.
I have read that in the pre-internet days writers would camp out at libraries to do their research. Now all aspects of research are a snap. At the Atlanta Writers’ Club I’ve heard that people writing historical fiction have benefited from the internet. For that genre an author has to care about clothes (to me they’re costumes), broughams and landaus, foodstuffs common and unusual, and contemporary political and social conditions. I’m no Max Headroom (I love how that show was set “15 minutes in the future”), but I’m able to invent these things for a story set in 2034. See Amy's previous statement about Slidell. Not so much research to be done, but it helps to be aware of the common joke about an earthquake dropping California into the sea.
Research is important for all writers. Google Earth makes the geographic research much, much easier.
I didn’t want to put the Amy and Paul adventures in my town. Maybe I was afraid my friends would think they were in the book (which they are, but put ‘em in a different city and they’re not so easy to recognize). Or I’d have to go to the, uh, unsavory parts of town with a clipboard, looking like a geek just ripe for being mugged.
Instead I opted for New Orleans, where I had lived a million years ago. So long ago, in fact, that I have not been there since before Katrina, which was nigh unto ten years ago. Much of my memory is obsolete – in the first draft of A Different Kind of Twin I had Amy’s mom Tracey shopping at Schwegmann’s, until Wikipedia told me it closed in 1999; instead Lazlo uses a souvenir Schwegmann’s bag to haul his digital recorder to the motel confrontation with the guy who kicked Paul’s body into a coma. My other almost-anachronism was Jaeger’s Seafood restaurant, where Uncle Charlie buys dinner for the crooked parish coroner in exchange for the police file on finding Paul’s comatose body on the levee three years earlier. I liked eating there on Esplanade Avenue. Woops – El Interneto told me it had moved out to Metairie in Jefferson Parish.
So, what do you do if you have set your story in some place where you don’t live, or haven’t lived in umpteen years, and is not just down the street?
You fire up Google Earth.
Google Earth allows you to interact with sophisticated satellite imagery to see what a state, a region, a city, a city block, or a particular house looks like from the air. At some point that I don’t understand yet the view goes from aerial to diagonal, which is a lot more useful (unless you’re just counting air conditioning units on a roof). This diagonal or oblique view shows the walls of a building as well as the roof. If you play with the compass donut in the top right corner you can turn the view to see what the other walls look like, too. Does the building have a brick facade but siding on the other three walls? This function of Google Earth lets you find out.
The unique feature I depend on is Google Earth’s history setting. You can change your aerial view from today (or whenever their current pictures were taken) to selected dates in the past, maybe as far back as 15 years ago. Limitations of past technology mean the pictures are less detailed the older they are, but they can be a huge help. The building you’re imagining will be the site of some action in your story: was it an empty field two years ago? A gas station? The history setting can help.
In my research of New Orleans, I can see the aerial view before and during Hurricane Katrina, as well as more recent images. A Different Kind of Twin was set in 2011, and The Beaded Necklace in 2021. I believe it adds to the stories’ verisimilitude that I can describe areas by referring to that widely known event. Believe me, almost ten years on and there are parts of New Orleans and environs that have cleared the debris but not rebuilt. In an upcoming story, The Wedding Fatality, Amy complains to Paul about going to an outlying town. “I was six years old when Katrina hit,” she says, “and half of Slidell still looks like Los Angeles after the 2028 earthquake.”
Another useful capability of Google Earth is the enhanced Street View. Sure, Google Maps has Street View, I think some other applications make use of it as well. But in Google Earth, Street View tells you the (approximate) street address you’re looking at. This has been very helpful to me, one of the tools I use to give a non-existent but realistic street number to a story location (reverse address phone lookups and Parish property tax records are other parts of that research).
I look forward to the day when Google Earth combines the history setting to Street View, too. I am not holding my breath.
A final tool I use a lot in Google Earth is overlays. It is klunky to do it and klunkier to change on the fly, but you can tell Google Earth to show you locations by category. Bars and restaurants. Post offices. Schools. Churches. Currently I’m researching a story that has some action in a part of Orleans Parish with the demographic and crime levels I want – but there ain’t no bars nor restaurants in it! I’ll move the bar a few blocks from where I had intended to put it to make it more realistic. It’s that word again, verisimilitude. Not reality, just the verisimilitude of reality. I’m not going to invent a bar for a story and drop it in a part of town that is entirely residential.
Mapquest has a similar feature to Google Earth’s overlays. It is much easier to use, although sometimes I think they don’t clean out the obsolete information; it can show an out of business restaurant still being there. Mapquest uses buttons just over its map, for lodging, restaurant and bars, travel services, shopping, activities, and local services; each one has ten subdivisions. It is much, much easier to use than Google Earth’s version.
Bing Maps has a neat feature that is easier to control than Google Earth’s equivalent. That is what it calls ‘bird’s eye view,’ a diagonal or oblique aerial view they lease through Pictometry International, which seems to be changing its name to EagleView. Bing lets you choose overhead aerial or bird’s eye. While Google Earth includes some bird’s eye views, I have not learned how to turn it on and off.
In the first draft of Another One Like Us, Amy’s boss at a market research firm was an ex-hacker who, while in high school, got in trouble for hacking a government website. He knows how to access satellite imagery at a higher resolution than the free internet sites and applications provide. But the booger wouldn’t tell me what the URL is! I want to find that website. Maybe even enough to pay a subscription, but let’s not get too crazy here.
I have read that in the pre-internet days writers would camp out at libraries to do their research. Now all aspects of research are a snap. At the Atlanta Writers’ Club I’ve heard that people writing historical fiction have benefited from the internet. For that genre an author has to care about clothes (to me they’re costumes), broughams and landaus, foodstuffs common and unusual, and contemporary political and social conditions. I’m no Max Headroom (I love how that show was set “15 minutes in the future”), but I’m able to invent these things for a story set in 2034. See Amy's previous statement about Slidell. Not so much research to be done, but it helps to be aware of the common joke about an earthquake dropping California into the sea.
Research is important for all writers. Google Earth makes the geographic research much, much easier.