Resident Writing

[cos]

A story set in a particular place can show how well the writer knows that place. Sometimes, I think it goes to another level, where you don't just realize the writer knows the place really well, but that you're reading something that could only have been written by someone who had lived there. Even if you know nothing else about the writer, you know they've lived in the place where that story is set.

What comes to mind for me is Zodiac by Neal Stephenson. I had no idea Stephenson had ever lived in Boston when I first read it, but it dawned on during the first chaper. Not in a questioning, "huh, did he ever live here?" way, but as fact: "I didn't realize Neal Stephenson had lived in Boston. Huh."

Have you read something that made you realize the writer had lived in the place where it was set?

Any thoughts on what it is about the writing that can make this so evident?

Comments

[lindseykuper]

I don't think I could be confident in my ability to know that a writer had lived in a place based only on the way they wrote about it. In one of William Gibson's recent books, one of the characters walks down 111th Street in Manhattan, past the Banco Popular that's at the corner of 111th and Broadway. Alex lived on that street last summer, and I've walked by that Banco Popular lots of times. It was remarkable that Gibson would point it out by name, but I don't get the impression that he necessarily lived there; he might have just walked by once, or a few times, and decided to leave it in a book as a kind of Easter egg for the handful of readers who might notice and appreciate it.

What do you think of Zodiac, by the way? I couldn't get into it when I tried to read it a few years ago.

[cos]

When I think of writing that's really familiarly set in a place, it's rarely about name dropping or easter eggs. Mentions of specific places do appear, but they're not the thing that gives the feeling that the writer had to have lived there. Like you say, merely mentioning specific places by name doesn't imply much. Maybe they walked by once and noted a detail, or maybe they asked someone else to tell them about the place in question.