Locations of the Mind

One of the more challenging things for me as a writer is envisioning the layout of the buildings where my scenes take place. There is a certain cabin in one of my novels that has a kitchen connected to the living room. To one side of the living room is a long hall with two small bedrooms on the left and a large one on the right. It was not my intention to design the cabin this way, but it was what worked for my narrative. As it turns out, I realized later, the layout parallels that of my childhood home with only slight variations. Why is this do you suppose?

I believe it is because the occupant of the cabin is a maternal figure. In my mind, I unwittingly envisioned her home as the house I associate most with my mother and grandmother, even though it's a bit of an odd layout for a rustic cabin set back in the woods. Every location I can clearly imagine has some real world counterpart. Even when I'm reading another writer's work, I picture the scenes happening in some place that's familiar to me. The drawing room where the characters take their tea may be an exact replica of the parlor in the Victorian bed and breakfast where my wife and I spent our honeymoon. The beaten down hotel where the characters spend the night may closely resemble the former hotel that I lived in one summer of my youth. Of course there are variations, just as in dreams the world is never quite the same.

Sometimes I will deliberately think of a real place like where I want the scene to occur and then tweak it to make it my own. For instance, there is a coffee shop that I frequent in an old redbrick building. The building has only one floor to speak of, but right across the alley is another old building that is at least three floors high. The upper floors largely consist of a historic "opera house" theater that was gutted out and subdivided into warehouses some time in the mid-Twentieth Century. For my stories, I have merged these two buildings into one. The fictional building is a tall redbrick structure with a coffee shop below and a theater above. In my fantasy, the theater is nearly restored and almost ready for use.

The real world existence of similar locations allows me to draw on my own experiences to fill in the details of these places as needed in my narrative. I've never seen the real theater in full glory, but I've toured the ruins and visited similar theaters.



Vintage photographs also help to fill in the mental void of how it might have looked. Of course my mind also imposes certain details that were never there in the original. My fictional theater has a grand crystal chandelier that casts innumerable dancing rainbows over the audience when an overhead spotlight shines upon it. This detail was inspired by a certain chandelier that exists at one of my favorite Chinese restaurants. As in dreams, memories merge to create a fantasy.

Some writers may find it more useful to plan ahead by drawing blueprints and maps of imaginary locations, but this has never worked well for me. As I write, I see through the eyes of my character. I am often surprised by the places I find.