Conjuring Trick

Authenticity and the texture of place in the novel

Recently, I found a corner of the Internet dedicated to pointing out all the inaccuracies in a bestselling novel—specifically, inaccuracies in its setting. Although its errors might not offend most readers, to the locals who lived in the area where the novel happens, they were laughable. A seven-hour car trip between two towns was travelled in two. In a historic flashback, no mention is made of a disastrous tropical storm that swept the state that year. To the people of that land, who work and live there, who know its history, the novel fell flat. Maybe not in entirety—there may be other details that delight the reader with their familiarity—but these errors meant that, for the local reader, parts of the story fail to ring true.

I can’t help but compare those complaints with my recent re-read: Huck Finn. This time through, I’ve been struck by the force and vividness of his descriptions. I don’t think of Mark Twain as a beautiful writer—funny, yes, insightful, yes, but not beautiful. And yet, page after page, I’m awestruck by the precise and detail-packed passages that describe Huck and Jim’s journey down the Mississippi. Like this:

“Pretty soon it darkened up and begun to thunder and lighten; so the birds was right about it. Directly it begun to rain, and it rained like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so. It was one of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest—fst! it was as bright as glory and you’d have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about, away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you’d hear the thunder let go with an awful crash and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs, where it’s long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know.”

And this:

“When the first streak of day begun to show, we tied up to a towhead in a big bend on the Illinois side, and hacked of cotton-wood branches with the hatchet and covered up the raft with them so she looked like there had been a cave-in in the bank here. A tow-head is a sand-bar that has cotton-woods on it as thick as harrow-teeth.”

And this:

“Every night we passed towns, some of them away up on black hillsides, nothing but just a shiny bed of lights, not a house you could see. The fifth night we passed St. Louis, and it was like the whole world lit up. In St. Petersburg they used to say there was twenty or thirty thousand people in St. Louis, but I never believed it till I see that wonderful spread of lights at two o’clock that still night. There warn’t a sound there; everybody was asleep.”

These passages, and others in the novel, delight me because they smell and sound and feel true. But also because they feel familiar. I was born in St. Louis, and although I only lived there until I was four, I have family in the area and I’ve been back often. I know what the Mississippi smells like, its color and rhythm in full seasons and dry ones, how it looks twisting between Missouri and Illinois. I drive through Hannibal every time I drive to my parent’s house in Iowa, every time I leave Iowa for Tennessee, every time my family visits my Grampa in St. Louis. (In fact, there’s a Casey’s in Hannibal where my dad once broke up a catfight between two female employees by using his “stern parent voice.” That may sound like a Mark Twain anecdote, but it’s true.)

So as Mark Twain recounts Huck’s journey downriver, the descriptions of willows and sandbanks and birdcalls delight me, half because they’re well-written and half because the land he describes belongs to me too. And isn’t this the work of the writer? To put into words his own experience so that others can read and resonate with it, feeling their own thoughts and memories articulated? Art aims to capture our shared human emotions through the particulars of our individual stories.

So what happens when you fudge the particulars? First, you fail to do justice to the place and people you have chosen to describe. If I choose to write a novel set in L.A. and I base my descriptions on a few Google searches, the biggest problem isn’t that my portrayal of L.A. will yield cliches and caricatures. It’s that I didn’t think L.A. was a place truly worth knowing, neither the land nor the people. If I thought so, I would call up people from L.A. and say, “Tell me about your world.” I’d read memoirs and history books. And I’d visit, taking copious notes on every palm tree and Pilates studio. “Write what you know,” is the old adage. Perhaps we could rephrase it: “Write what you love.” Because every word written about a place that the author doesn’t truly love changes their setting from a living description to the cardboard backdrop that defines the spirit of “well, I had to set it somewhere and I guess it might as well be New York—or London—or Morocco” that dominates Hollywood films set in some “vaguely urban place” or “vaguely African place” or “vaguely Mediterranean place.” In the same way, we can turn people into stock characters, human emotion into cheesy dialogue, and art into algorithmic tropes when we forget that great art begins with an honest and accurate representation of real life.

Now, all writers fudge the details somewhere, because we’re not omniscient. (Hard to believe, I know.) But all readers know how it feels to pick up a book rich with the “texture of life”, as Ray Bradbury called it, and find ourselves transported to another place, real or fantastical. That living texture comes from an author’s love of place. (Even in fantasy—how many of our favorite fantasy novels are really just love letters to England?)

So how do you learn to write about the texture of a place? You pay attention. You fall in love with land, and with cities, and with the middle-of-nowhere towns along the Interstate. You learn how to surrender to every atmosphere. Speaking of a friend in Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis wrote:

“I learned from him that we should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was offering itself at the moment; in a squalid town to seek out those very places where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on a dismal day to find the most dismal and dripping wood, on a windy day to seek the windiest ridge. There was no Betjemannic irony about it; only a serious, yet gleeful, determination to rub one’s nose in the very quiddity of each thing, to rejoice in its being (so magnificently) what it was.”

All that it means to be a writer is this: the serious and gleeful determination to rub your nose in the quiddity of everything, including place.

So you pay attention, and like all experience, you store away your memories of place, so that when the time comes to tell a story, you do not need to turn to the Internet to construct a setting. Rather, you will have a multitude of places at your fingertips, ready to be whipped out and displayed like a magician’s conjuring trick, only instead of silk scarves hidden in your sleeves, you carry willow-trees and cornfields and cicadas and streetlights and coffee shops and all the glorious, individual particulars of some place that you have truly known, because you have truly loved. Love begets art, which rekindles love in its onlookers, inspired to turn to their own lives and see them anew. A well-written setting does not merely convince a reader of its own accuracy; it has, rather, a more powerful argument—it convinces him that it is good to love his home.

P. S. Mark Twain agreed with me that inaccurate description can be a literary shortcoming. In fact, he wrote a whole essay on such problems in the work of James Fenimore Cooper. You can read it here.