Sense of Place
By Jeff Mariotte
I tend to be drawn to fiction with a highly developed sense of place. I want to read authors who can write convincingly about a certain locale or locales, and probably as a result tend to favor those with strong regional associations. Stephen King on Maine (and more recently, John Connolly on coastal Maine). James Lee Burke on southern Louisiana and Montana. Joe Lansdale on east Texas. Robert B. Parker on Boston. Pat Conroy on the Carolina low country. Wallace Stegner on the intermountain West and the plains of Saskatchewan.
Some places have almost too many people writing about them. Los Angeles? Joseph Wambaugh, Michael Connelly, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, James Ellroy…that’s just crime writers, and it’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I’ve done my share of L.A. fiction too—hard to avoid when you write tie-in fiction for the Angel TV series—but it’s not a location I’d choose on my own.
Without my conscious participation, my region seems to have chosen me. My first original novel, small press classic The Slab, was set in California’s Imperial Valley and around the Salton Sea, a few miles north of the Mexican border. My second, Witch Season: Summer, first book in a teen horror quartet, took place mostly in San Diego. Also, you might note, a few miles north of the border. My occasional comic book series Desperadoes usually takes place in border states, sometimes right on the line. My forthcoming supernatural thriller Missing White Girl is the most explicitly border-centric one yet, set on both sides of the border and involving border issues. I seem to have become a borderlands writer, specializing in that separate nation that straddles the two recognized by law and convention and a line on the map. And that’s just fine with me.
Last month I went to the World Fantasy Convention in Austin, and I spent some extra time in Texas, mostly around the border city of El Paso, doing on-site research for the next one I plan to write. Part of writing convincingly about a place can be done by reading about it, but I think part of it has to be done by being there, walking around, looking and tasting and smelling it. I don’t know that part of the world as intimately as I do the Arizona setting of Missing White Girl or the California desert of The Slab, so it is even more important that I spend enough time out there to get it right.
Here are some of the things I did there:
I went to the Hueco Tanks State Historic Site and walked, crawled, and scrambled on rocks where people have lived, off and on, for twelve thousand years, leaving marks—pictographs, names and dates, graffiti—the entire time. Hueco Tanks is a sacred spot to many, and being there it’s easy to see why. Reading about it in books or online doesn’t prepare you for the reality.
I tried to make it through El Paso the first night, headed for Van Horn, but after hiking at Hueco Tanks during the day fatigue caught up with me sooner than I had hoped, so I stopped at the tiny town of Fort Hancock. This turned out to be a lucky break. The book I plan to write takes place in a small Texas town that has seen boom and bust, and from afar I had expected to model the fictional town, physically, on Van Horn. But I wanted it to be on the Rio Grande, too, which Van Horn isn’t. Fort Hancock, though, is, and this accidental stop became the high point of the trip, giving me the model I needed.
I drove to the port of entry at Fort Hancock—the crossing into Mexico—and through it, across a narrow bridge over the thin, flat brown ribbon of the Rio Grande. Then, before reaching the Mexican port of entry, I turned around and came back. This book doesn’t take place in Mexico, I knew. But I needed to see what the river looked like there. The ICE agents on the US side were surprised that I had spent such a brief time on the other side, but they were friendly and one was a horror fan and I told them about, and showed off the cover of, Missing White Girl, and may have sold a copy or two when it comes out. And maybe my future books, as well—if I get the border stuff right.
I buzzed through Van Horn in a hurry, looking at it only long enough to confirm to myself that I didn’t need it anymore. Too far from the river, physical surroundings all wrong, and Fort Hancock works better on every level. This was a crucial piece of information, and if I had tried to write the book from my ranch without going to the actual location, I’d never have known it.
Then it was across west Texas, a night in the charming Hill Country town of Fredericksburg, and on to Austin. Austin is a big city that felt, for the most part, like other big cities, its much-vaunted “funkiness” aside. I fought traffic to get to the funky part of town, then, disappointed, fought it again to get back to the WFC. Once again, I had to see it for myself.
On the return trip I didn’t stop in Fort Hancock (although I did spend a night in Fort Stockton, where there are dozens of restaurants, nearly all of which are closed at dinnertime on Sunday). But I stopped across the highway from Fort Hancock, where I took a dirt road as far as I could until the NO TRESPASSING signs stopped me, and discovered a wonderland of grassy sand dunes that I’d never have known about without experiencing them for myself.
Finally I was back in El Paso, where the action in the book that doesn’t take place in my fictionalized version of Fort Hancock occurs. El Paso, in the novel, will not be fictionalized, so I needed to drive and walk its streets and neighborhoods, making notes of particular locations that might enter into the story. I got to visit the Rio Grande again, this time securely inside the border and so not surrounded by fence. I saw Good Coffee Mexican Food and Bogart’s Lounge and the big, genuinely funky houses on the hills west of downtown and the pawn shop where the life-size Elvis statue is flanked by the Blues Brothers (but the music coming from the speakers was The King, baby, all the way). These sights may or may not make it into the novel—hell, the novel may or may not be written, that’s how this business goes. But they’ll inform it, and when I write about El Paso it’ll be with the knowledge of someone who has taken the city into his lungs, who had blisters on his feet from hiking around town, who went up Mt. Cristo Rey and bought an éclair at the Sunland Park Mall. I’ll probably need another trip back before the book is done, but at least I’m ready to start.
Better writers than I have written novels set on Mars, in ancient Greece, in Amber and Newhon and Dune. I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’ve written books that take place in the outer spaces of both the Star Trek and Andromeda universes, in Joss Whedon’s Sunnydale and in Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age and in Barrow, Alaska in midwinter, in addition to those set in Las Vegas and San Francisco and L.A. and other places I know well. I’m only saying that I prefer to write about the places I know, and of those places my preference narrows still more. It’s the border country that I know the best and love the most, and about which I just might have something to say that’s worth saying.
I didn’t choose it. It chose me, and now I’m tramping all over it, marking my territory. Has your region chosen you?
If not, maybe it’s time to get in the car and drive until you’re tired, just to see where you’ve been brought.
