Unlocking Your Novel's True Potential: The Power of Place in Writing
I’m back in Singapore.
It’s amazing how this place on the other side of the world I knew has become a third home.
As the city scrolled by on the bus ride back to my in-laws’s flat, I started thinking about writing.
Specifically: does geography affect how I write?
Hard to say. These days with (virtually) always on internet and 24/7 access to most things we’d want or need, where you are has less influence on how we think.
The Shrinking World of the Digital Age
This wasn’t always the case. The first time I went to Japan in 2007, I remember feeling completely distant from my home country.
Everything looked and sounded different. Signs and machines sang jingles. I had no idea how to get around without a map. Every chance encounter with a local was an adventure; one that often ended in failure. But it made me bolder.
The Connection Between Place and Prose
Fast forward a decade and a half, that’s no longer the case.
Google maps and AI translations have cleared the fog of confusion from most locations.
From Brunei to Ulaanbaatar, to the frozen Antarctic sheet in the south, few places are uncharted.
What does have to do with writing?
Not much, but stay with me.
Writing is discovery of the mind.
Different locations prompt altered forms of exploration. It’s through culture, history, language, food and family that we tease out our feelings about various subjects and sticking points.
Take my current novel project, “Gates of Okinawa”.
Today marks day 70 of the project. You read right. That’s ten weeks (unbroken) working on this book—im currently 40 chapters into the first edit.
All this time, I’ve been wracking my mind to make it fit into the supernatural horror category..
The Epiphany: Embracing Authenticity
But then it hit me like a monkey sticking a landing from an adjacent tree: do I even need to change it?
So far, it reads like an adventure story. A simple, fun read, that could easily be adapted to any movie or phone screen. Isn’t that what I set out to write at the start back when I planned it to be a “bestseller”? Yes.
I wasn’t going for King level horror. And when I stepped into the familiarity of my wife’s childhood bedroom, the stasis of it stopped me.
I thought: Some things are perfect the way they are. What’s required is acceptance. Geographic perspective provides that.
So does location affect your writing?
It can if you put down your screen and allow it to.
I’m still not sure what I’ll end up doing with Gates of Okinawa, but I plan on doing less slashing and hacking to make it fit it what I think it should be. What it is will emerge as long as I keep it in sight.
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