Can you accurately write fiction set in a place in which you have not lived? People have written about places in which they have never set foot. The arctic, the moon, the past. The question I pose is a privileged one, posed only because I have lived in other places. And have occasionally come across fiction whose setting lacks a certain depth. As if something were missing. The visitor or traveller or tourist brings the outsider’s eye but also misses what the resident sees.
Should I try the experiment of writing about a place I am visiting?
Dunblane, Scotland. A busy pub from which central casting could take many a character, mostly men, all white. The round face of a well-fed man in high-res vest. The lean bespectacled face of the dark-clothed professional or office worker. And there, in a corner, the white-haired man with the shale-sharp nose and blue-grey eyes overhung by unpruned white eyebrows. A face that at rest looks bitter and lonely but that flushes pink in the warmth of his table-mate’s joke, that lifts his crag and shale into the pleasure of laughter.
DEBRA MARTENS 