A Question

[awanderingbard]

I have a question for my fellow writers: when your characters enter a location that's not established (a place you've seen in a show or film) do you create the location, or is the location already there when they arrive?

Because when I'm world-building, the location is there and I don't have to think about what it looks like because it looks like what it is. In other words, with something like Molly's flat, I don't go 'and I'll put the couch here and the TV here', it's already there when I picture it. Even with somewhere like a hospital room, which my characters are in a lot, in each case it's a different layout without my consciously making it so. I also find it really hard, because the locations are so fixed, to move something around that's not working for a scene. For example, if my characters need to move to the left to make the scene work but I've got in my mind that that object is on the right, I get very distressed at having to move it. Even if I haven't written anything about where it is.

So, how do you build worlds?

Somewhat related to this:



I think this is my favourite room I've made so far. The library at the Holmes Ancestral Home. Though I still need to figure out how the lights work. The glare on the door is annoying.

Comments

[awanderingbard.livejournal.com]

I think that happens to a lot of people when they're reading. I know it happens with characters, too. I have very strong images of characters and then their hair colour gets mentioned and I have to rearrange my whole portrait of them.

I've been looking at a lot of London housing lately, for stories, and there are a lot of places that have 'void' areas. They are mostly houses converted to flats, where new walls were built and areas become closed off. I suppose 221 could work if there were some void areas in it. Otherwise it is a non-rectangular flat in a rectangular building.

[aelfgyfu_mead]

I didn't know that about void spaces. I suppose 221 is old enough to have been converted like that--surely Speedy's wasn't always there!

Do you watch White Collar? Sometime in the third season, I think it was, when we thought we all knew the layout of Neal's little apartment, it suddenly developed that there was this huge area we'd never seen before. It was so unexpected that I just started laughing. copperbadge memorably wrote (here), under Sam's Three Things:
2. Neal's bathroom is not a bathroom, it's a WHOLE NOTHER HALF OF HIS APARTMENT. (Sorry, I am obsessed with his apartment, because for a while there he had an invisible bathroom.) Apparently, the most common recurring dream among New Yorkers involves opening a closet door and finding a whole new suite of rooms. With Neal, this is actually the case. I bet his wardrobe has a secret entrance to Narnia at the back.


Bear in mind that I have an obsession with figuring out where the bathrooms are in fictional places, so I had also been watching WC very carefully to find the bathroom!

[awanderingbard.livejournal.com]

I don't watch White Collar, but that is awesome!

I get really anal about people living in places that don't suit them--too clean or too modern or too big. One thing I love about 221b on Sherlock is how messy it is all the time. I like that they've thought about how it would really look and not gone the TV route of having it look like everyone has a personal maid.