Feature: Geography: How to Get It Right When You've Never Been There
Not many people have travelled really extensively, so when it comes to writing a story set in a specific area, especially in a country foreign to you, it's almost certain you've never visited it. Let's get a bit of help from our Sentinel friends.
If the story is set in a fictitious city (like Cascade or Gotham City) or country, or even a fictitious not-specified part of a particular country, that's fine; as long as you keep your fictitious geography consistent you can make it up. Although someone has drawn a map of Gotham City; so it's a good idea to check for something like that before you start.
Even if it is a specified part of a country, you can still waffle, make things very general; if your characters are camping in a forest, it's easy to create a clearing for their tent.
After they left the truck, Jim and Blair hiked through the trees in a northerly direction, and after almost an hour reached the clearing where they always camped.
Nobody is going to know exactly where they left the truck, or now fast they were walking, or even if their direction was exactly north or deviated by a degree or two east or west - but the reader gets the general picture. Nobody is going to say, "There isn't a clearing like that there!"
With that kind of story, the only thing you have to be sure of is the general terrain; if it's mountainous, if it's likely to be forested, etc.
The problem arises when you try for specifics and actually name real places. That's when someone who lives in, or even just knows, the area can get back to you, justifiably pointing out (for example) that nobody could possibly make the journey your characters just did in one day - it would need at least four. I've actually seen that in a story. A journey, completed in one day, that - from my personal knowledge of the route - I would say couldn't be done in less than three and a half to four days.
At one time, the obvious thing to do would be to consult an atlas (which is what the writer of the above-mentioned story probably did, because the route was correct, place names along it were correct, but she didn't have any idea of the exact distance involved or the timing involved in making the first part of the journey). Unfortunately the average atlas is very small-scale and can only give you a general idea of the terrain. So if you use an atlas, you need to think about scale as well as route.
Today, it's easier to consult the internet than check a book.
Google Earth (which you do have to download) is really useful. It's the most helpful online 'atlas' I've found. You can scroll all round the world, zoom in to get an idea of the terrain if it's away from roads, use street view to get a closer look at the area close to the roads. It's the nearest thing you'll get to actually visiting there. Google Maps doesn't have to be downloaded; it's accessed through your browser. (These are also available as mobile apps.)
Another advantage of Google Earth is that although they're not always placed completely accurately, most areas include photos visitors to them have taken, and some of these are well off the beaten track (if your characters are likely to head off into the wilds).
GENERAL INFORMATION ON AN AREA
Checking tourist information is another source of factual information about an area. Real estate listings (like Zillow in America) can give information about an area. Yelp gives info on restaurants, etc, in a number of countries. All of that can be useful if your characters are spending time in a city and you want to be more specific than 'Seeing a restaurant, he went into it for lunch'.
The following is from a story written using a combination of Google Earth and (internet) tourist info on Crawford State Park, Washington State, and I don't think anyone who'd actually been there would consider anything about it, or any of the details in the story, seriously inaccurate.
"Come and eat," Jim said. "You can carry on checking out the map afterwards."
"I already have a sort of idea for a good place to go," Blair said, continuing to talk between mouthfuls. "Boundary Dam. It's pretty well due north of Spokane, close to the Canadian border. There's a small park there, Crawford State Park. Overnight camping isn't allowed in the park itself; it isn't big, just forty-nine acres - that's only a fraction of a square mile. But there's a campsite beside Boundary Dam - it's not far from the park.
"It's limestone country - the main point of interest in the park - well, the only one, really - is a big cave, open to the public, though you have to go in on an organized tour."
And later -
Once he was satisfied that Jim was sleeping, Blair strolled over towards the water and wandered northwards through the trees, following the course of the river.
He didn't go far, although he suspected he'd gone far enough to cross the boundary into Canada. After about quarter of an hour he turned and made his way back, walking more briskly as he returned to the tent.
TRANSPORT
Most stories are what might be called modern - that is, set inside the last thirty years or so. Google Earth can give you distance and travel times if you ask it for directions from A to B. Obviously, if at least one of your places is fictional, like Cascade, A would have to be somewhere close to where Cascade 'is' - somewhere on the Pacific coast not too far from the Canadian border.
Often your characters may decide to fly from A to B. Sites like Travelocity can give you travel times and prices, though obviously what you'll get are today's prices, not the prices as they were in the 1990s (Sentinel) the 1980s (Professionals) or the 1970s (Starsky & Hutch).
Tied in with flying is jetlag. Your characters won't get jetlag flying more or less due north or south, even if they fly non-stop from southern Chile to Chicago - they're in the same time zone. The characters will be tired, certainly, from the length of the journey, but they won't suffer jetlag. Flying from the east coast of America to the west can cause minor jetlag for some people - even the hour difference in daylight saving time can cause problems for some. People only get serious jetlag if the flight is east or west and covers eight or more time zones, but even then some individuals recover from it faster than others. Going east causes more problems that going west because of the rotation of the Earth; the same length of journey takes longer if you're flying east.
You also have to consider ground transport.
The most obvious method of ground transport involves roads.
If it's a more historical setting, the ground route shown on a map will probably still be reasonably accurate, even though roads are being improved, sometimes realigned, all the time. Even if it hasn't been improved recently, for dramatic purposes you can probably diverge a little from today's route, for example have a river being forded instead of crossed a hundred yards upstream by a bridge, unless the bridge is known to pre-date the period of your story.
With horse-drawn wagons, the average daily journey was perhaps fifteen miles, though a stagecoach was able to travel faster, covering possibly four times that distance in a day. Early cars had a top speed of 7mph, so weren't able to travel much further in a day than a stagecoach. In addition, the road surface was unlikely to be anything other than quite severely potholed or rutted. For other eras, Googling them will get you results. There's also a Live Journal commumity, Little Details - you can check answers to all sorts of questions asked for dates going back several centuries from all over the world, as well as ask your own question if you can't find the answer anywhere on the site.
There are trains. There's a very useful site at Seat61.com that gives routes, etc, for all over the world.
And then there's travel by ship, using sea, river or canal, much less common now than it once was, but in a historical story it's worth considering. Wikipedia is a useful source of information for these.
WEATHER
Linked to geography, more than many people realize, is weather.
Rain tends to depend on the prevailing wind. When it reaches high ground, moist air is forced upward and cools, dropping its moisture. As a result, the windward side of a mountain range is wet, the sheltered side is usually in a rain shadow; the wind has become dry. That side gets most of its rainfall when the wind is from something other than the prevailing direction. If you want your characters to be affected by a flood, for example, either have them on the side of the country where there's a lot of rain, or specify that the storm is coming in from an unusual direction. Again, you can google for the weather specifics for the area where your story is set.
There are a lot of different kinds of wind, including sea breezes and land breezes, which are more localised - during the day a cool wind blows off the sea onto the land, at night the wind blows from the land towards the sea. A useful thing to remember if your characters are having a seaside holiday.
"I don't care how sunny it is," Blair complained. "The wind's blowing off the sea, and it's cold!"
You can also get localised wind direction in hilly areas - if there's a valley, the wind will often change direction and follow the valley rather than rise and go over the top of the hills. There can also be the odd hollow that the wind blows right over, or a boulder that diverts the wind, leaving a small area where your characters can find shelter.
Sometimes there can be seasonal variations in the wind caused by hurricanes or typhoons, when storm-force winds are stronger than the prevailing wind and come in from an unexpected direction.
And snow; it's a little-realized fact, but if you go high enough you will find snow - even glaciers, though global warming is melting them - at the equator. Google Kilimanjaro or Mount Kenya in Africa and you'll get a lot of photos that include snow.
Death Valley in America might not normally get snow, but it does sometimes get ice - scientists studying the moving rocks of Death Valley have recently (August 2014) discovered that on the rare occasions when it rains at night, surface water can freeze - deserts can get very cold at night - and then the wind can easily blow rocks across the ice. So don't assume that because your story is set in a warm or desert area it will automatically be warm at night.
It's even possible to google for the weather in any given area for the past seventy years at Weather Underground History
WILD LIFE
There are other details, too, that writers might not think of that are linked to geography. What plants grow in specific areas, either native, introduced or garden escapes? What animals are native to there? What plants or animals are never found in the wild outside sometimes quite localised areas? Even in towns - what wild animals might there be that have moved in from the countryside? Hawks and falcons have found that high buildings provide an excellent nest site, and urban pigeons provide them with a very adequate food supply. Coyotes have been found in New York's Central Park. Foxes are common in many UK cities. Some areas harbour animals, sometimes dangerous animals, that someone originally acquired as a pet when it was young and small then, when it grew inconveniently large, released it to survive as best it could in the wild. Again, ask Google or Wikipedia.
ASTRONOMY
Yet another related subject is astronomy.
If your story is set totally in a big city, you probably won't need to worry about that too much (street lights kill the stars and the buildings mostly block the moon) but if the story moves into the countryside, moon and stars do enter the equation. Watch the phases of the moon, if you mention it - if one night scene is brightly lit by the full moon, another night scene a week later will only have the light of a half moon in the latter part of the night. Watch out for what constellations are likely to be visible, and where they are in the sky - in the northern hemisphere Orion marches across the southern sky, but in the southern hemisphere he'll be to your north. In Egypt he'll be high in the sky; in northern Europe he'll be a lot closer to the horizon. Planets - your characters might see Venus, Mars, Jupiter or Saturn. Mercury is possible but unlikely - it's on record that Galileo never did manage to see Mercury - because it's really too close to the sun. Winter, about an hour before sunrise or an hour after sunset, probably offers the best opportunity. But will your characters actually know which planet is which? Will they see the planets simply as very bright stars?
If you really want to get the exact details of what your characters might see in the night sky, Your Sky
can help by calling up info for any date and location you specify between 4713 BC and 8000 AD.
Watch out, too, for length of daylight. If your characters are mining for gold in a northern Alaskan summer, they might pack up at 9pm because they're getting tired, but not because it's getting dark - they're north of the Arctic Circle, in the world of the midnight sun. If they're visiting Peru, on the other hand, they can expect it to be dark by about 7pm at any time of the year. (Google 'length of daylight in... ')
Even when you've been to an area and think you know it quite well, unless you actually live there checking Google Earth/Google Maps is a good way to keep up to date with any changes there might have been since your last visit, depending on how long ago that was (because many of the maps are three or four years old). This is especially true of towns, where redevelopment can change parts of the road system quite drastically in just two or three years.
Remember - if you don't know the territory where your story is set, Google Earth/Google Maps is your friend. Even the more remote areas (where the image is sometimes less clear) can tell you enough to let you keep your basic geographical facts reasonably accurate. And Google or Wikipedia will supplement that.
Sources
rain, wind and
Death Valley rocks
Trains, canals, and rivers
Little Details
If the story is set in a fictitious city (like Cascade or Gotham City) or country, or even a fictitious not-specified part of a particular country, that's fine; as long as you keep your fictitious geography consistent you can make it up. Although someone has drawn a map of Gotham City; so it's a good idea to check for something like that before you start.
Even if it is a specified part of a country, you can still waffle, make things very general; if your characters are camping in a forest, it's easy to create a clearing for their tent.
After they left the truck, Jim and Blair hiked through the trees in a northerly direction, and after almost an hour reached the clearing where they always camped.
Nobody is going to know exactly where they left the truck, or now fast they were walking, or even if their direction was exactly north or deviated by a degree or two east or west - but the reader gets the general picture. Nobody is going to say, "There isn't a clearing like that there!"
With that kind of story, the only thing you have to be sure of is the general terrain; if it's mountainous, if it's likely to be forested, etc.
The problem arises when you try for specifics and actually name real places. That's when someone who lives in, or even just knows, the area can get back to you, justifiably pointing out (for example) that nobody could possibly make the journey your characters just did in one day - it would need at least four. I've actually seen that in a story. A journey, completed in one day, that - from my personal knowledge of the route - I would say couldn't be done in less than three and a half to four days.
At one time, the obvious thing to do would be to consult an atlas (which is what the writer of the above-mentioned story probably did, because the route was correct, place names along it were correct, but she didn't have any idea of the exact distance involved or the timing involved in making the first part of the journey). Unfortunately the average atlas is very small-scale and can only give you a general idea of the terrain. So if you use an atlas, you need to think about scale as well as route.
Today, it's easier to consult the internet than check a book.
Google Earth (which you do have to download) is really useful. It's the most helpful online 'atlas' I've found. You can scroll all round the world, zoom in to get an idea of the terrain if it's away from roads, use street view to get a closer look at the area close to the roads. It's the nearest thing you'll get to actually visiting there. Google Maps doesn't have to be downloaded; it's accessed through your browser. (These are also available as mobile apps.)
Another advantage of Google Earth is that although they're not always placed completely accurately, most areas include photos visitors to them have taken, and some of these are well off the beaten track (if your characters are likely to head off into the wilds).
GENERAL INFORMATION ON AN AREA
Checking tourist information is another source of factual information about an area. Real estate listings (like Zillow in America) can give information about an area. Yelp gives info on restaurants, etc, in a number of countries. All of that can be useful if your characters are spending time in a city and you want to be more specific than 'Seeing a restaurant, he went into it for lunch'.
The following is from a story written using a combination of Google Earth and (internet) tourist info on Crawford State Park, Washington State, and I don't think anyone who'd actually been there would consider anything about it, or any of the details in the story, seriously inaccurate.
"Come and eat," Jim said. "You can carry on checking out the map afterwards."
"I already have a sort of idea for a good place to go," Blair said, continuing to talk between mouthfuls. "Boundary Dam. It's pretty well due north of Spokane, close to the Canadian border. There's a small park there, Crawford State Park. Overnight camping isn't allowed in the park itself; it isn't big, just forty-nine acres - that's only a fraction of a square mile. But there's a campsite beside Boundary Dam - it's not far from the park.
"It's limestone country - the main point of interest in the park - well, the only one, really - is a big cave, open to the public, though you have to go in on an organized tour."
And later -
Once he was satisfied that Jim was sleeping, Blair strolled over towards the water and wandered northwards through the trees, following the course of the river.
He didn't go far, although he suspected he'd gone far enough to cross the boundary into Canada. After about quarter of an hour he turned and made his way back, walking more briskly as he returned to the tent.
TRANSPORT
Most stories are what might be called modern - that is, set inside the last thirty years or so. Google Earth can give you distance and travel times if you ask it for directions from A to B. Obviously, if at least one of your places is fictional, like Cascade, A would have to be somewhere close to where Cascade 'is' - somewhere on the Pacific coast not too far from the Canadian border.
Often your characters may decide to fly from A to B. Sites like Travelocity can give you travel times and prices, though obviously what you'll get are today's prices, not the prices as they were in the 1990s (Sentinel) the 1980s (Professionals) or the 1970s (Starsky & Hutch).
Tied in with flying is jetlag. Your characters won't get jetlag flying more or less due north or south, even if they fly non-stop from southern Chile to Chicago - they're in the same time zone. The characters will be tired, certainly, from the length of the journey, but they won't suffer jetlag. Flying from the east coast of America to the west can cause minor jetlag for some people - even the hour difference in daylight saving time can cause problems for some. People only get serious jetlag if the flight is east or west and covers eight or more time zones, but even then some individuals recover from it faster than others. Going east causes more problems that going west because of the rotation of the Earth; the same length of journey takes longer if you're flying east.
You also have to consider ground transport.
The most obvious method of ground transport involves roads.
If it's a more historical setting, the ground route shown on a map will probably still be reasonably accurate, even though roads are being improved, sometimes realigned, all the time. Even if it hasn't been improved recently, for dramatic purposes you can probably diverge a little from today's route, for example have a river being forded instead of crossed a hundred yards upstream by a bridge, unless the bridge is known to pre-date the period of your story.
With horse-drawn wagons, the average daily journey was perhaps fifteen miles, though a stagecoach was able to travel faster, covering possibly four times that distance in a day. Early cars had a top speed of 7mph, so weren't able to travel much further in a day than a stagecoach. In addition, the road surface was unlikely to be anything other than quite severely potholed or rutted. For other eras, Googling them will get you results. There's also a Live Journal commumity, Little Details - you can check answers to all sorts of questions asked for dates going back several centuries from all over the world, as well as ask your own question if you can't find the answer anywhere on the site.
There are trains. There's a very useful site at Seat61.com that gives routes, etc, for all over the world.
And then there's travel by ship, using sea, river or canal, much less common now than it once was, but in a historical story it's worth considering. Wikipedia is a useful source of information for these.
WEATHER
Linked to geography, more than many people realize, is weather.
Rain tends to depend on the prevailing wind. When it reaches high ground, moist air is forced upward and cools, dropping its moisture. As a result, the windward side of a mountain range is wet, the sheltered side is usually in a rain shadow; the wind has become dry. That side gets most of its rainfall when the wind is from something other than the prevailing direction. If you want your characters to be affected by a flood, for example, either have them on the side of the country where there's a lot of rain, or specify that the storm is coming in from an unusual direction. Again, you can google for the weather specifics for the area where your story is set.
There are a lot of different kinds of wind, including sea breezes and land breezes, which are more localised - during the day a cool wind blows off the sea onto the land, at night the wind blows from the land towards the sea. A useful thing to remember if your characters are having a seaside holiday.
"I don't care how sunny it is," Blair complained. "The wind's blowing off the sea, and it's cold!"
You can also get localised wind direction in hilly areas - if there's a valley, the wind will often change direction and follow the valley rather than rise and go over the top of the hills. There can also be the odd hollow that the wind blows right over, or a boulder that diverts the wind, leaving a small area where your characters can find shelter.
Sometimes there can be seasonal variations in the wind caused by hurricanes or typhoons, when storm-force winds are stronger than the prevailing wind and come in from an unexpected direction.
And snow; it's a little-realized fact, but if you go high enough you will find snow - even glaciers, though global warming is melting them - at the equator. Google Kilimanjaro or Mount Kenya in Africa and you'll get a lot of photos that include snow.
Death Valley in America might not normally get snow, but it does sometimes get ice - scientists studying the moving rocks of Death Valley have recently (August 2014) discovered that on the rare occasions when it rains at night, surface water can freeze - deserts can get very cold at night - and then the wind can easily blow rocks across the ice. So don't assume that because your story is set in a warm or desert area it will automatically be warm at night.
It's even possible to google for the weather in any given area for the past seventy years at Weather Underground History
WILD LIFE
There are other details, too, that writers might not think of that are linked to geography. What plants grow in specific areas, either native, introduced or garden escapes? What animals are native to there? What plants or animals are never found in the wild outside sometimes quite localised areas? Even in towns - what wild animals might there be that have moved in from the countryside? Hawks and falcons have found that high buildings provide an excellent nest site, and urban pigeons provide them with a very adequate food supply. Coyotes have been found in New York's Central Park. Foxes are common in many UK cities. Some areas harbour animals, sometimes dangerous animals, that someone originally acquired as a pet when it was young and small then, when it grew inconveniently large, released it to survive as best it could in the wild. Again, ask Google or Wikipedia.
ASTRONOMY
Yet another related subject is astronomy.
If your story is set totally in a big city, you probably won't need to worry about that too much (street lights kill the stars and the buildings mostly block the moon) but if the story moves into the countryside, moon and stars do enter the equation. Watch the phases of the moon, if you mention it - if one night scene is brightly lit by the full moon, another night scene a week later will only have the light of a half moon in the latter part of the night. Watch out for what constellations are likely to be visible, and where they are in the sky - in the northern hemisphere Orion marches across the southern sky, but in the southern hemisphere he'll be to your north. In Egypt he'll be high in the sky; in northern Europe he'll be a lot closer to the horizon. Planets - your characters might see Venus, Mars, Jupiter or Saturn. Mercury is possible but unlikely - it's on record that Galileo never did manage to see Mercury - because it's really too close to the sun. Winter, about an hour before sunrise or an hour after sunset, probably offers the best opportunity. But will your characters actually know which planet is which? Will they see the planets simply as very bright stars?
If you really want to get the exact details of what your characters might see in the night sky, Your Sky
can help by calling up info for any date and location you specify between 4713 BC and 8000 AD.
Watch out, too, for length of daylight. If your characters are mining for gold in a northern Alaskan summer, they might pack up at 9pm because they're getting tired, but not because it's getting dark - they're north of the Arctic Circle, in the world of the midnight sun. If they're visiting Peru, on the other hand, they can expect it to be dark by about 7pm at any time of the year. (Google 'length of daylight in... ')
Even when you've been to an area and think you know it quite well, unless you actually live there checking Google Earth/Google Maps is a good way to keep up to date with any changes there might have been since your last visit, depending on how long ago that was (because many of the maps are three or four years old). This is especially true of towns, where redevelopment can change parts of the road system quite drastically in just two or three years.
Remember - if you don't know the territory where your story is set, Google Earth/Google Maps is your friend. Even the more remote areas (where the image is sometimes less clear) can tell you enough to let you keep your basic geographical facts reasonably accurate. And Google or Wikipedia will supplement that.
Sources
rain, wind and
Death Valley rocks
Trains, canals, and rivers
Little Details