ok so last week (maybe? time's a little unmoored for me lately) danielle
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shrimpchipsss linked me to a convo she'd had, thinking about the differences between different fic fandoms. this, from our follow up conversation on twitter, summarises the point nicely: 'i have a whole spiel about how there are a lot of mdzs aus that take place in specific times and places (modern day in philly, for example) [...]
whereas haikyuu is set in real time and real place and yet there's a lot of haikyuu aus set in [indeterminate college town, probably american] even though it isn't like there aren't colleges in japan haha/there's a fair number of aus that are sort of. place-agnostic unless multiple teams are part of the story and theres some kind of sense of diff territories etc'
(this is a side post which should be separate, but i'm going to note it within this one anyway, a little nesting doll of thought. anyway i think it's so nice to be able to refer to conversations. most of my writing is academic, so i'm very used to crediting the people i use, but not so much to acknowledging non-peer reviewed inspirations or influences. or even suggesting how you arrived at conclusions from certain scholars, and how you felt about them, even tho a lot of my use of sources is actually extrapolations and massive assumptive leaps and emotional reactions, that probably could do with a bit more explanation. but i'm already citing every other sentence, and wordcounts loom, and i can't. (in some ways, of course, i am. the need for citation does essentially render all academic writing, at least in my fields, a conversation, even if it's often (always, in my case, so far) one sided. it's just that the personal associations which 'conversation' evokes are carefully disguised by academic writing. meanwhile, internet convos are basically all personal chat - 'i speak' 'you speak' 'i reply' - which disguises the fierce and fun generation of new ideas.) anyway, i enjoy giving credit where credit's due, in all mediums and styles)
danielle's point got me thinking about place and writing. i'm always thinking about place and writing, in some ways - they're both things that fascinate me on the personal and academic levels, and that i enjoy enjoying. there was a few different ways our conversation got my brain sparking, but it specifically got me thinking about place in
my fic. i mostly write haikyuu, but i believe very deeply in locating what i write about, despite the fact i've probably not been there. this isn't always about physical location - sometimes, it's just about being precise in culture, character, timeof life, and so on - but often it is geographical. one time i wrote about
ikejiri and kita meeting and i identified where down to a specific bar, and then made sure to write the interior right. when i think about writing 'know what a river can be', i'm amazed i did it in a couple of weeks, not because of its length (intense for me, but plausible) but because i had to spend so much of that time looking up travel routes, locations, and so on. as i said in the AN, i hadn't actually been anywhere i described in it, so that information took a lot of work to collect. but i didn't want people to know that - at least until they finished reading.
this isn't a slight on people not doing that btw, but it's important to me. i really do think, if you are going to write canon stuff, and not generically relocate it, place, and travel, and space, are important to get right. we experience the world through places, even when we're doing virtual things, like reading or writing. i'm on a train rn, and that's part the writing of this, and when i look back at this post, and probably when i think about these ideas, i will remember which train.
writers write in and about place. there's this article by a geographer named douglas pocock from 1981 called 'place and the novelist' that i think captures this well. he characterises the novel as implicitly 'time-specific and, thus, by implication, place-specific also', and also says some other stuff that i'm going to stick in a list, and may not refer to again, but which are framing my thoughts here:
- 'we are rooted and grounded in place, by place'
- 'Recognition of the importance of place to novelists is also seen in the reticence they often express towards the portrayal of foreign scenes and characters [...]The difficulty in setting a novel in a foreign context illustrates the bias imparted by one's native place'
- 'Place, then, contains our roots, our unique point of reference. We may not be able to begin again but it is a point to which we can return'
they say write what you know, and part of what you know is where you know. certainly, whenever i write original things, it's always around the city i live in and walk through and which structures and is my life rn (even though i'm often apathetic towards it). i don't like that lack of imagination in myself, but it's difficult to remove myself from the city when it's so immediate and easy, and i'm still learning how to write creatively in many ways. even fantasy is often located in places known and lived in: my prime example of this is earthsea, which is modelled on the pacific northwest where le guin lived (in the mini-series they apparently have american accents, which feels strange in a world centred on british-accented fantasy, but that is itself its own kind of placing, firstly by tolkien, and then by a succession of other anglophone fantasy writers seeking castles. why not american, when le guin is?) i'm taking as a given, then, that your writing is about where you know.
so what does it mean, as a fic writer, to inherit a location you don't know? that is someone else's place. can you even write it? how?
i'm going to think through this a little, but i think the ultimate point of this post is to pose that question, and flag that it's weird, and tough, and cool that so many people are, in various different ways.
sidenote: haikyuu's a really interesting example here, because in some ways it conjures some quite generic settings: high school, sports teams. the existence of high school and sports aus as a way to relocate specifically located stories into generic settings prove how easily adaptable these concepts can feel - although that ignores how they are often extremely americanised versions in fics. yet haikyuu is also quite specifically located. firstly, it is about real places - not just town names and landscapes, but street corners and school halls and that big moon face. you can do that thing where you print out an image from the manga, and take it to a real place, and hold it up, and have it match, that's usually reserved for movie stills - photography, not illustration. and it's also very much about furudate's own high school volleyball experience, so there's another layer of additional locating. furudate has also said they research by going to the actual on-going tournaments, so it continues to be located in the existing, bordered and placed world of japanese high school volleyball. this is a very specific setting. there's an interesting contrast, then, between the story's delibrate (volleyball is for everyone - furudate) and inadvertant (high school is for everyone - the high school au tag on ao3) sense of universality, and the place it's actually specifically about. this means that fanworks run the whole gamut from generic to specific (even sometimes in locations entirely different to japan) in a way which must be about individual interests, but also culture. i mean culture in the online sense: the discourses (in both the (broadly) foucaultian and tumblr senses) that i saw on the internet in my formative years raised a lot of concerns about appropriation which made me cautious about how i dealt with other people's stories when i started writing. other people, within the same haikyuu writing spaces, will have inhereted different ideas, been introduced to fic in different ways, will be less neurotic than me. i think that's fine: i like reading all that different stuff. and, as i implied, i also think haikyuu lends itself to the range. this is good, because with the huge number of writers in the fandom, you're going to end up with a ton of different approaches. i'd also be curious to know if the popularity of hq fanworks has been encouraged the fact it can do both, as it were?
anyway, back to me (even more than already)(but listen, literature is always experienced individually, and so is place. i could say more, but instead, i'll converse. i like michael mayerfeld bell's article 'the ghosts of place' a lot anyway, but he has a good bit on this: 'Much of the evidence I use is reflexive, that is, drawn from my own experience of place. This, of course, is not the usual source of evidence from which sociologists draw, for such evidence is so particular. The particularity of place, though, suggests no better source. I hope that the personal evidence I report will, however, recall to memory similar and related experiences on the part of the reader').
anyway, back to me properly. just as a refresher, i'm actually now thinking about what it means to write somewhere you don't know, because you, as a fic writer, have inherited that setting.
i. fantasythe first implication of writing places you don't know is that you end up writing fantasy. i don't mean this in the making-it-up sense, although that is, of course, a risk. what i mean is writing becomes a different sort of imaginative exercise. of course, all fiction (all writing?) is imaginary, but it's different describing new york vs a city you've made up. if nothing else, the reader needs different information from you. good fantasy writing (imo) requires the imaginative equivalent of going for a walk around the neighbourhood you're writing: the writer must work out the shape and size and feel of a place, what it looks like beyond the edges of the writing, before they can begin to describe it: it must be mapped. i love those tiktoks where people pour rice on paper and then draw round it to make fantasy islands, so that's what i'm picturing. only, miyagi, and othe rhaikyuu settings, are not somewhere i'm making up. it's somewhere real, and already as a clear shape. and so working out the shape/size/feel is not something which you can do internally; you have to look outward. you don't draw your own maps; you turn to google's.
ii. researchthis is vital, to me. i want to get things right. partly because i just don't want to get it wrong (ok time for a tangent (who's shocked) but i was in a presentation the other day by someone who was studying a cultural phenomenon that happens, among other places, where i live, which she referenced, and then continued to get details wrong about my home. on a basic geography level. she was a full-on academic. it was astounding. my point is that it's very annoying when people just assume they get where you're from, and then don't. i try very earnestly to not do that). if i get stuff wrong, then anyone who know the place will know, and won't be able to enjoy my work, and will possibly feel weird and alienated more generally, which means i'm failing: there's a level of care i think i owe to my readers. but i also research because i want my writing to feel detailed, intricate, lived in. everything is placed, and every place is composed of a mass of physical things, sensations, emotions. if i'm placing my writing, it needs at least some of that, or it won't ring true, even if it's only me who spots the gaps in knowledge, because i'm the only one who definitely knows i don't know. i'm the only person i'm ultimately writing for.
there's some random, and slightly less precise sources of research i work with. 1) the actual images in haikyuu really help: their hyper-precision is both a challenge and a help to rise to it. 2) there's one phrase in one of my fics, which i took from an actual book; i just happened to read this writer's description of a visit to a place which i was trying to write from my imagination on the same day. i took the phrase not so much because i needed the descriptive help, but because i wanted to mark the moment of inadvertent alignment. 3) there's also other fics. there's definitely been points where i've chosen a fan interpretation over a real thing, even when i know it's wrong (think olympics). i'm aware i'm writing for a community which has this communal understanding, and that in this context, the real thing will seem more invented than the fiction, and will create more dissonance. it's rare i do this, but sometimes, with fanworks which are going to be read only within community, that is the truer option. reading fic is its own type of research, and there's more i can say on that, but i won't rn.
but when i want precision, accuracy, detail, i turn to google. the only problem is, the answers it provides are none of those things. theoretically, everything's on the internet, but not everything is findable, and you only have so much time to look. ideally, i'd read novels or memoirs or something about the place i was writing about, but i'm busy, and again, writing for me. and anyway, who's to say a person's take on a place is all that place is. i had to stop reading a novel set in the town i went to uni once, because it was so unrecognisable, even though i knew the place names. i tend to use travel or culture articles, and pictures. lots of pictures. so many pictures.
but the stuff that comes up on google images isn't necessarily the most recent, or the most accurate: it often prioritises either aesthetics, or just fitting everything into frame. and wikicommons, for instance, has a shockingly outdated selection of images. with photos, you only get one angle, and then the place is stuck that way.
a couple of days ago, i heard someone make the point that 'if you visit a place online, it's fixed like that'. it was a totally different conversation, but at the back of my mind, i was like 'oh i have a dreamwidth post that would be perfect for'. the way a place looks, or is portrayed online, can never full capture what it's like: it won't include all weathers, all viewpoints (both visual and opinion), all anything. i'm not totally convinced by benjamin's rejection of reproductions (see 'the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction'), but the aura of a place on a website will be different to a place on its physical site. websites and photos capture only a still slice of the movements which makes space into place: you only get the end product, not the on-going process (this is terminology direct from my thesis; i'm too close to it to know if it makes sense, but i hope you get some sense of meaning from it - it doesn't matter too much if it's the one i intended or not). it's hard to get past that stillness, imposed by the anonymous curators of the internet, when you're working with a location you don't know, imposed by the original author. you, the fic writer, need to find your own perspective on that place.
the research, then, lays the groundwork. it gives you the detail you need: names, routes, distances, landscapes, but also food, temperatures, currencies. the geograpy of the place and the things in it. to use the fantasy metaphor, tentatively and without endorsing it, it gives you the map and the lore. it's up to you to imagine what happens on the ground, to the people.
iii. places you've beeni wrote this fic about water once. it's the one i mentioned already, with 'river' in the title. i hadn't been to any of the places mentioned. but i did live by the sea for a while, and i missed it. i've looked out across one of the great lakes, and hopped across a stream so small it disappeared when the weather warmed up. i've flown over an ocean. i've been to pebbley beaches, and sandy ones. i can actually see the sea out of the window of the train i'm still on right now. this is the train journey, along the same tracks, that i took when visiting my parents after moving out for the first time - i always look to see the sea along this stretch. my point is, i know water. i know what it feels like to go to a heaving, touristy beach, and one on off-season. these are sensations i know, which i've felt across different places to places. i can apply it to some more.
i know what it's like to move away, but i don't have access to the specifics of doing it to play volleyball and renouncing your citizenship. so, when writing oikawa, i took what i knew, and i built on it, and where i encountered large voids between the story furudate was laying out and what my life has been like, i did a little research, and a little imagining, and i felt my way between them. ultimately, i think, the best research for writing about a character encountering water is visiting myself - but i still have to know what kind of water they're looking at, how deep, are there islands? knowing that there are islands makes me consider what i feel like when i see an island, and suddenly it's all realer - not just the description of place, but character sensation too, because suddenly the character (i) am responding to where they are, and i have been. even if i haven't been there.
writers write place. all the time
iv. places you arethere's a secret layer to my fics that you will never know about. and that's where i was when i wrote them. even if i tell you, you're only getting the fixed, website version. you'll never properly know about the perpetual chill and the specific shade of wood, or the way the unusually warm spring filled up the concrete yard where i had breakfast. the brown, clear water, and the iterative finding of it. the dark street, the gravel lane. the too-short distance between my bed and the ceiling. the train by the sea, where i wrote all of this so far. i'm describing flashes here, i'm gesturing to edges, but you'll never know more than words. but i will, or at least i'll remember (i'm off the train now. it both literally and metaphorically recedes, and i remember it like its windows in the dark: flashes always), but that memory is baked into what i write, and it still spills lights into now. this means that when i revisit my fics, there's a double placing. where i'm describing (already a mix of my real places and the real place), and where i wrote that description. to me, that's as much of the story as anything else, and sometimes i can see it pushing its way through so, so clearly. it's part of what you read. and you'll never know
there's a secret layer to my fics that i will never know about. it's where you read it. sometimes people comment and tell me, but i can't really extrapolate much, not from the anonymised comments. i can fit it onto my knowlege of the world: i know bus stops, but couldn't begin to guess what the one that the commenter stood and read my work at is like: could it have a roof, a bench, did they need to sort out change to pay? (there's nothing like going to a new place to remind you that buses are mysterious and temperamental beasts which may respond any which way to your outreached hand.) i don't know, i won't ask, and i'll never get it. but i know what it means to read at a bus stop and i appreciate how it feels for me, and it makes me smile to think of someone else doing that. place is at once inherently individual, which brings with it a distance from other people, but it's also a source of real empathy. it's a shared experience; we are all placed, all 'rooted and grounded in place, by place'. i hope you remember where you were when you read my fics, and if you revisit that place, you also revisit that memory. not because i want to be remembered, but because i think it makes place, and writing, much richer when they bleed into each other and add all these other, invisible locations into each other. i want to add a metaphor here but i can only come up with lasagne. invisible lasagne of feelings and associations.
places and writings are never fixed. they alway grows and builds on each other, even if the process invisible, and individual, and no one else ever knows. that may sound sad or lonely, but it's really not, because we're all together in that experience.
thank you for reading this. i know it's messy, and horribly long, and i've not edited. i've also not slept much, which is why it's gotten all weird and ephemeral and heartfelt at the end here. but that's okay, because i only write for me.
except, if you made it this far, i also write for you. wherever you are.
