The Devil's in the Details

I was reading a galley proof this week for a collection of short stories, and a single detail in one of the stories stopped me in my tracks. 

The character went to a Starbucks in Beatrice, Nebraska. 

That’s it. That’s the detail.

In a rather unlikely twist of fate, the authors of this story made their story memorable to me, but for all the wrong reasons. I happen to be familiar with Beatrice, Nebraska. My grandparents lived there. I still have family there. And I know one thing for certain: there is no Starbucks in Beatrice. 

I know. I know. Poetic license, and all that. If the situation were slightly different, I would never have thought twice about it. If she’d walked into a non-Starbucks coffee shop in Beatrice, or if she’d walked into a Starbucks in Lincoln, I’d have been okay. But the Starbucks in Beatrice made me stop and do a Google search.

Which brings me to my topic: authenticity of place. Because I’m such a stickler for details, I regard that as part of the author’s job: to make the details as real and as rich as possible. I often research the ‘small stuff’ that an author brings to his work. More often than not, they get it right.

The tenth anniversary edition of one of my favorite books, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, was released last month with an expanded text. As I read news stories about the new edition, I found myself remembering the details of place that make that book so special. It’s been easily seven or eight years since I read the book, but I clearly remember two places from the text: the House on the Rock, near Spring Green, Wisconsin, and the Geographic Center of the Contiguous United States near Lebanon, Kansas.   

I’ve been to the monument marking the center of the Lower 48, and Gaiman’s description comes pretty close to the memories of my 12-year-old self. But it’s the descriptions of the House on the Rock that really stand out, because any fairly decent internet sleuth can find hundreds of photos of all the details Gaiman describes. In my opinion, Gaiman’s authenticity of place holds true for at least two of the locales in the book.

That’s important, especially in books that ask the reader to leave so much of this world behind. Modern fantasies — urban and otherwise — ask us to walk in this world, and yet to suspend our disbelief and to embrace the impossible. The ancient gods walk among us. Vampires exist. The zombiepocalyse is real. A living child is raised by a village of ghosts. Any and all of these things can happen in the pages of a modern fantasy, and so much more.

Because the stories are grounded in the here-and-now, they must be true to the details of place. My current work in progress is a young adult paranormal/gothic romance. As you can tell from that description alone, I’m asking my potential readers to leave reality very, very far behind. But I can’t leave them with a touchstone, without something familiar and real.  

The details are real. I’ve been to those places. I have memories and photos and stories of real people and real events that happened there. To me, those places are a real part of my life. And it’s my job to make them real for my readers, as well. Because if I don’t make those places real, I’ve failed to give them a foothold in the world I’ve created. And without the foothold, the work may crumble into a pile of rubble before the end.