Mapping My Books
However you may feel about Google and its parent company Alphabet, their maps application has been a great resource for writers (and most everyone) since it was first made available over twenty years ago. It’s pretty much a standard resource for me now when I’m working on a new book. There are two main ways I like to use it.
The first is one is to confirm the fictional geography of my book. Each Rolly Waters mystery is set in specific neighborhoods of San Diego. As a long-time resident, I’ve already visited some of the places where my characters go. Sometimes they go places I haven’t been so I’ll take a couple of hours to explore the area. I’ll write down some notes and take photographs.
Memories, notes and photos are great to have on hand but inevitably, as I’m putting my characters through their paces, a question will come up that I can’t answer. How long would it take a character to drive from one place to another? On foot? What can they see from a particular location? Questions like this pop up all the time as I’m writing. And that’s when I turn to my trusty Google Maps.
As I was writing Gillespie Field Groove I wanted two of the characters to be able to look down from a house and see an FBI raid taking place at buildings on the west side of the Gillespie Field airport. Here’s the view of the airfield I was able to find from Google Maps.
There’s several houses on the other side of the street, set back from the street on small hill. The geography worked! I could write the scene as I wanted.
Authenticity like this certainly isn’t required when you’re writing fiction, but I think it makes things more interesting, at least in the case of the Rolly Waters mysteries. I’ve had to finesse certain place descriptions sometimes but, on the whole, I usually get the geography right. And I think the books are better for it.
Which brings me to my favorite use of Google Maps. Inspiration! As I browse through areas of San Diego County I’m featuring in the next book, I’ll discover things that give me new ideas for where the story, and the characters, can go.
The climactic chapters of Ballast Point Breakdown take place in the Coronado Islands, just off the coast of Baja California. I’d seen them in the distance for years but knew very little about them. I took a closer look on Google maps and discovered the Mexican government has two outposts on the island—Faro and Faro Sur. There’s also a well-protected cove on the northeast side of the largest island, a place where someone in a sailboat could anchor and shelter their boat. There’s a trail leading up from the cove to other government buildings on top. I glanced through comments and photographs. There were videos of pods of dolphins and stories of a 1930s casino. All sorts of ideas started popping into my head, many of which made it into the final version of the story.
Google is great of course, but what happens when you’re writing historical fiction? I go searching for historical maps. I don’t get as much information as I do from Google, but they still can be useful. Here’s an 1899 map of San Diego County I often referred to when I was working on The Deadly Stingaree.
This map helped me understand the route President Harrison’s train took during his 1891 visit (and helped me imagine how it might be diverted). I discovered names for towns I’d never heard of before—Fruitdale, Nestor and Oneonta—which have since been incorporated into larger cities such as Chula Vista and Imperial Beach. The map also gave me a sense of how uninhabited and agricultural the southern part of the county was at the time, giving me some more ways to tell the story.
Maps, maps, maps. A writer’s best friend (maybe second best. after a Thesaurus).