Thread: Ever have a source stonewall you?

Sorry all I just need to vent and maybe get a little feedback.

Have all of you been to the different places you write about? If Paris is your backdrop have you seen the tower that the city is famous for? If Texas is you venu have you seen it's horse ranches at sunset? Well, far be it from me to cut you down if you have or not. I'm writing about Yellowstone National Park. I have a contact that has been feeding me info that I can't find on the net or in the MANY books I have bought. She chastised me for writing about a place I have not been today. Acting like I had no right to include it in my story if I had not witnessed it with my own eyes! Does she not understand the term starving artist!!! If I had the chance to go everywhere I want to write about I would not have the TIME to write. I would be living IT!!! I've never swam with a shark but it might sound cool to write a story about that too is that a crime!!

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. Has anyone hit my wall?

I think it's a bit silly for someone to chastise another person for writing about somewhere they haven't been. What if you're writing about the Antarctica? Are you supposed to jump on a plane and fly over? What if you're writing about someone who murders another person? Grab a gun and find out what it sounds like, how it feels, and the effects it has on a human body?

I'd take what they said with buckets of salt.

I understand how you feel. It sounds like the other person was being pretty unreasonable, BUT (this is basically relationship advice here, if it sounds familiar): Maybe it's kind of a good thing it ended when it did.

Anyone can write about whatever, whenever, wherever they choose. Any one but me. I cannot write about a place where I've never spent time or situations I've never experienced. Call it a massive lack of imagination. But consider that William Faulkner's books were set mostly in and around Oxford, Mississippi.

Some years ago a community college in upstate Mississippi found me through a magazine in which I had published a photo essay. The college asked if I could lead a two-day workshop on photography, specifically black-and-white photos of the type in the magazine. We arrived at a price which made it worth my time and everything was set.

No one in the town or at the college knew me by sight. I checked into a local motel a few days ahead of time and with my trusty Leica iiif and 50mm lens wandered around taking pictures. No one paid any attention to me. It's a beautiful little town, like so many in that part of the South. There were endless opportunities for photos of the type the workshop was intended to teach.

On the morning the workshop opened I asked the students what they had been photographing recently. They all said that because there was nothing in the town worth taking pictures of, they had to get up expeditions to Memphis or New Orleans to find any suitable subjects. Most of them complained that the lacked the proper equipment to take good pictures. I had the lights turned out and presented a 30 minute slide show of some 150 pictures taken around the town, in the countryside within ten miles of the town, and on the campus itself. And I was careful to point out that every picture was taken with a camera over 30 years old equipped with a single lens.

When the lights came back up I asked them to tell me again about there being nothing near them worth photographing. There was a stuttering silence. We spent the remainder of the workshop analysing and critiquing the photos I had made. I heard later from the Dean who told me that within a month there wasn't a tree, house, barn, cow, or chicken in the county that had not been duly documented.

You don't have to go anywhere to be a writer. You can research and find out about places you've not seen, or you can look around and recognise that there are stories and pictures worthy of your time and effort wherever you are.

One of my better moments was when Ox critiqued a piece of mine called "Hunter" about an Australian Aborigine. he said if he didn't know better he would think it had to be written by an Aussie, and a native abbo. at that. Made my day, I have barely been outside Europe, nowhere near Australia, so dissmiss it as ignorant foolishness.

Your are fortunate to have that ability. I can't do that. I've read about London all my life, but I could never write about London. I have to spend time in a place before I can write about it. Part of it may be that I depend on my camera and my sketch pad to be my visual memory.

garza - I wasn't going to enter the latest LM Challenge, but in view of your remark I might just have a go and write about a London and/or an England I have never seen. I might not too, but if my Muse looks on me with favour anything's possible.

I've written about places I know and places I've never been, and I've written about places I have been to but don't remember much of. Personally I feel that as long as you do your research and do some checking up it's perfectly acceptable. Especially with the globalized world we live in. I find that I do the same amount of research on places I know as I do on places I don't know, and my own experiences of those locations don't always match up to the truth. I once wrote a screenplay for a short film, situating it in a part of Stockholm. I lived there at the time, only in an other part of town. Accidentally I placed a family of Arabic immigrants in front of a neo-nazi hangout. While this would have worked for a completely different story, I did end up having to scrap that location for the time being.

So even if I was moderately familiar with the area, it turns out research was still more important, and I´d say this is true for any place that you don't know as if it were your own block. Having been there is obviously never going to hurt, and when it's possible I recommend it, but stating it in your list of demands is unreasonable. After all, if we were to reason as your source did, well, anyone writing historical fiction would be pretty screwed unless he had a flying Delorian or the Tardis at hand.

There's plenty of info about Yellowstone, plenty of photos. If you are looking for food, hotel, and such for a movie, try Expedia or some other service and see what suggestions they come up with. There are probably a ton of blogs.
If it involves the volcano...well, you're going to blow up everything anyway...
Anyhow, do the locations you want to use have to be "real" or just sound like some place around Yellowstone? (Why would you want to go to a "soon-to-be" (maybe) active Super Volcano anyway?)

or, as revenge, you can have the action take place elsewhere, instead of Yellowstone, and trash the locale in spite.

Originally Posted by Vickip

She chastised me for writing about a place I have not been today. Acting like I had no right to include it in my story if I had not witnessed it with my own eyes!

It sounds to me like your contact is a little disgruntled about having to 'work' for you. If you're asking for a lot of details, and she has to spend a lot of time writing things down, it's likely time that she's spending away from her own interests. I've no idea who your contact is, and I hope I'm not being offensive to her.. but some people don't write as fast as us. A paragraph for her may take 10 minutes to write.

It might help to ask her what's up. It's unreasonable for her to request that you visit the place (at least without showing some interest in meeting you / showing you around). I think her motivation for making the comment lies elsewhere.