It’s new book day! And this particular Tuesday is a little extra special because we get an all-new adventure featuring The Roarbots’ favorite necromancer, Eric Carter!

In celebration of Carter’s fifth outing, Ghost Money (check out our review of the book here), Stephen Blackmoore stopped by with a guest post on the city as character.

Take it away, Stephen!

It’s Not Just Where the Plot Happens

I’m in a bar in L.A. some years back talking to a guy whose name I can’t remember, and I’m just giving the city a ration of shit for whatever fucked up thing that’s happened that day. 

And he says, “You’re pretty hard on Los Angeles.”

“What do you mean? I love this town. It’s so fucked up.”

“That,” he says. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

I live in Los Angeles. My Eric Carter necromancer urban fantasy series is set here. Why? Because I love this town. It’s so fucked up.

Just as much as Eric Carter, the aforementioned necromancer, any of his allies, like Gabriela Cortez, a ruthless mage who goes by La Bruja and gets what she wants even if she has to skin somebody for it, and his antagonists, like Santa Muerte, the Mexican folk saint of Death who is a lot more complicated than she appears, Los Angeles is a character.

A setting isn’t just where the plot happens. It’s more than just a stage. It constrains the story, opens up new possibilities, forces characters to operate in certain ways. But on a nuts and bolts level, when you’re actually trying to write it, how do you do it?

In writing the Eric Carter books, I’ve thought about this a lot and here are a few things that (I think) have worked for me.

No, It Isn’t Easier

Let me get this out of the way because it’s surprising how many times I run into this. This is worldbuilding. Fantasy and science fiction writers do this all the time. But I’m writing about a real city. That’s easier, right?

No, it’s just different. Writers who are doing sword and sorcery, for example, have a lot of heavy lifting to do. Depending on how much they want to dig into it, they’re creating geography, politics, language, history, and so on. If you’re writing about a real place, you just have to know about geography, politics, language, history, and so on. 

Wait. 

As long as you can maintain consistency and have things sound plausible, a purely fictional world doesn’t have to hold up to too much scrutiny. Not saying that it won’t or can’t – just that it doesn’t necessarily have to. 

If you get something wrong about a real place, someone’s going to notice. And they’ll be surprisingly unhappy. Don’t believe me? Ask any crime writer what happens when they get a gun fact wrong. Or a Regency romance writer how fans react when they don’t get corsetry boning details just right.

Again, like with making any fictional setting (and believe me, any portrayal of a real city is fictional), how much detail you want to put into it is going to inform how much research you need to do. Some of it you probably are going to have to make up. Just be careful that it doesn’t contradict something major. Putting a new building on a street is one thing; creating a new freeway is something else. You will get called on it.

Constraints and Opportunities

Every setting is going to create challenges and offer solutions for your characters. Things you can use to get in their way and things you can use to help them along. 

New York has a lot of traffic but also a lot of really tall buildings, so Spider-Man gets around just fine. An opportunity. Put Batman in L.A. and he’s fucked. The Batmobile will get stuck in traffic, he’ll have a string of cop cars and helicopters on his ass as he slowly wends his way back to the Batcave (which is in Bronson Canyon in Griffith Park, by the way). That’s a constraint.

I can’t have somebody go from the Valley to LAX in 20 minutes… well, at the moment I can because the freeway’s eerily empty during these plague times. But normally, we’re talking a couple hours easy. That’s a constraint. There are tunnels underneath downtown Los Angeles that have been used for everything from city maintenance to moving illegal hooch for speakeasies in the 1920s. That’s an opportunity. 

Or maybe the other way around. Every city, every setting, has these sorts of constraints and opportunities. The only real difference is in how you use them. 

Authenticity

Authenticity’s a tough one. How do you get across to a reader enough of the setting to ground them into its reality? It’s not enough to say, “This is Chicago.” What details make Chicago special? How much or how little do you give?

For me, and some of this is simply because of my style, I prefer as little as possible. I can go on about the character and nature of the street and all the different people on it, the cars, etc. Or I can mention palm tree lined boulevards and sun reflecting off the concrete so bright it burns your retinas, and I’m pretty confident most people know where I’m talking about.

A quick and dirty way to do this? Look to stereotypes. That example I gave is an L.A stereotype. You’ve seen it in countless movies. There are a lot more. The young woman who’s come to L.A. to get into the movies only to have her hopes dashed when she meets a prospective agent at a Starbucks who tells her he can’t rep her. I’ve seen that exact scenario play out. It was fucking heartbreaking.

History and Secrets

To know a city, you need to know its secrets. You need to understand its history. Everything that is happening today is because of something that happened yesterday – or 30, 50, 100 years ago. Peppering a story with bits of history, or even using that history as a central part of your story, is going to go a long way to making a place feel real. 

Sometimes you have to dig for it. L.A. history is like that. So much of it has been bulldozed and paved over, it’s hard to get details. And sometimes when you do, it forces you to dig into an even deeper rabbithole.

Did you know that there are lizard people hoarding gold in tunnels under downtown Los Angeles? Really. At least, that’s the story from the 1930s when a mining engineer showed up and managed to get funding to dig a shaft to look for it. 

It’s a hell of a story and you should look it up. Of course it’s all bullshit, except…

Over the previous 150 years, a story kept popping up about buried Spanish gold from the old Rancho days buried on Fort Moore Hill, in what is now downtown Los Angeles. Over the years, a lot of people have gone looking for it. One story led to another led to another and eventually you have a crackpot mining engineer talking about underground lizard people, and the place to go digging for them is, you guessed it, Fort Moore Hill.

If that doesn’t strike up some story ideas for you, I don’t know what will. I haven’t used it in an Eric Carter book, yet, but believe me I will.

You’re Going to Be Fine

Worldbuilding, whether you’re creating an entirely fictional place or using somewhere that really exists, is tough. How much information do you give the reader? How do you know when it’s too much? 

It’s easy to get stuck in those questions. A lot of the answers only come from trial and error. Different stories and different voices are going to require different approaches. Sometimes you can get away with a single sentence; sometimes it might take a lot more. 

You’ll figure it out. I hope this helps.

Ghost Money, Book 5 in the Eric Carter series by Stephen Blackmoore, is out today from Daw Books.