Today it's my pleasure to be handling the blog over to Chris Lloyd, author of The Elisenda Domènech Investigations series, to talk about the challenges (and fun) of setting stories in a real location.
It was the name that got me.There are moments when you read or hear something that punches the breath out of you. I was researching in the city archives in Girona, in Catalonia, for a guide book and I came across the story of a small statue not far from where I was. Outside, I looked for the statue and found it above one of the medieval gateways into the city. She was serene and beautiful, a Madonna and child surrounded by ornate and brightly-painted curlicues and cherubs, and she was called the Virgin of Good Death.
She was called that because she was the last blessing for prisoners as they were led out of the medieval city to be executed outside the city walls. It was the beauty and the brutality that struck me, the benevolence and menace, and it was the germ of the first book in my Elisenda Domènech series, about a police officer in present-day Girona. Back in the archive, I then came across a series of local legends that left my head reeling at their folklore wisdom and savage imagery, and that sealed the deal. I knew I had to write about it all. The problem was whether anyone who didn’t know Girona or Catalonia would be interested. I’d lived in Girona and Barcelona for 24 years and I’m passionate about Catalonia and its culture, and the one thing I was concerned about was maybe I was being just that bit too niche.
And that, I think, is one of the first dilemmas you face when you set your stories not just in a real location, but in a foreign one. There’s a balancing act between looking too narrowly at your setting while finding stories to set there that will appeal to a wider audience and to readers who might not know the place you’re writing about. It’s a question of finding a harmony between the local and the global, telling a universal story that we can all feel through a unique and very specific setting that only you can tell. But it’s precisely that intensely local atmosphere that can create its own strength and become even more powerful and evocative as long as you can find a way to use it as the vehicle to tell a story that touches on everyone’s life.
