I had dinner with a friend the other night. We’ll call her A, for amazing, because she totally is. For starters, she loves to travel. She’s been to China, Nepal, Tibet, Africa — I mean, I don’t think there’s a single place she hasn’t been. It’s astounding to listen to her stories.
She has a thing for yaks. Not sure why, but I think it has something to to with how versatile yaks are. Yak wool for clothing and tents, yak milk for butter (Yak Butter Sandwich — anyone remember that old fan fic site?), yak meat — I’m sure I haven’t touched the usefulness of yaks.
But I digress.
I told her I write, and what I write, and I gave her an overview of one of my original works that concerns a transport agent who falls in love with her client, who is a shape-shifter. In the course of explaining the world I’ve created, the conversation turned to realism.
“Don’t you want to go there?”
I gave her a blank look. “Where?”
“To the desert. To see what it feels like to ride a camel, to sleep in a tent on the sand?”
First, the world is fictitious. It can’t be visited. Second, um, no. So I said so.
“I hate camping. It’s enough to be there in my head.”
She was dissatisfied. So she told me a story of how she’d gone to Lake Natron, a major breeding site for flamingos in Africa. (Not her picture, but you get the idea.)
“You know how pretty it looks, with all the birds and the lake?”
And the stink and the noise and the mess, I thought, but nodded. Lake Natron is a brine lake, and most of us have been to estuaries at low tide and have an idea of what that’s like.
“I wasn’t prepared for the experience. I had no idea it would be so loud, all those birds, and the smell! I could hardly breathe!”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “I would have expected that. I’ve been to duck ponds in summer.”
“But the noise!”
“I live with parrots! I’ve been to barnyards of chickens! In the summer, even.”
We stared at each other.
You might recall, I’m MBTI certified, and I play Guess the Type games in my head. That was the moment I realized my brilliant — still brilliant! — friend is likely an ISTP, which is totally cool. But yeah, SP, all the way. Sweet.
My point is, no, I have no desire to go to my fictitious worlds. I can extrapolate. She still thought I needed to go, to get the full sensory experience. And I do do things like that, with some things. I admit, I usually write my characters while wearing a particular “hint” to keep my mind in role. I have, um, props, and I know how to use them. And as much as I want to go to Scotland, it’s for the Islay whisky, not to look at castles. But I’ve felt granite, either on modern buildings or on 200 year old grave stones, and I’ve been in caverns and basements, so I think I can describe what a dungeon sounds and smells like. No need to go there, even if it existed.
And as a writer, I feel I should be able to weave together pieces of things to create a convincing whole, without having to go there. Did Wells actually time travel? Did McCaffrey actually go to Pern and the Red Star? Likely not. Why should I? How else is anyone supposed to write fantasy?