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The Stupid 365 Project, Day 57: Setting the Setting November 26th, 2010
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The Stupid 365 Project, Day 57: Setting the Setting November 26th, 2010 
Okay, I’m here. Despite the picture up there, the sky is as blue as a bachelor’s button. That little flock of clouds is over to the West, where the sun is in the act of packing it in for 12 hours. In the past 30 minutes, the temperature has dropped 15 degrees. I’m in one of the world’s nicest coffee houses, the oddly named Wonder Garden. Everything I could want: great coffee; fast, free wi-fi; a view of a mostly empty desert street in one direction and those hills up there in the other. Comfortable chairs, tables of the right height for a keyboard. Unfortunate music, by which I mean big-hat country. I love country, but not this country. By the way, anyone who condescends to Taylor Swift needs an ear transplant. She wrote “Invisible” and “The Best Day” when she was eighteen, okay? She was writing great songs at fourteen. If she keeps it together and stays away from John Mayer and all the other John Mayers (John Mayer was the model for Doug), she’ll amaze us (well, me, anyway) for thirty years. One of the things I’ve left out of PULPED is the quality of the light up here, how hard it is. Details are sharp, shadows have edges that look pencilled, the sky is China blue straight overhead, paling toward the horizons. The sun feels closer. I’ve been here two hours and I’m already feeling the difference between the amount of work I put into describing Bangkok in the Poke books versus the effort I’ve put into Joshua Tree (actually, Twentynine Palms) in PULPED — or, for that matter, the San Fernando Valley in CRASHED. I think it might be because I still have the “lookit” impulse about Bangkok — as long as I’ve been living there, it still makes my jaw drop. But so does Joshua Tree, and, in its own way, the Valley. Maybe I should imagine that I’m writing about those locations for a Thai readership, just to prevent myself from taking for granted a shared frame of reference that would make me skip, or miss entirely, the single detail that might make a whole page work better. This might be a writing principle I should follow: Write the setting as though no reader has never seen it. Why not? If I over-describe, there’s always the delete key. Thinking about CRASHED, there are only really a few descriptive passages of the valley, the best of them on the drive from Wattles’ place to Trey’s, a nice conjunction of an awful little strip mall with some pepper trees — hold on while I find it: I made the turn, past what has become a normal Valley strip mall: dry cleaner, Mexican restaurant, Korean restaurant, liquor store, massage parlor, check cashing outlet. Then there were pepper trees on either side of the road, old ones, trailing long green streamers to the ground. There should be more of that. Unless a book takes place entirely inside the characters’ heads, there should probably always be more of that. Place should be a character, and if it’s not, then that should be a conscious decision on the writer’s part, not just a thoughtless omission. Material isn’t that easy to come by, and it’s stupid not to write the physical environment, not only because it provides a sort of visual lattice for the reader, but also because it’s full of story potential. I’m talking to myself here — this isn’t intended as advice to other writers. It’s something I should just keep in mind. The question is valid at all times: Where are we? Just because the location isn’t “exotic,” just because it’s not something I’d instinctively point a camera at, that doesn’t mean it’s not interesting. In fact, if it’s not interesting, why the hell am I writing about it? This is an important message for PULPED. I’ve put a lot of effort into describing the mystery/thriller limbo Simeon is stuck in, in part because you’ve obviously never seen it, in part because describing it in detail helps me to see it, and in part just because it’s fun. But the Twentynine Palms Madison occupies is a sandy, dusty, fragmentary, ugly little town that just happens to be over a rise of hills from one of the world’s most spectacular landscapes. But the reader needs to see Twentynine Palms just as clearly as se (remember se? I thought not.) sees Simeon’s limbo. So I’ve already had one insight about the book, and I haven’t even unpacked yet.
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