Sometimes, when you’re planning a scene in a piece of fiction, you feel that you really need to be where the action takes place, and see the scene as your character sees it.
Not so hard to achieve when your characters are conveniently inhabiting your own home town. You can hop in the car, or walk down the street, and in minutes immerse yourself in a setting. Being there, seeing it from your character’s eyes, and noting the dozens of tiny details – including the sounds and smells – that they would experiece, help you bring a scene to life.
But writing about what you know doesn’t mean you always have to set a story in your own back yard. It helps to have personal experience of a location, but if you can’t be there in person during the imagining, the next best thing is to be there virtually.
This is where Google Street View comes in. Street View functions as part of Google Maps. It lets you zoom right in on a location, then switch from a traditional map view into a view taken from one of Google’s camera cars. You can rotate around the street, move up and down it, even turn the next corner and see what your character would see if they went there too.
It’s not limited to towns and cities either. Major roads in the country are covered too.
Perhaps this is best demonstrated with an example from a story of my own. It’s set in France, with one of the critical scenes involving an accident on a county road in Brittany.
I’ve travelled in this area and had a pretty good idea where the accident should occur. I knew from Michelin maps, and from my own memory, what the D-769A outside Huelgoat was like, and in my mind I had a clear idea of how the accident was going to unfold. But I needed to find a blind corner on the road, and I wanted to make sure that there was a earthen-sided ditch at the side of the road with a steep embankment rising beyond that.
With no pictures of my own available, I decided to try google street view. The embedded image below shows the stretch of road where the accident occurs.
Imagine it’s raining hard, with a mist hanging over the hillside. Spray is being thrown into your face by passing traffic as you struggle uphill on a tandem. You’re being passed by a large agricultural vehicle when a delivery van rounds the corner at the top of the hill. To avoid a head-on collision with the delivery van, the tractor pulls sharply back in to the right. But the rear of the vehicle is still level with you and it’s massive, studded rear tyre veers towards you. For you there is only one place to go to avoid the tyre.
With Google Street View, I was able to examine this spot from every angle. I could see the inevitable outcome, and feel the result. Not all of the detail makes its way into the final draft, but in my mind I now have a rich image of the scene.
That’s what Google Street View does – it takes you right into the place where the action happens, and it lets you add layers to the story because of what you’ve seen. The mental image was so sharp, it played like a movie in my mind.