Visualizing Locations

I wrote a scene for my new novel that takes place in the den of a man who collects paper cars. Without effort I was able to visualize every aspect of this room. The rows and rows of shelves of mostly-white little cars. The dim room lighting contrasting the sharp work bench lighting. The smell of glue and color printer ink drying. These images came alive in my head and flowed down on to the page.

But what do you do if this doesn’t happen? What if you are writing a location that doesn’t just spring to mind? How do you explore this unknown place of your own imagination?

I had this experience writing the very first chapter of my new novel. It takes place in a bar that required a specific layout to facilitate the interaction of the characters. As I wrote I kept running into conflicts of space and would have to rearrange the furniture and sometimes even the walls to make the action work.

I finally gave up and started from scratch, but before I wrote a word a created a diagram of the bar. I used a free flowcharting program I download which had a floorplan module. And it worked. As I started putting things in place I saw immediately what was wrong. I changed the rooms from being square to being long rectangles, the depth of the rooms, front and back, being much longer than they were wide. Then everything fell into place. The cramped width created the tension that was previously missing from the room, and the exaggerated length gave the trip to the back room much more the feel of a journey.

I should note that I have little artistic ability. The point isn’t the quality of the drawing I created, it is that using this tool helped me visual a space that I need to be just perfect, and it worked.