A guest series curated by Jeffrey Condran. Project intro here.

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The World That Matters

by Stewart O’Nan

When I’m writing a novel, I like to do location scouting as if I were shooting a movie.  If possible, at the very beginning, or at least early in the first draft, I go to the actual setting of the book and drive around taking pictures, looking for where I might set scenes.  As Laurie Anderson says, “Let’s put some mountains here so the characters have something to fall off of.”

It rarely happens that I find readymade settings.  Or maybe it’s that the ones in my head are better, more evocative than the ones I run across in real life.  It could also be that I’m a terrible location scout—impatient to get back to my desk and the world of the characters. Continue reading →