psychogeography

for fiction writers

Welcome back, fellow explorers of Sequel Country, where last week we took a breather on a plateau. This week we are descending into a broken landscape where weird, knobbly columns of rock stand above sandy, weathered gullies, and as we descend into them, the purple heather gives way to bracken and moss, giving off a fresh, grassy smell. As we pick our way between the boulders, our footsteps muffled by the sandy soil, the temperature cools as we descend into the shadows, and we’re constantly forced to change direction to find a way through the maze of weathered rocks. A cloud passes over the sun and we’re no longer sure which way we’re facing, or what could be waiting for us just behind the next eroded corner.

Landscapes, natural or built, give us feelings. That’s what I’ve been thinking most about this week as I wrestle with my sequel. As soon as we find ourselves in a new place, we start to make judgements about it and how we feel about it. We might revise or even reverse them later, especially if we have good or bad experiences there, but we always have some reaction.

There’s a handy word for this, psychogeography, coined in the middle of the last century by a Frenchman called Guy Debord. It sounds like a science, and indeed has been picked up by academia, but it mostly remains an informal subject, with an element of playfulness and openness (and a useful vagueness of definition) that seems to have largely evaded academic rigour. Debord and his followers were mainly interested in the built environment, and recommended drifting (in French called a dérive) around cities to be receptive to understanding the psychological effects of different kinds of urban area.

I first heard of it some years ago through my activism in OpenStreetMap, when one of our regular peripatetic conferences included a psychogeography walk to take in the sights, sounds and smells of the city it was held in that year. Since then I’ve read much of what has been written about it, since it intersects two of my main interests, map-making and writing. All my life, I’ve enjoyed looking at maps and imagining the places they depict, which one could frame as imagining the psychogeography (rather than, say, daydreaming); and whenever I’ve visited new cities around the world, I’ve always enjoyed having a good walk all over them, learning how they fit together and “getting a feel for the place” which certainly meets the definition of the dérive.

It also interests me as a writer because I’ve always enjoyed books which convey a strong sense of the places in which the story happens. In fact, I often refuse to watch films based on books I’ve enjoyed, because I prefer my own mental images and mind-maps of their settings over whatever the location scout came up with (plus modern commercial movies almost never linger on places, because to drop below anything less than a frenetic pace would apparently have modern audiences criticising them as “slow”, as if that’s a bad thing). Of course mental maps aren’t just about topography, they’re about the feelings we associate with places too: well-described fictional places are a fiction of psychogeography.

One of the main motivations for me in setting my debut novel Parallel Lines in the part of Yorkshire where I grew up was that I wanted to write about what the place felt like in the 1970s and 80s when the novel is set – which was very different from how it feels now. It’s a unique place, very flat and fertile, and rich in coal reserves which is why my village was surrounded by collieries and power stations: you could see three power stations from the rise above my village (Ferrybridge, Eggborough, and in the distance, Drax, or at least the steam from its cooling towers). I have memories of spending sunny summer days biking around the country lanes and swimming in the pools at Selby (an old-fashioned one), Kippax and Knottingley (both new ones built for their large mining communities). So I put some of that in the book. I very lightly fictionalised the place, but anyone familiar with the area would easily see the real place in their mind’s eye. I fictionalise places partly because it amuses me (for example Ferrybridge became Airebridge, since there’s a bridge over the river Aire there, but it’s also a pun), and partly to make it clear that the story and characters, unlike the place, are entirely my own invention. I hoped to paint a pretty faithful picture of the place, but the characters are not based to any substantial degree on real people, let alone real people who lived there when I did; they were devised to serve the story I had to tell.

Recently, I’ve been thinking that psychogeography may be the key to my sequel. I decided more than a year ago that I want to set it in Newcastle’s Ouseburn Valley, an interesting and atmospheric post-industrial space, which even today has a lot left over from when it was densely industrial (abandoned warehouses, a large scrapyard, and green spaces where slums were cleared in the 1930s). When I lived in Newcastle in the 1980s/90s, less than a mile away near Chillingham Road, Byker Valley (as it was locally known) was a deeply sketchy area. Which is great news, as a novelist! I’ve begun to map out my fictionalised version of the valley, which is helping me to push forward some ideas for the plot, just as I’d hoped. One thing I noticed is that the valley is exactly half-way between the two nearest Metro stations, which probably helps to explain why it is only now, 40 years later, starting to become somewhere that developers want to build new housing. I briefly considered adding a fictional new Metro station for it near Union Road (a good name for a Metro station, right?), but then realised that its presence would make the lawless and abandoned nature of the valley much less plausible. The chaos, the decay, and the irony of the authorities abandoning places like that and then not much liking how people behave there, those are the ingredients I want for my story.

And that’s psychogeography for fiction in a nutshell: at heart it’s the idea that places affect the people who inhabit them, and thereby, places shape stories.

Looked at in that way, the flat plains of central Yorkshire aren’t just interesting in their own right, but shape the lives of the characters I wrote about in that book. Growing up in a rural area, there was no access to information about sexuality, certainly no way to access porn, and no possibility of meeting anyone your own age who didn’t go to the same school as you. When my characters want to sneak off somewhere to experiment sexually, they don’t go to anywhere in the built environment (there being nothing much in the village but a couple of pubs and the Womens’ Institute), but to a wedge of forgotten land between a stream and a railway line. And the one who dreams of escaping far away, dreams of rail travel.

Not all stories are about place, but the ones I’m most interested in writing about are. So for me, psychogeography is a key ingredient. If you know anyone else who might be interested in seeing their writing this way, please recommend this column to them:

We seem to have made it through the Valley of Psychogeography unharmed! See you next week in the next, even weirder stretch of Sequel Country.