In a stranger-than-fiction moment, I stumbled into a scene from my second novel, To the Left of Death. This was an unplanned visit to a story setting. One that I only realized months after booking the hotel and days before leaving for my trip. Here’s what happened.
When writing fiction, I tend to create my own towns, loosely based on real places. In To the Left of Death, some characters take a road trip to New York City.
While I’ve visited New York City many times, we usually stay downtown, near Times Square or the East Village. In the book, the trip would start in the East Village, then head uptown. I wasn’t sure where. I needed an upscale neighborhood that would be out-of-the way for tourists, but not too far from where they began.
I stumbled on the perfect spot in the Upper East Side. It had a hotel, a middle school, and an upscale apartment building. So I used Google’s street views to help me get a feel for the area. (I wrote about that in an earlier blog post.)
Day Fifteen
If you’ve read To the Left of Death, you can find the scene in the chapter titled Day Fifteen. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that the main character subconsciously chooses the hotel, then goes for a walk and realizes why.
During that walk, she quickly finds herself in front of a middle school with closed gates. She then trails a passing family back around the block until they enter a sushi bar. Walking on, she soon ends up outside a familiar apartment building. As she stands on the corner, she faces a pharmacy, where she sees something shocking… (Spoilers!)
Those places all exist. It was wild to show up at the hotel, follow my character’s steps, and see those locations in person. Especially since I had booked the hotel without realizing its significance. It had seemed vaguely familiar, but I didn’t know why until I looked at the surrounding restaurants and shops a few days before the trip. I could not stop laughing when I figured it out!
Visiting My Fictional World
While we were in the city, it didn’t work out for us to eat at the sushi bar (we did have good sushi near Lincoln Center). But it was fun to see the places in person. Since we were there from Thursday to Sunday, we waited until Saturday morning to take some pictures with my book. I wasn’t keen on taking pictures of a middle school while classes were in session!
Because everything was within a block of the hotel, we passed those locations every time we went out, and it never failed to amuse me. It also strongly rekindled my dream of living in NYC, but a check of the uptown real estate helped to curb that. (How do people afford those co-op fees?! $8k a month?!)
We took the subway multiple times during our trip, just as my characters did in my book. And the timing held up to what I’d found in my research. It’s amazing how much you can learn about a place without leaving your home–and even better to see it in real life!
A Story of Survival and Recovery
If you haven’t read To the Left of Death, please take a moment to check it out! It’s a first-person story of a woman using her love of art to help her recover from a traumatic event, though her art also threatens to pull her deeper into the mystery of that tragic day. You can learn more here: To the Left of Death
“To the Left of Death by Susan Quilty is a caring story about how we must not mistake re-creating the past for creating a present.” – Samantha Hui for Independent Book Review (Full review here)
“Due to the evocative prose and masterful use of the first-person point of view, the story is an emotional voyage into the human mind.” – Keyla Damaer for Readers’ Favorite (Full review here)
Wild! And very cool!