Writing One Day, Nicholls used places in Edinburgh he knew well. But in researching Us he made use of Street View to zoom around cities he had never visited. Not all authors know their settings at first hand, so what is the secret of creating a convincing sense of place?

Many years ago, while writing my first novel, I took a train to find the house where my fictional character lived. I brought with me a notebook, pen and camera and walked the streets from the station down to the sea, found a spot that felt right and took a great many photographs of quite staggering dullness. In retrospect, the expedition was probably little more than an exercise in procrastination. As with so many first novels, the central character was not unlike my teenage self, the house and town not dissimilar to where I had grown up, and the day might just as usefully have been spent looking at old photographs, or even writing. Still, it felt important to make the journey, find the address and trace the character’s route from that house to the pier so that I could place pins in a map and know “here’s the house, the takeaway, the pub, it all happened right here”, even if it hadn’t really happened at all. Little of that research found its way on to the page directly. Reading the novel now, through the gaps in my fingers, there is nothing you could call descriptive prose and the fictional address I attributed to the house, 16 Archer Street, sounds horribly made up. But if the expedition was a little foolish and pretentious, it still felt important to go, because wasn’t this what proper writers were meant to do?

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Cut to 12 years later and I’m writing my fourth novel, Us, in which the narrator, Douglas Petersen, is hurtling towards Bologna airport in order to catch a flight to Madrid, where he hopes to be reunited with his estranged son. I have never visited Bologna but a few clicks of the computer mouse bring me a thousand images of the railway station, inside and out. The online website has already told me the train’s arrival time on the day of the fictional events, and a few more clicks will bring up a map of the fastest taxi route to the airport. Zooming in on the station, I can take the hand of the little unisex figure in the right-hand corner, drop it in the ticket hall and, in view mode, click through the doors and find a taxi. These images were captured on an overcast day, but it’s not beyond my imagination to picture August heat as I click through the route, looking left and right, along a nondescript urban ring road to the small airport, which is close to the city and looks like almost every other small airport I have ever seen.

In the finished novel, this journey will take up four sentences. My virtual mapping of the route will have almost no discernible impact on the prose that I’ve already sketched out – as adjectives go, “nondescript” doesn’t paint much of a picture – and, once again, what I justify as research might just as easily be dismissed as the writer’s tendency to arse around. It’s certainly less costly and time-consuming than visiting Bologna, but it still feels a little like cheating. What if I’ve missed something? Isn’t being there part of the job?

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Not for all writers, no. Kafka never saw Amerika, Bellow wrote Henderson the Rain King before visiting Africa and EL James stumbled on no red rooms in Seattle, exploring on the internet instead. Stef Penney’s fine Canadian-set novel The Tenderness of Wolves was researched in the reading room of the British Library, a fact that was much reported at the time, as if not visiting was somehow dishonest. That novel is set in the 1860s, and for writers of historical, fantastical or futuristic fiction, physical distance is just part of the challenge; a train ticket, a notepad and camera won’t help you much if you’re trying to conjure up Wolf Hall, Westeros or the Republic of Gilead.

Besides, precision is not always the desired aim. Muriel Spark’s Edinburgh, Peckham and Kensington are specific and detailed right down to the bus routes, yet one of her most brilliant and unsettling books, The Driver’s Seat, follows her central character from the “north” on a holiday to a kind of generalised “southern” every-city. There’s a Metropole hotel, a post office, public squares, a museum with “ancient pavements”, but the setting really might be Athens or Rome, Palermo or Barcelona. Simultaneously vivid and vague, the effect is disorientating and absolutely appropriate for that queasy and unsettling story.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Hardy’s Wessex also lies outside of time’ … Carey Mulligan in Far from the Madding Crowd. Photograph: REX Shutterstock

The success of such imagined, unvisitable worlds might argue against the necessity of first-hand experience. After all, the reader has an imagination, too, and merely to write the word “Bologna” or “Southend” or “42nd Street” will call up an image from the innumerable mental picture postcards we carry with us. Even on the page, the streets and squares of Shakespeare’s Verona feel distinct from his Venice or Vienna, despite the minimal description. If the reader can supply the characters with a face and voice then surely they’re capable of painting in the background?

Yet even when the reader’s imagination can be relied on, there’s still the author’s anxiety about getting it horribly wrong and, like Shakespeare, marooning the characters on Bohemia’s non-existent coast. Take the (apocryphal?) author who mistook the map’s ring-road for some mighty river and sent his characters walking there. Besides, research is not just a matter of fact-checking. A novelist’s deep immersion in a place is often part of the appeal, the sense that not only were they there, but things happened to them, and it’s impossible to read about Mavis Gallant’s Paris, Isherwood’s Berlin or any number of locations in Conrad and Greene and not feel as if that environment has been both observed and experienced at first hand; fiction as first-class travel-writing, with the author as our man in Havana.

Meanwhile, other writers create familiar worlds that are precisely conveyed, mappable almost, while remaining overtly fictitious; Middlemarch, Cranford, Barchester and on through Tilling, Hardborough and Ambridge. It’s an approach that works better for self-contained provincial communities than city life. A renamed shadow-London, Moscow or Rome might run the risk of seeming absurd – what would you call it? What are its landmarks, its history? How could you begin to make it up? Consequently when those provincial characters leave their fictionalised homes to travel, the real-world locations seem to materialise around them. In Great Expectations, Dickens’s London locations are characteristically precise and significant, so that Jaggers lives on the south side of Gerrard Street, Wemmick’s castle is in Walworth and Estella resides on Richmond Green, but further from the capital the specifics disappear and we enter the “marsh country”; vividly conveyed, geographically obscure, it’s enough to know that Satis House is “uptown”. A little digging places the model for that famous churchyard in real-life Cooling, Kent, but once outside London there are many fewer pins in the real-world map.

Perhaps no author has played these geographical games with more enthusiasm than Thomas Hardy, not just creating a fictional town but reimagining an entire region as a stage-set in which to play out his dramas, the region expanding with the number and scope of the stories. He describes Wessex “a partly real, partly dream country ... which people can go to, take a house in and write to the papers from”, but that “dream” element is essential in fiction that is sometimes a recreation of the realities of rural life – its farming practices, rituals, superstitions and dialect – sometimes fanciful, romanticised and melodramatic. In contrast to Dickens, Hardy’s landscapes start to blur as we approach London. Try to imagine Bathsheba or Tess or Jude on Regent Street; they become harder to envision, like stage actors disappearing into the darkness of the wings. Why go to London anyway? “There was quite enough human nature in Wessex for one man’s literary purpose.” Adding to this sense of self-containment, Hardy’s Wessex also lies outside of time; a novel like Far from the Madding Crowd is stripped of current events and topical references; even the dates on the gravestone are missing.

Hardy was amused and flattered by readers’ attempts to find real-life addresses in a highly fictionalised world – “I do not contradict these keen hunters of the real” – and cheerfully open about his inspiration, approving the publication of A Handbook to the Wessex Country of Thomas Hardy by his friend Hermann Lea. If Hardy was ever obliged to make adjustments to the reality, he was quick to own up, confessing in his introduction to Madding Crowd that “Everdene farm has taken a witch’s ride of a mile or more from its actual location.” Later editions of the Wessex novels even came embellished with a map, because what could be more authoritative and informative than a map? Like family trees at the start of a novel, maps contribute to that sense of a carefully constructed alternative reality and – even better than a map of Middle Earth or the Seven Kingdoms – the Wessex map allows the reader to overlay the ghost- and real-worlds, so that the Hardy enthusiast can spend a wonderful holiday re-enacting Tess Durbeyfield’s treks, though in more appropriate footwear and with less tragic consequences. It’s an enjoyable conceit, a game between author and reader; feel free to imagine the streets and landmarks of Dorchester, Winchester and Salisbury, but let’s agree to call them something else. Of course there are approximations and variations, and the map is not suitable for use by pedants; it would be too much to rename Stonehenge, but if Wintoncester is Winchester, why is Southampton, further west, still Southampton, Bristol still Bristol, Bath Bath? Because, Hardy answers, those large towns lie outside the outline of the traditional kingdom. They are offstage, and while a character might visit Bristol, Bath or London, the reader can’t follow them. It almost seems as if the characters have a fictionalising effect on the settings, so that if Tess were to meet her end in Southampton rather than Wincanton, that city would acquire a new name, too.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The most obvious inadequacy of this approach is that if the author doesn’t leave their desk, then nothing happens to the author’ … David Nicholls. Photograph: Hal Shinnie

One of the unintended consequences of these overlapping worlds is tourism. After following in Tess’s footsteps, why not track Mrs Dalloway around Bloomsbury or Leopold Bloom around Dublin on Bloomsday? The phenomenon is particularly apparent outside the most famous postal address in fiction, 221B Baker Street, an address that did not exist in Conan Doyle’s time. Perhaps he was wary of inconveniencing the residents, anticipating the thousands of tourists who now queue to enter the Sherlock Holmes Museum, seemingly indifferent to the fact that the current holder of the fictional address actually stands at No 239. An even stranger example of our desire to mark fictional events on a map can be found in a dark, cramped courtyard in Verona, where hundreds of tourists congregate beneath Juliet’s balcony. Who cares that it was attached to the building in the 1930s, that the house never belonged to a Capulet family, that Shakespeare probably never came here and that the play’s text doesn’t even mention a balcony? It’s now part of the itinerary for those who would like to think “it happened right here, or somewhere like it”, to recite the lines and write something sentimental on the wall in the space provided. In Us, Douglas Petersen stumbles on this spot by accident on a sweltering August afternoon and rails against the ridiculous artifice of it all, unaware that he doesn’t really exist either.

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While there’s clearly no agreed method for an author to acquire a sense of place, I’ve always wanted to know a location at first hand, and have always been able not only to place a pin in the map but also to specify a date and time, so that the flat on Rankeillor Street in Edinburgh where Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew wake on 15 July 1988 is the same sublet flat that I shared with 15 other students during that summer’s fringe festival. This is not to say that the events are autobiographical – that’s rarely the case – but experience provides a sort of sense-memory, an authenticity that hopefully finds its way on to the page, because if the background is tangible and real, then hopefully events in the foreground will seem more plausible, too. Mapping and timing the journeys also seems important, and while writing One Day I stomped from Rankeillor Street up Arthur’s Seat then down to the New Town and on to the point on Hanover Street where the final conversation takes place. I can’t claim that the re‑enactment had a huge effect on the text; the only detail I remember lifting from life was the cock-and-balls graffiti that someone had scrawled in green Sharpie on the trig point on Arthur’s Seat. Did they bring the pen with them with this in mind? I wondered, and had Emma wonder this, too.

Us is a kind of road movie by rail, a disastrous grand tour of Europe during which Douglas tries to save his marriage and salvage his relationship with his son. Douglas is an obsessive planner and it seemed appropriate that the novel should also function as an itinerary, so that it might be perfectly possible to retrace the final holiday of the Petersen family, see the same paintings, catch the same trains, sit on the same benches but without suffering the same emotional breakdown. The settings were to include cities I knew quite well – Paris, Venice – others, like Bologna, that I didn’t know at all and a few that I’d visited just once, many years before. It seemed safe to assume that Siena hadn’t changed a great deal since 1992, but nevertheless a certain amount of time was spent Googling my way around Europe in the name of research and at times this was very helpful indeed. There’s a set-piece in which the novel’s hero tries to see all of Florence in the 45-minute gap between trains, and it was reassuring to stand a virtual Douglas outside Santa Maria Novella station then set him running, clicking through the streets at something approaching his manic pace, looking up and down to answer certain questions along the way. How much of the Duomo can you see from the corner of Via dei Rondenelli? Can you glimpse the Ponte Vecchio from Piazza della Signoria? As a way of experiencing Florence this was, of course, entirely inadequate, a fish-eyed lens view with no sounds or smells or interaction, but it provided confirmation, and in the same way I was able to find the precise spot where Douglas proposes marriage to Connie, see the view from the Accademia bridge, sit on a particular bench outside the Prado and know that I wasn’t too far off, that it was still as I remembered.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess in One Day, with Edinburgh in the background. Photograph: Allstar

The most obvious inadequacy of such an approach is that if the author doesn’t leave their desk, then nothing happens to the author. Some writers have fun with this mingling of personal and fictional experience, and I enjoyed both Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, books where a blurring of author and narrator invites the reader to think, my God, did this stuff really happen? Even when the work is unequivocally fictional, the author wants to bring something home from the journey, a useful souvenir. Visiting a book fair in Moscow I found myself sharing a table in the hotel’s breakfast room with some noisy and self-confident armament manufacturers and this encounter, heavily fictionalised, found its way into Us, as did the smallest hotel room in Venice, a heavy, salty meal in Munich and the sleepless night that followed, an awkward encounter with the bikers outside a bar in Amsterdam. There’s that familiar feeling: this is an awful experience, maybe I can use it.

For other episodes in the novel, clicking was clearly not going to be enough and so between first and second drafts I made a number of frantic journeys to fill in some gaps, experiencing Douglas’s exhaustion on a long hike around the Louvre, taking the train from Paris to Amsterdam and from Munich across the Alps to stand beneath that ridiculous balcony in Verona, and while these journeys undoubtedly improved the sketched-out versions, I hope I’ve avoided another potential pitfall of “being there”, the tendency to cram all the research on to the page. “He found his seat on the train, 47C, the fabric of which was of a vibrant cobalt blue striped with chlorophyllic green, soft to the touch but statically charged and still carrying a trace of the previous occupant’s floral eau de cologne. He opened his newspaper and noted how the page’s proportions differed from the familiar ...” Every detail declares authenticity but it’s the literary equivalent of looking at someone’s holiday snaps. The best writers of place, I think, are those that select a few choice details or a single image, and for me the model for this kind of economy must be Penelope Fitzgerald, equally good on places that she knew at first hand and foreign, historical settings; the household washday that instantly establishes 18th-century Germany in The Blue Flower or the laundry frozen hard enough to knock out a tooth in The Bookshop’s windblown Suffolk town – place and time established with a single stroke.

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Geographical details in a fictional world allow the reader to fix a spot and believe “it happened here”. Many writers fight this kind of literalism, obscuring detail or creating unvisitable worlds, while others create an inbetween world, a place the reader can recognise without knowing the co-ordinates. My own inclination is to continue to go there if I can, to find points on the map and take those dull, dull photographs, because the research is often as much about reassuring the author as convincing the reader. Like a director scouting for film locations, the author can look around, take it in and stage the scene. The fictional can be grounded, just so long as everything is right.

In 1921, James Joyce wrote to his aunt Josephine Murray in Dublin and asked her to do some research on his behalf. “Is it possible for an ordinary person to climb over the railings of No 7 Eccles Street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within two or three feet of the ground and drop unhurt? I saw it done myself but by a man of rather athletic build. I require this information in detail in order to determine the wording of a paragraph.” We now live in an age where possession of a stranger’s postcode allows us to peer into their windows, and a quick search on the internet reveals that No 7 Eccles Street, Leopold and Molly’s house, has long gone, and all that remains, the old front door, is now on display at the James Joyce Centre. Were Joyce writing now, he could have jogged his memory without leaving Paris, but it’s reassuring to note that even someone as steeped in a city as Joyce still felt the need to take a look – still needed confirmation that he had got things absolutely right.

• David Nicholls’s Us is out in paperback from Hodder.