I get the joke, but as a small-town girl myself, I kinda know where this is coming from. People who live in small towns love it when their town gets noticed by the wider world. They tend to revere people who 'make it' who originally came from their town. (We had an Olympic gold-medal speedskater from our town when I was a child, and the furore didn't die for years.) They love it when their town gets mentioned (in a good way) by the media. I think they love not being ignored. And I can assure you, if somebody writes a book about their town, it will get stocked on bookshelves (if they still have a bookstore) and promoted via other means as well. And heaven help anybody who gets stuff wrong.
Well, this is how I see it. Let's say I'm writing about a guy, like myself, who ends up somewhere in some place I've never been to for a few days. You can't expect my narrator to give you too many accurate specifics, definitely not in terms of geography.
Actually, you've hit on an angle I'm using for my next novel. In my two new locations (Boston, and a fictional small town in Nova Scotia ...along with real Halifax, which I have been to, along with many other real small towns) my characters will be 'visitors.' It's easier to write from the perspective of a visitor, especially if you've actually been one yourself. (OR ...from the perspective of a settler, but a relatively new one.) You write about what you would see and experience while visiting. You don't necessarily need to know the whole history. The problem comes when you try to write a character who is established in a place, when you don't actually know the place very well yourself. Maybe some people don't mind whalloping inaccuracies, but I'm not one of them. And even if you live somewhere for a while, this doesn't necessarily mean you understand the local culture. You just observe it, but you don't necessarily know where it came from, or why people do what they do. That's fine, if you're writing a visiting character, but beware doing this if you're pretending to be a native inhabitant. Much better to go the route of making up a town or location SIMILAR to the one you want to re-create. As I said in an earlier post, this isn't a revolutionary hare-brained idea. It's been done for years and years by many well-respected and famous authors—such as Mark Twain, who created the fictional town of St Petersburg, Missouri for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which was based on his own home town of Hannibal, Missouri. This is a long-accepted literary device, created to give the author creative license, while working within a specific 'type' of place.
Yes. This is not something I feel comfortable doing right now. I've shelved off all those potential pieces for when I'm much older.
The bestselling Scottish author Peter May gets quite a bit of schtick from some quarters because he sets many of his thrillers on the Isle of Lewis, where he lived (maybe still lives) for many years. However, there is an undercurrent of local resentment because he's an 'outsider, and doesn't actually portray the way of life very accurately, and uses too many stereotypes.' He's a very popular author, but maybe not so much on Lewis? Because, apparently, he gets the tone wrong. Hard to do. Again, it wouldn't matter if all his characters were visitors or outsiders like himself, but he makes the 'mistake' (if it is a mistake) of creating Lewis natives as some of his main characters without really understanding what makes them tick. And that's where the problems lie. I have to add that I can't say with any conviction that this is a universal opinion on the island—but I've certainly heard it said. It's just the tone, apparently—and the use of what some people feel are stereotypes. Not an easy thing to get right, if you come from outside. You see stuff—maybe even stuff the inhabitants themselves miss—but you won't understand everything you're seeing. However ...if you were to create a fictional island off the north coast of Scotland, and use that as your setting, many of these problems would disappear!
