Writing About the City You Live In

Ask someone to describe a city they spent a long weekend in and they will talk for twenty minutes. Ask about the city they have lived in for fifteen years and they will often pause, then tell you the traffic is bad and the rent is worse. Everything they know is in there somewhere. It has just stopped looking like material.

Much of the advice on writing about cities assumes the writer has just arrived, with fresh eyes and a new notebook. We have given some of that advice ourselves, in Writing About a Place You Visited. A resident has the opposite problem and the opposite advantage: too little surprise, and a depth of knowledge no visitor can collect in a fortnight. This piece is about what to do with both.

What living somewhere does to your eyes

Familiarity works like a filter. You stop registering the things that never change, which is useful when you are crossing a road and awful when you are trying to write. The shuttered cinema on your way to work was a striking sight in your first month. By the third year it is just where you turn left.

So the first draft of a home-city piece tends to fail in a recognisable way. It is full of opinions and short of things to look at. The writer knows the neighbourhood has changed, knows the council got the new junction wrong, knows the good bakery moved, and assumes the reader can see the streets these verdicts are about. The reader cannot. They need the street first and the verdict after.

Making your own streets strange again

You cannot will yourself into seeing freshly, but you can change the conditions. A few changes tend to work:

• Change the hour. Walk your usual route at half past five in the morning, or on a public holiday. A district you only know at commuting time is a district you half know. Who is out? What is being delivered, hosed down, unlocked?
• Ride to the end of the line. Most residents use a small slice of their own city. Take a bus you have never needed as far as it goes, then walk part of the way back.
• Answer a newcomer’s questions. Imagine a cousin is moving here next month. Write down what you would tell them that no guidebook would: which side of the street stays shaded in August, the market day when parking disappears, the pronunciation that marks someone as new in town.
• Ask why about the ordinary. Why does that road curve for no visible reason? Who is the square named after? Old maps, the local library’s collection and planning notices will often answer questions you have been walking past for years.

Whatever you try, take notes as if you were travelling, with the date, the time and the exact place. Residents rarely bother, because the city will still be there tomorrow. It will, though not in quite the same state, and the note you skipped today is the detail you will want in three years.

Your real advantage is time

A visitor can tell readers what a street looks like during one week in April. You can tell them what it looked like before the flyover came down, how the corner shop has changed hands and languages, what the river does in a wet February. Few things give writing about place more authority than having watched it for years.

Some of the best-known city writing comes from exactly this kind of attention. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs described the daily comings and goings on her own stretch of Hudson Street in New York, which she called a sidewalk ballet, and built an argument about how cities work on what she saw from her doorstep. Nobody passing through could have written those pages.

You can use time as a structure too. Choose one thing and follow it across the years: a bus route, a shopfront, a length of canal. Then be strict with yourself, because memory flatters the past and long-term residents are especially prone to believing the city was better when they were younger. Check what you can against old photographs and newspaper archives. Where you cannot check, write as I remember it and let the reader weigh that.

Two readers, one piece

A piece about your own city has two audiences. The neighbour knows the place and will be bored by explanation, and will also spot every mistake. The stranger has never been there and gets lost at the first local name. Most drafts serve one and abandon the other.

The usual fix is to explain things in passing, inside the story, instead of stopping to define them. “We met at the old bridge, which everyone still calls that although it was rebuilt decades ago” tells the stranger what they need and gives the neighbour a small nod of recognition. Use the local names, since they are part of the texture, but give each one a little context the first time it appears.

To test this, hand the draft to someone who has never visited and ask them to mark the first place they felt lost. Then ask someone from your own street to mark the first thing they would argue with. Both marks are useful. Long pieces on FullySky get a table of contents built from their headings (see features), so a stranger can also see the shape of your city before setting off into it.

You have to live here afterwards

The visitor goes home. You will stand in a queue behind the person you described. That changes the ethics of the work, and it should. Someone can be identified on a single street without being named: the woman who runs the launderette, the man at the house with the blue shutters. Your neighbours will recognise them at once, even if a distant reader never could. Our community guidelines ask writers to leave other people’s private lives out of their work, and a small neighbourhood is where a harmless-looking detail most easily stops being harmless.

The other risk is speaking for everybody. Your hours, your income, your language and your postcode decide which city you actually live in, and the person three streets away may be living in another. Be wary of sentences that begin people here think. Which people? Say where you stand, say what you cannot see from there, and go and talk to someone whose version differs from yours. A home-city piece that admits its own edges is more believable than one claiming to hold the whole place.

A city is too big for one piece

The portrait of my city is a tempting assignment and a hard one to survive, because it has no natural limit and nothing to decide what gets left out. Smaller frames work better: one street, one winter, one argument over a demolished market. A narrow subject lets you use what you know in depth, which is the thing only a resident can offer.

You also have a freedom no visitor has, which is that you can go back next week. A city you live in suits serial writing unusually well: a year on one tram line, say, or a season of visits to every bridge. We wrote about keeping that kind of project alive in Writing a Series Over Months, and readers who want to follow along can do so through a writer’s RSS feed.

If you want somewhere to begin, think of the thing you walked past today without looking at it. Go back with a notebook. Write down what is there, then ask how long it has been like that and why nobody you know can tell you.