"Anita and I were driving around the back roads near Key Largo, looking for the places where the characters in my story would end up. I wanted to describe those roads in detail, by name. I wanted to know exactly where Laura, the narrator of ‘Noir’, would drive. ‘I was driving us out of the city,’ Laura explains, ‘staying off the highway, down Old Cutler Road to Card Sound Road, the saw grass and dust edging the asphalt, and every now and then, a barely visible side road, overgrown, that would lead maybe to a lime quarry, or maybe just to beaten swamp and then the ocean again.’"
I wrote this for Research Notes, Necessary Fiction's series that invites authors to describe their process for a recent book. http://necessaryfiction.com/blog/ResearchNotesThisWaytoDepartures