Talking Location With… author Simon Stephenson – MICHIGAN to CALIFORNIA

20th July 2020

#TalkingLocationWith….. Simon Stephenson, author of Set My Heart to Five. Michigan to California.

Set My Heart To Five, soon to be a major motion picture with Edgar Wright attached to direct, is out by Fourth Estate.

As a reader, I have always been drawn to novels with a strong sense of place. Maybe it comes from a childhood spent reading Robert Louis Stevenson – who could write as convincingly of Treasure Island as our hometown of Edinburgh – or perhaps it is simply a way of travelling without ever having to stray too far from the comforts of home.  Nonetheless, the old maxim is as true for me of fiction as it is for real estate: location, location, location.

As a writer, place is an equally endless inspiration to me.  My first book was a memoir and took in the locations I at that time knew best: Edinburgh, London and Thailand.  I don’t think it is entirely a coincidence that it necessitated a move to another country – and a good many years coming to understand it – for me to finally feel ready to write another book.

That country was the United States, and the book is my new novel, Set My Heart To Five.  Set My Heart To Five takes place in 2054 and tells the story of Jared, an android who learns to feel by watching old movies. Abandoning his pre-programmed work as dentist, Jared sets out for Los Angeles with dreams of writing a movie of his own.

Set My Heart To Five begins in the mid-western college town of Ypsilanti, Michigan.  Jared’s life in Ypsilanti is one of quiet and soul-crushing routine.  Still, Jared is programmed for enthusiasm and thus outspokenly proud of Ypsilanti’s real-life attractions: its phallic water tower and its ‘tridge,’ a bridge that connects three points of land.

Ypsilanti’s role in Set My Heart To Five is to be the place from where Jared leaves, and so I necessarily exaggerated its ordinariness for comic effect.  Mid-westerners are a wryly humorous people, and I suspect they will enjoy the joke.  Still, in making fun of the Midwest’s ordinariness I understand I am entirely missing the point, and so perhaps it is only fair to here allow F. Scott Fitzgerald to explain the allure of his birthplace in what I have always considered some of the most beautiful lines about place ever written:

That’s my middle-west–not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.

Jared’s quest leads him across the country – perhaps, given how often I have read the above passage, not entirely coincidentally by train – to where it has brought so many of us before: California. Specifically, Jared comes to Los Angeles, the city us daydreaming screenwriters all inevitably make our home.

When I arrived here – like many, on a one-way ticket with no more than the promise of a couch to sleep on – I was relieved to discover Los Angeles was not the city I had feared it to be.  Those popular stereotypes – the cosmetically-enhanced zombies, the fast cars and faster producers, the restaurants filled with beautiful people having endless zero-calorie lunches – all certainly exist, but are a vanishingly small part of the whole.

Just as I first did, Jared makes his home in Echo Park, a historically Mexican neighborhood on the east side of the city.  LA is full of people temporarily passing through, and in time-honored fashion Jared sublets a pool house.  He spends time, too, in Griffith Park, the eastside’s four thousand acre urban wilderness where the trees are pines not palms, and the wild mountain lion reminds Angelenos daily that, here in the west, nature will always be the biggest star.

As a screenwriting student, Jared soon learns the technique of foreshadowing and the pre-eminent importance of location.  Thus, when he has to confess a devastating piece information to his love interest, he attempts to soften the blow by the use of foreshadowing, and arranges a trip to a suitably spectacular-yet-foreboding location: the Joshua Tree desert.

The majesty of the Joshua Tree desert leaves Jared feeling awestruck, just as it does everyone the first time they visit.  Its sublime moonscape mostly defies description, but scattered amongst it majesty are some profoundly human elements, which only underscore its lonely and ethereal beauty.  A stone marker near the Wall Street Mill trail, for instance, reads thus-

“Here is where Worth Bagley bit the dust at the hand of W.F. Keys May 11, 1943

The marker was erected by one WF Keys.  That is: WF Keys killed a man at this spot, and then erected a marker to his crime.  I could not resist featuring this in my book, where our android hero Jared – always baffled by the oddities of humans – finds it especially incomputable.

After a car chase up the iconic Highway 1 – alas with no time for a pause in Steinbeck country, but a short interlude in Henry Miller’s beloved Big Sur – Set My Heart To Five reaches its crescendo in San Francisco.  San Francisco has always been my own shining city on a hill, and it seemed a fitting location for the finale of a story rooted in the future.   I was lucky enough to live in San Francisco for a while, and Jared’s adventures again take him to the places I myself knew best: Crissy Field, the Japanese Garden, the Golden Gate Bridge.

Having finished Set My Heart To Five, I feel – at least for the current moment  –that I have said the things I wanted to about California, and perhaps even the US in general.  And so, inevitably, I begin to look around for the next location, and with it the next story.  When he was a year or two younger than the age I am now, Robert Louis Stevenson set sail from California for a new life in Samoa, where his writing once again found a new urgency.  I don’t envision such a journey for myself – Samoa seems far, and remote – but I certainly understand the impetus.

Simon Stephenson

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