Field Trip: Part Deux

Ala Wai Harbor as seen from Ala Moana Beach Park, 0600-ish.

     Once more I found myself heading out in search of inspiration and information.  My target?  The Ala Wai Harbor.  I haven't been out here since my early teens when I was in a pilot for a Christian T.V. show.
     Yes.  Yes, you read that right.  Even had a line.
     Started from Ala Moana after getting off work.  Dipping into Ala Moana Beach Park, the above shot has the Waikiki Yacht Club in the foreground with the Prince Hotel in the background, left.  Immediately I noticed a small problem.  The boat I mentioned in the novel is a yacht.  These vessels in the foreground are yachts.
     Guess what?  They are nothing like I pictured.  I am not nautical in anyway, couldn't tell you stim from stern to save my life, and don't have the first clue about boat types.  So here I am just getting started and already found a hitch in my book.  But screw it, it's a small bump.  I'll just search for something that resembles what I was picturing, snap a couple shots, then look it up online.
     Leaving the park and crossing over the Ala Wai Canal, it's a quick hop to the hotel that the last two chapters I finished was located at.  The Prince Hotel.

     The first thing I noticed is a little something missing, namely the main entrance was not where I thought it to be.  In fact it was on the complete other side of the damn building.  Still not a problem.  A few sentence tweaks and I am back in business.  Circling round the side I'm now at the mouth of the harbor.  Something immediately begins to nag at me, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

     At the beginning its kind of boring.  About the only thing that stands out is the large amount of pollution in the water.  It's not exactly a secret that the Ala Wai is incredibly polluted and here where it connects to the ocean its pretty heavy.  Only other thing that stood out was this creepy thing.

Couldn't find anything for scale but it was the size of my friggin' head

     The water cleared up as I went along.  To my left (North) nothing but a restaurant, two more hotels and a long covered parking area that followed the harbor curving out toward the ocean (South).

     Turning back to face the way I had just come from I took this panoramic shot (Above) and the thing that had been nagging me suddenly became clear.  As you can clearly see the hotels are directly next to the harbor.  In the scenes I had just finished writing, the beach (Which is just to the left side of the above pic.) and an important element discovered by one of the main characters, is directly between the hotel and the harbor.  This was a huge freakin' problem as there is no way my character could possibly have found what I put there from his view point in the hotel.
     Unlike the errors I found in my description back in Chapter 1, this was no band-aid solution (Or plaster situation for any folks in the U.K.).  This was either going to be a transplant or an amputation.  When I passed the Prince, the placement of the entrance was not the only difference I noted.  Lack of balconies, the delivery area being no where like I thought, and the hotel itself looking nothing like I remembered.  In fact it appears that I got the Prince and the Ilikai Hotel (Where the beach was actually located.) confused.  Now I'm left with the decision of do I take creative license or do I adhere to reality?
     Once I decided to write a book I really started putting serious thought into what made certain stories elements work.  One thing I noticed is that if you ground something in reality you can then go as wild as you want and the audience will gladly grant you that suspension of disbelief.   George Lucas gave Star Wars (The originals.) a used feel, where before all depictions of the future was of a bright, shiny, mint-condition world.  The Millenium Falcon was held together by spit and duct tape giving it that grit of reality so when you see people using the Force or wielding a lightsaber no one even blinked.  In the Dresden Files, Jim Butcher gave Harry's magic a firm base in physics.
     You don't even have to stand up to your neck in reality, as long as your feet are in it you can get pretty fantastical.  I also have to take into consideration the proliferation of information on the internet.  Rearranging the geography of the area in DM could either be a detail no one notices or one that some person looks up and spots right off the bat.  And there is always the reality that I was way, way over-thinking things.
     On the phone with Tim at the time he threw out a suggestion that quieted my prolific use of pejoratives and worked quite well for rearranging Chapter 8.  At the time I was a bit miffed.
     Deciding not let that ruin my trip I continued on working my way slowly out to the end.  Though it is essentially a big parking lot for both cars and boats, the water cleared up beautifully and I passed a few interesting sights on the way.

Found a couple cool old cars.

An actual Junker.  Pretty shot too, total accident.

Made me think of 'Enter The Dragon'.

     Also found a couple possibilities that came real close to what I had mistakenly been picturing a yacht to be.

Of course I couldn't go the whole trip without putting my thumb in a damn shot *sigh*.

     I was told these were called 'Cabin Cruisers' (Above) and would be more than capable of doing what I needed in the story.
     What with the major errors in location, this trip was a bit more frustrating than the last and with less to look at.  It also ended up being much shorter since I didn't have to cover anywhere near as much ground.  Only real disappointment is that I was hoping to run into someone to stop and get info on the boats, but no such luck.  In fact there was hardly anyone out there at that time of the morning except surfers.  Got more than enough to move on in the book which, in the end, is all I really needed.
     As aggravating as having to go back and completely rearrange a chapter I was perfectly happy with was, it's good practice.  No book is perfect (Especially a first draft.) and if I get published my agent and editors will at times require me to do similar things and now I have a little experience in making those changes.  This time thanks to Tim's suggestion I was able to do a transplant instead of some Civil War style field amputation, next time I may have to do the literary equivalent of taking a chainsaw to an infected limb.  I'm even looking forward to my next field trip, wherever that may be.