By the time you read this I should be in Venice, ensconced in a little apartment not far from the Rialto bridge, starting to put together the framework that will -- fingers crossed -- turn into the book for 2012. I already have the rough shape of that book in my head, and some scenes written. But I'm at the stage where I don't feel I can go any further until I've walked the place a little myself, and will be returning to do so in early Venice too.

Lots of writers have written books without visiting the locations where they're set. Science fiction and fantasy authors do it as a matter of course. I can't. Why? And should you be stuck on the same obsessive need to walk the streets you want to capture for fiction?

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Let me answer the second question first, and return to this general subject tomorrow. If you can choose between going and not going then you're out of the loop. Those of us who are truly obsessive about on-the-spot research do it because we have no alternative. When I write a book I'm building a world, one I want to recreate later in the mind of the reader. This is a very visual process for me. I need to see what places look like, touch them, walk them, smell them, feel the air. Without that everything's two-dimensional.

Maybe that's because I lack the imagination to do it any other way. Or perhaps it goes back to my formative years as a journalist when everything had to be seen, checked out and recorded. Whatever the reason, it's there and it's unavoidable.

One reason I have to see a place I'm writing about is because I find the visual aspect of shaping a story incredibly important. That's why my greatest research tool of recent years is a simple, cheap digital camera, one that fits in the pocket and gets carried everywhere. With it I photograph big things and small things, things that no one else photographs too such as street signs, names in windows and those very useful historical information placards you see in Italy all the time.

You can <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/hewsons/" target="_blank">browse some of my research photos at Flickr</a> and see how appalling -- in pure photographic terms -- many of them. Doesn't matter in the slightest. I'm not taking them to prove my photographic skills. I just want them there so that when I'm back in England, trying to recreate a scene, I can track down the right photo, pull it up on screen and go, 'Ah yes, now I remember.'

Of course if I tried to do this in the UK I'd probably get arrested as a potential terrorist under the new 'harass anyone with a camera policy'. Happily such madness hasn't reached Italy. When I wrote <em>The Sacred Cut</em>, I wanted to know about the various doors that lead into the Pantheon. I spent a couple of hours walking round the place, photographing the most boring brickwork imaginable. No one batted an eyelid. You can see just a <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/hewsons/sets/72157615808466979/" target="_blank">few of those photos here</a>.

With some books these photos are about the actual places that appear in the pages. For <em>Dante's Numbers</em>, which echoes Hitchcock's <em>Vertigo</em>, I patiently walked many of the locations he'd used in 1957, seeing what they looked like today. You can see them -- and Scottie's apartment if you look carefully -- <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/hewsons/sets/72157615878038226/" target="_blank">in the Flickr album.</a> Photos also help me visualise imaginary places too. Sometimes I'll take a snap of a building and combine some of its features with those of another to get the right apartment block or office for a scene.

In one week in Venice I guess I'll take a couple of hundred photos (I'll show you a few as I go along with some blog posts if I have the time). Perhaps twenty or thirty will find their way into the final book. Of the rest some will be wasted and some will be subterranean background for the feel of the story -- or so I hope.

Venice will also serve to remind me that I once tried to do this before digital cameras became commonplace. When I was researching <em>Lucifer's Shadow</em> in 1999 I trudged the streets lugging a film SLR and, two days before I came, dropped off my films in a photo shop in the Lido to be developed. When I came back the following day the man shrugged and said, 'Sorry, we had a problem in the lab. Everything's been wiped. Here…' And gave me some replacement films.

Not going there again...

I'll be trying out two cameras on this trip, a Ricoh CX2 and a Fuji F200 EXR, both of which are supposed to capture extra colour range which ought to be useful in Venice in January. No, they won't match Turner. But I hope I'll come back with something worthwhile.