Is "wherever it takes to.." ungrammatical

Question

wherever it takes to...

Is this proper grammar? I've heard,"Whatever it takes to do something", but this type is the first example for me.

...being a writer means going wherever it takes to find “the scale of things...

Answer 1

Note that the verb isn't necessarily "to go", and the pattern is the same as your "whatever" examples. Wherever replaces Whatever when the verb indicates movement.

I will do whatever it takes to win the competition.

I will eat whatever it takes to win the competition.

I will walk wherever it takes to win the competition.

I will fly wherever it takes to win the competition.

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I think you might just be reading it wrongly:

Breaking it up into the following parts might make more sense:

      phrasal verb*      infinitive    
(going wherever it takes)(to find)

^{* I suppose this might just be two verbs, rather than a phrasal one, but they go together. My terminology might just be wrong. Feel free to edit.}

Have a look at some other examples in different tenses

He goes wherever it takes to find food

The dog went wherever it took to seek shelter

The missionary will go wherever it takes to spread the message.

Also, notice that although there are two verbs, only the first matches the number. It stays the same

Answer 2

There are no records for the string wherever it takes to in either the Corpus of Contemporary American English or the British National Corpus, and there are no citations that include it in the Oxford English Dictionary. The Corpus of Global Web-Based English has just these two records, the first from the Philippines, the second from Australia:

He taught me to have courage to go wherever it takes to make it.

From wherever it takes to undumb the nation.

It looks ungrammatical to me. Whatever it takes is grammatical, because it means whatever thing (effort, time, energy, money) it takes. You can take a thing, but you can’t, in the same sense, take a place. The difficulty can be resolved by writing ‘being a writer means going wherever necessary to find . . .’

TrevorD’s examples are grammatical because the construction is different. In all three, ‘it takes’ has an object (him in the first and third, you in the second). But wherever is an adverb, and, as such, cannot be the object of takes. Whatever, by contrast, is a pronoun, and can.

Answer 3

As @JamesWebster has illustrated, the basic phrase is:

[going] wherever [it] takes

and, although it is often followed by an infinite verb (to ...), is not necessarily followed by to.

For example, the following are also examples of the same phrase:

He needs to go wherever the job takes him.
You need to go wherever it takes you.
He followed the path wherever it took him.

So, yes, it is 'grammatical' and a common idiom.