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Ticket to Travel 6/17/2010 4:16:40 AM
I am traveling this week. As luck or legacy or fate would have it, I’m on my way to BEAUTIFUL DISASTER’s setting in Athens, Georgia. A year ago I did not anticipate this trip. But a year ago I had no idea that my Northern bred daughter would choose my alma mater as hers. By the same token, I did not anticipate that a manuscript relegated to a drawer in my desk was about to have a Lazarus-like resurrection. Note to all writers with manuscripts in drawers, in boxes, in their heads: never give up, because you never know.
So along with attending college orientation all over again, which is as close to time travel as you can come without a patent, I have the uncommon opportunity to mind travel. I would think an experience such as this is as individual to an author as the characters in his or her book. Of course, not all settings are plucked from reality. If a setting is fictitious you might borrow a place, relocating it for the footprint of your work. A memory of Saranac Lake may be the image needed for a romantic scene, although your story takes place a thousand miles removed from New York State. And that old stone church, the one you passed on your way to school every day, who knew it would someday serve as the perfect protagonist’s hideaway. I do that, cherry pick locations. I’ll drop a building, a stretch of highway, the overgrown honeysuckle bush on Bayview Avenue, where I grew up, into a particular setting. The beauty in this is the power to take scraps of material and stitch them into one fluid seam, thereby creating a whole new place.
I’ve written five novels. Two settings were a dart to map. Other than a conveyable knowledge of the area, which I believe is a must, the stories could take place anywhere—which may be why they never took off beyond that desk drawer. SLUSH, a bumpy patch in my novel learning curve, takes place on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. There’s mysticism here, and while the town of Snow Harbor was pure imagination, I could taste the salt in air, see the fishing boats bob on the Chesapeake Bay. Seaside locales lend themselves to novels, particularly those where romance is involved. There’s nothing like a little heat and dune to… well, that’s another blog entirely. I just completed the draft for a new novel, VALLEY VIEWS FROM ABBOTSFORD, PA. Like SLUSH’s Snow Harbor, Abbotsford is comprised of random images, cataloged in my brain like yesteryear microfiche. Setting was especially important here, providing an integral backdrop for the novel. You won’t find Abbotsford on any Commonwealth map, though the aforementioned valley view is real enough. In fact, it’s a rather thought provoking sight. It provoked me into 400 plus pages.
BEAUTIFUL DISASTER is different. Athens, Georgia is a very real place that inspired a lightning bolt of fiction. People have solid ideas about Athens, much of it tied to a tailgate. And that’s okay; I love that part of Athens too. But the Athens where we find Mia and Flynn, on some level that place is as evocative as my characters, poignant as their story. No doubt there will be some personal push and pull over the next few days. Much of me will be reality based, visiting the campus, fervently figuring things out, trying to negotiate life for a kid who will be twelve hundred miles from home. Part of me has already given into the distraction. From the corner of my eye, I will be looking for Flynn. I will hear a voice while on the old north campus and turn, expecting to see Mia. I’ll be surprised, if not truly disappointed when I don’t find them together, hand-in-hand on Broad Street. That’s an uncanny incredible experience. Perhaps it also means I should stop in for a session or two at the School of Psychology while in town. Even so, I can’t fathom this experience with my other books. The settings are too composite, shaded by real places, tinted with the imagery that is the tool of my trade. For BEAUTIFUL DISASTER it will be impossible to separate the setting from a place with a dynamic two hundred-plus year history, of which I may be fortunate enough to find I am a footnote.
