Location, Location, Location

 

No, I’m not buying a new house, but I did look for a setting for my current writing project, which takes place in England. Unfortunately, it will be a while—if ever—before I get to England again, meaning I couldn’t do my research on site.

As a writer, I cringe whenever a reader tells me that I got something wrong, including facts about the setting. I also don’t want people guessing that a purely fictional character is based on the reader or someone the reader knows, which is more likely to happen if the setting is real. So for this book I created the fictional village of Puedam and a fictional market town called Ressel.

To give the story some connection with reality, however, I chose to set the fictional village in a real English county. Using the internet and a book on English shires, I went looking for the right one.

I had several conditions. First, Puedam couldn’t be near anyplace that Hitler was likely to target with his bombers, which ruled out areas with major manufacturing centers or significant military installations. Second, since all the settings (other than references to London) are fictional, I didn’t want it too close to a real city in case readers would question why my characters never went there. And, while not crucial, I was hoping for an inland farming area.

The winner was Derbyshire in central England. As you can see from the map at the head of this post, the population in the southwest part of the county is relatively sparse and the land is flat enough to support farms. Relatively isn’t really the right term, though. If you look at a larger map, the area is sprinkled with villages, and there are several real cities, including Derby, close enough for shopping. However, it fits my needs as well as or better than anywhere else.

Besides, I’m treading on hallowed ground by following in the footsteps of British authors who created fictional villages and market towns throughout England for their fiction.

__________

The map at the head of this post was downloaded from https://freeworldmaps.net/europe/united-kingdom/derbyshire/.

Story Ideas That Are Out-of-Sync with Travel

 

In 2014, I dragged Roland along on a trip to Utah and California to do research for my first middle-grade book, Desert Jewels. Since Roland had never seen the Grand Canyon, we took a side trip to visit it. I had no plans to set a story there, so we spent our time at the tourist sites.

Now I wish I could have seen into the future. I am currently working on the first draft of a book that begins in the Oklahoma dust bowl in 1934 but then moves to the Grand Canyon for the rest of the story. The many photos I took as a tourist have been helpful for the setting, but I‘m missing some I would have taken if I had known. In particular, my online research tells me that the school building my main character would have attended is still there (although not in use as a school), but we didn’t visit it.

The limited knowledge I have of the school as it was in 1934 comes from a history page on the school district’s website. Although the page was quite helpful, it didn’t answer all of my questions, such as how many classrooms there were. Given that it was the third location and the second building actually constructed for the purpose, it seems logical that the attendance had outgrown the previous building. The enrollment listed in the article also supports that, with 29 students in 1914 and 250 currently. This makes it likely that there were at least two classrooms.

The website didn’t include contact information for the school or the person who put the history page together, but I did find an email address for the school librarian. Unfortunately, she hasn’t responded to my inquiry, so my conclusion that there must have been more than one classroom is simply an educated guess. An onsite visit would probably have answered the question, but I didn’t know enough to check it out a decade ago.

I also tried searching online for photos of the old school and found one labeled that way. There are two problems, though. First, I have no way of confirming that the caption identifies the correct building. Second, the front-end view isn’t enough to determine how many rooms were inside.

That’s what happens when I can’t foresee what my future novels will be about. It can also work the other way around, however.

Over a year ago I wrote a story about a girl who traveled around the Horn in 1850 on her way to the California gold fields. That manuscript is currently circulating among agents and hasn’t found one yet, but the lack of success may be a good thing.

When I wrote Around the Horn, I relied on journals written by people who had taken that trip in the mid-1800s. They were clearly the best resources, although it would have been nice to have supplemented them by taking the same route myself. I assumed, however, that it was a trip I would never take.

Wrong. Or maybe not, since we never know what the future holds. But after I started circulating the manuscript, Roland and I booked a cruise around the Horn for early 2026. We didn’t plan it as a research trip, and we aren’t stopping in the same ports as my characters did, but I’ll get whatever information I can out of it. Obviously, many things will have changed in 175 years, but much of the landscape will probably be the same.

I don’t really expect that what I see on my own trip around the Horn will change anything in the manuscript, but you never know. That’s why I’ve decided not to make another round of submissions until after I return. In this case, unlike for the book about the Grand Canyon, I may actually have a chance to do the research I didn’t expect.

But it sure would be nice if story ideas always coordinated with my travel plans.

Customs Change Over Time

 

I just re-read the first three books in the Cherry Ames series by Helen Wells. For those of you who don’t know, Cherry Ames was part of the craze for series about older teenage girls that started with Nancy Drew. Cherry was a nursing student and then a nurse rather than an amateur detective like Nancy, so most of the series takes place when she was a young adult. Although Cherry did solve some mysteries, they were secondary to her life as a nurse.

When I was a girl, my family occasionally stayed with my Uncle Lester and his family. My cousin Ann was four years older than I was and away in college during my high school years, so I slept in her room several times. One of the things I liked about it was Ann’s collection of Cherry Ames books, which I got to read while I was there.

Ann went to medical school and became a doctor, so many years later I asked her why she read books about a nurse instead of a doctor. If I’m remembering it correctly, Ann said she wanted stories with a medical setting and the Cherry Ames books were the best she could get.

By the time Ann started medical school, it was already the late 1960s and female doctors weren’t as unusual as they had been. Fiction hadn’t caught up with the times, however.

This isn’t a criticism of the Cherry Ames books. Nursing is a noble profession, and society needs nurses as well as doctors. Those first books in the series were consistent with the state of the medical profession when they were written and published in the 1940s. Although there are no female doctors or male nurses in them, there is also no suggestion that those roles are inappropriate and, for all I know, female doctors and male nurses may have appeared later in the series. Furthermore, I believe those books were written the way they should have been. Even though they were not historical fiction when they were written, they were set during World War II and have become historicals simply by occurring in an easily identifiable historical setting.

I strongly believe that historical fiction should reflect the time it is set in. Many of my novels include beliefs and actions that are not popular today. For example, Learning to Surrender has a protagonist who believes in slavery during much of the book until circumstances show her the evils that exist even for slaves with “good” masters.

This doesn’t mean that historicals can’t give a nod to today’s thinking, but it must flow with the story. A good example is Tenmile by Sandra Dallas, which takes place in 1880. The protagonist often helps her doctor father, and people tell her that she would be a good nurse. Nobody except the housekeeper encourages her to become a doctor, although the protagonist’s father seems to be wavering in his opinion when the story ends. The protagonist is still too young to become either a doctor or a nurse, but the reader has learned there is a medical school that takes women, and we are confident that will be the protagonist’s future. The prevailing opinion among the people in the story is consistent with the times, however.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with books that intentionally change history and admit it, and temporarily misleading information is often crucial to a plot during the course of a novel. But if you want readers to come away believing your historical setting is correct, you should make sure it is.

Always respect the reader.

Setting is Important

I just finished reading Bummer Camp by Ann Garvin. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend it to anyone because the plot was ridiculous. It may have been intended for humor, but I winced much more often than I laughed.

Normally, I would have put it down after a few chapters. So why didn’t I? The story took place in a summer camp in the woods, and I was caught up in the well-executed setting.

The photo shows the outdoor amphitheater at Presbytery Point in Michigan, a Presbyterian camp located on the Upper Peninsula. I spent a number of summers there as a child. Or rather, I spent seven days there each summer, since the individual camps were only a week long. I always looked forward to going but got homesick after being there a couple of days. And yet, the next year I couldn’t wait to return. So the setting of Bummer Camp brought back many pleasant memories.

Setting can be an integral part of a book’s plot, as it was here, but it is the plot that is crucial to the story. Even though I finished the book, I will not read another one by Ann Garvin.

Still, although a good setting is never an excuse for a bad plot, it can cover some sins.

That’s why a good writer doesn’t ignore the setting.

Lighthouse Travel Research--Mapping the Station

 

As mentioned in my last post, my recent lighthouse research trip provided insight into the isolation and loneliness my protagonist would feel at a remote location. But it also helped me map my fictional setting and put the buildings in likely spots. After all, I don’t want the buildings to move to different locations in the middle of the book.

Besides the tower and the keepers’ house, each lighthouse station had several outbuildings. In the days before automated lighthouses, all stations had a fuel building that was located away from the other structures because of the volatile nature of its contents. Most stations had either a fog bell or a foghorn, also separate from the light and the keepers’ dwelling, possibly in the futile hope that it wouldn’t disturb the keepers’ families during the night.

Then there was the outhouse, which was a necessity well into the twentieth century for some of the more isolated lighthouse stations. The outhouse was often built of brick, and a typical one had two holes for adults and a smaller one for children.

It was also common for a lighthouse station to have a barn and a boathouse. Some also had a tramway, which wasn’t a building as much as an elevator designed to haul supplies up a cliff from the dock below.

Before we went on our trip, I tried to draw a preliminary map of my fictional Lonely Rock Lighthouse station, but I knew it was incomplete. After returning, I drew the one at the head of this post. As I write the story, I may discover the need to add additional topographical features, but at least I know where the buildings are.

A map keeps buildings from moving around unexpectedly or characters from walking in the wrong direction to reach them, and location research can help develop that map even for a fictional setting.

And that’s especially important when the setting is a character in the story.

Lighthouse Travel Research--How Lonely is Lonely?

 

I recently returned from a trip to New England to research lighthouses for my next book. My protagonist will be living in an isolated lighthouse in 1924, and I’ll have to create the atmosphere. Although my lighthouse is fictional, it will be a composite of several historical lighthouses located offshore in very lonely settings. So it was helpful to know exactly how isolated some of these lighthouses are.

We didn’t have time to see each of the hundreds of lighthouses along the New England coast, or even to sample some from each New England state, so we selected a few in Rhode Island and Maine. Unfortunately, things are much different now than they were in 1924, and many lighthouses that used to be almost inaccessible are now easy to reach by car or ferry. That also meant there were lots of tourists to interfere with the isolated feeling. Even more problematic for doing research, the loneliest ones are not open to the public and can be viewed only from the water.

The Portland Head Light in Maine isn’t really as isolated as it looks in the photo at the head of this post. It was lonely in the sense that it probably had no near neighbors, but it’s on the mainland and not too far from a village—at least close enough to go into town whenever supplies ran low. The same is true of the nearby Cape Elizabeth Lights (two twin lights, only one of which can be seen in the second photo), Pemaquid Point Light (Photo 3), and West Quoddy Head Light (Photo 4), all in Maine.

The Southeast Block Island Light in Rhode Island (Photo 5) was probably the remotest one we saw in terms of distance from the mainland. It took us thirty minutes to get there by high-speed ferry and would have taken three hours by the slower car ferry. Even so, the Southeast light was only a few miles from a tourist town that was probably thriving during most of the years the lighthouse was inhabited.

There was a more isolated lighthouse on the island, but it turned out to be too isolated for us. It would have cost too much to take the car on the ferry, so we planned on renting bikes. Unfortunately, I hadn’t ridden in years, and even Roland, who rides almost every day, was having trouble controlling his rental bike. So we gave up and walked to the closer lighthouse with the idea of taking a taxi to the more isolated North Block Island Light. But we discovered—in time, fortunately—that the road ended short of the lighthouse and we would still have had a twenty minute walk over sand to reach it. Aside from the fact that our legs were already tired from walking to the other lighthouse, we would never have made it back in time to catch the return ferry.

The sixth photo shows the North Block Island Light taken from the ferry. It was quite a distance away and I was fortunate to get even this poor-quality shot.

Beavertail Lighthouse in Rhode Island (Photo 7) and Bass Harbor Head Light in Maine are both located on populated islands. Bass Harbor Light is in Arcadia National Park and actually felt the most isolated because we had to wait thirty minutes in a traffic backlog to get a spot in the small parking lot. The lighthouse itself was a disappointment, though, because the area around it was too tight to get the entire complex in a single picture. As you can see from Photo 8, which was taken from the rocks below the lighthouse, the fog was also a problem at Bass Harbor.

We saw one other lighthouse on an island, also in Rhode Island. The final picture shows the Rose Island Light, which is on a small island close to the mainland. It shared Rose Island with a military installation in the days when families lived there. Actually, it doesn’t seem to have been a regular military base, but some officers were lodged on the island with their families. So that wasn’t as isolated as I wanted, either.

Still, I did get a peak at the loneliness the keepers and their families might have felt.

And it’s always good to feel the atmosphere before writing it.