Researching Setting

 

Last month Roland joined me on a research trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which is the setting for a women’s fiction novel I’ve been working on. During the first few days we stayed at my brother’s cabin in DeTour Village, where I grew up, and took excursions to several places that my protagonist visits in the novel. That’s the cabin in the picture at the top of this page. I’ll tell you about the excursions in next week’s post.

DeTour Village lies on the St. Mary’s River between Lake Huron and Lake Superior, and it is as far east as you can go in the U.P. without falling into the water. I wanted to set my novel slightly farther west, though, along the northern shore of Lake Michigan. That’s still in the eastern part of the U.P. that I’m familiar with, but I haven’t been there for years. So after we left DeTour, we drove along U.S. 2.

I’m placing my fictional town along U.S. 2 somewhere between St. Ignace and Manistique, and I wanted to make sure that my memory coincided with the actual landscape. Fortunately it did, at least for the most part, and the adjustments I had to make were minor. I took these photos through the front windshield. (With Roland driving, of course.)

Many people think of the U.P. as mountainous, but, as you can tell from the photos, it isn’t all like that. The mountains are in the west, and the eastern part is mostly flat with some gently rolling hills (although they didn’t seem gentle when I rode my bicycle up them as a kid).

A writer who doesn’t know better might easily place a novel in the eastern U.P. among the mountains, but that would be wrong. It’s better to check out a setting before writing about it.

Even if a writer thinks he or she knows the facts, it’s important to check them. That was the purpose of my research trip, and it was worth the effort.