Humans: They Amuse Me

April, my loves. April has come with all of its busy glory and I have to say that the front half of it has been impossibly full. For one thing, my hours at work were slightly beefed, I snuck down to Atlanta to surprise my best friend, Katie (Lady Alis of The Windy Side of Care), Easter happened while I was down there, and then I came back to play hostess and fundraiser and help my sisters organize, prep, create art for and throw a swanky soiree silent-auction to benefit our upcoming missions trip to Romania. All that to say, I have not written anything except people-watching sketches this month. I feel slightly bad for even admitting that until I realized that living life also qualifies as research. Meeting and appreciating new people helps one build realistic characters. Hashing through life situations with friends helps one understand and portray nuances. And I think we're all on board with the idea that travel broadens the horizons of one's mind an awful lot. So maybe April has been full of useful and unusual methods of research.

I am currently in the mood to ask each of you to drop what you are doing and start up a people-watching journal. I can't tell you what a treat it was to drag mine out on the flight from Norfolk to Atlanta and read back on all of the wonderful humans I have come in contact with since I began to write about them in December. It is such a treasure because each description, however slight, never fails to conjure up an exact image of that moment in that place. Take this, for example:

"A man with shy eyes an a gentle smile and his young daughter are sitting across from me. He has good hair and is in his prime but has no ring. His daugher is shy around him, leading me to believe he is divorced, not widowed. Very handsome but sad-looking, somehow. His daughter has his profile and their eyes share the same quiet humor. She is about twelve, he probably in the late half of his thirties."

When I read this, I can picture the exact table in the Busch Gardens Fest Haus at which I sat when I encountered this man. It is a fascinating way to retain experiences as well as practice one's descriptive powers.

"The man is so terribly conscious of himself. Not self-conscious, but apparently confident that all eyes are ever upon him. I dislike him so strongly and I am unsure whether it is mainly his real character I despise or whether I merely resent the fact that he expects homage paid...One fears to ask oneself what sort of life he leads that he can afford to leave all so flippantly and gang tae the hielands on his ridiculous whims. (He) is proud of being a dilettante and I have no patience for it."

My entries range from the frustrated (above) to the amused (below) and everywhere in between. But all through I find myself content with playing the game of capturing likenesses of as many people as I can in words. I think of it as my hobby, sort of in the same manner as photographer Brandon Stanton's Humans of New York project.

"...When we finally ordered, Maryanna mentioned a shrimp allergy and he grew so incredibly excited.
'Oh, I totally understand,' he crooned. 'I'm allergic to everything under the sun--lactose intolerant, gluten intolerant--I'm also a bit of a hypochondriac. And I was eating shrimp the other day and my lips started itching and I am so worried I am developing a shellfish allergy.'"

I usually keep the entries brief, though some require longer explanations if I take time to set the stage of the interaction. Of course it is inconvenient to keep such a thing up; I realize that. I learned the discipline required in the first year I went to Romania and religiously kept my travel journal. But I count my people-watching book a valuable tool. Not only does it serve as an opportunity to improve my non-fiction writing skills and keep my goal of writing something every day, but it also gives me an entire volume of characters to choose at will for my stories. Do I need someone unusual, or a funny interaction for a scene? With a people-watching journal kept faithfully, I ought to have plenty from which to choose a case that fits. Let it be a lesson, dear folks: there are many reasons keeping your eyes and ears open (and remembering what you see and hear) is of value. Also, never underestimate the power of smiling at strangers and looking approachable. You never can tell what sort of interesting humans are waiting for a chance to meet you!

"And watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by."

(Quote from Rudyard Kipling's "Smuggler's Song") 

"Slowly, slowly, very slowly went the garden snail.Slowly, slowly, very slowly up the wooden rail."

Nursery rhymes seem good at describing my writing pace in the last couple of weeks. I have not written too much new stuff since I was busy editing The Fox Went Out. Now that I've applied the edits, I am slowly, slowly, very slowly easing myself back into the world of Scotch'd the Snakes. At this point, the main thrust of that work is research. I am dealing with two new areas of England in this mystery (alongside my fictional town of Whistlecreig) and want to really get a good picture of what they look like. One of the places is Saltburn-by-the-Sea: a place I stumbled upon by happenstance over Instagram and was instantly charmed by. I spent yesterday morning thumbing through the official website, delighted by each new thing that turned up. Its history has been an eclectic one, and besides lending itself perfectly to a 1930's seaside resort location, there is much material I can work with to lend an air of authenticity to the setting as I write. Perhaps one of the most interesting mechanical pieces of the town has been the funicular Cliff Lift.

The Cliff Lift

I couldn't get enough of reading about it and watching the video included on the site. The entire thing works by counterbalancing the cars with water so when one is going down, the other is going up, and I think it was a purely brilliant invention considering the steepness of the cliff which, I assume, people had to scramble down pre-lift days. I adore things that have been left pretty much alone since the era in which I want to inspect them. Makes my work so much easier, and as the Cliff Lift has been virtually unchanged since its construction well before the timing of Scotch'd the Snakes, I have loads of accurate material with which to work.

Another fascinating bit of Saltburn-ness is its famous (infamous?) history of smuggling. Bwahahaha. I can have fun with this one, can't I? If you want to hear an absolutely thrilling Rudyard Kipling poem ("Smuggler's Song") read by someone with an absolutely chilling voice, go thataway. I found it most inspiring.

The Ship Inn

For instance, John Andrew, most infamous Saltburn smuggler, also ran the Ship Inn, Saltburn's booming tavern, and on occasion "helped" the customs men chase down his smuggler friends. I'm seeing a bit of an ignoble Sir Percy Blakeney thing going on. I'm not certain what I'll settle on as far as using its smuggling past in my own book, but knowing the lore of a place helps wonderfully with drawing its portrait well. I'm so happy that my somewhat randomly-selected beach town ended up having such a rich and varied history, setting, and quality. I'm looking forward to working with Saltburn and using its character to color my own cast.

Rummage-y Bits: Eccentric Places to Find Vivid Research Details

When I set out to write or read historical fiction, I am not content with merely hoping the plot (set in a certain era) will show well against the era. I want the era to be smashed into the plot like bananas into the peanut butter of a peanut-butter-banana sandwich. I don't actually know if I like peanut-butter-banana-sandwiches, but the image of smashing historic detail into your characters and scenes as you'd smash a banana into peanut butter (with a fork) was a little too tempting to deny. When have you ever known me to care about conventional associations? But sometimes it can be hard to actually find those historical tid-bits that will mix vividly with your setting. Obviously, one could cruise the back-pages of Google (frightening thought, that) for months and perhaps would finally settle on the Fountain of Youth of historical detail. On the other hand, many of us don't have months to cruise the back-pages of Google. I know I feel let down by modernity when I have to travel to Google's second page. It's like...an abyss. But we are good authors and we know when our details flop. The committed among us refuse to let our work accordion-fold with the half-baked historic flavor. So what's a well-meaning Peanut-Butter-Banana-Sandwich-Seeking author to do? Here are some of my favorite ways to find the Rummage-y Bits that make a setting pop:




1.) Check lyrical music of the era: when I want to know about 1930's pop-culture, what better place could I look for it than in a Broadway show like Anything Goes with lyrics by Cole Porter and, yes, P.G. Wodehouse? This musical happens to have been a contemporary show when it was written (1934), and has a song called "You're the Top" that basically swims with pop-culture references which makes it invaluable for knowing what sorts of things were being talked about in that raggedy, glamazon era:

"You're the top!

You're the Coliseum,

You're the top,

You're the Louvre Museum,

You're a melody

from a symphony by Strauss,

You're a Bendel bonnet,

a Shakespeare's sonnet

You're Mickey Mouse!

You're the Nile,

You're the tower of Pisa,

You're the smile

On the Mona Lisa,

I'm a worthless check,

a total wreck, a flop

but if Baby, I'm the bottom,

You're the top!

2.) Read memoirs: Not particularly memoirs by overly-famous people. I have found some of my favorite details for Anon, Sir, Anon through a a site for Northants who want to post memories of growing up in the 1930's in Northamptonshire. In fact, one of these memoirs is where the incredibly thick Northant fogs came up and gave me a cloaking-spell for the murder scene! Memoirs are different from biographies in that they are more than likely written by normal people of the era, and normal people remember normal things...normal for that time period, that is. And these normalcies can be the key to blowing readers' minds with a bit of historical writing.

3.) Pay attention to fashion: what were people wearing in that day and age? No one likes long, drawn-out descriptions of clothing, but it is true that people in the "old days" didn't dress like us, and a casual mention of a pair of gloves, the train of bustled skirt getting in someone's way, a hat being left on a train seat, or a certain perfume only enhances the reading experience.

4.) Check out newspaper ads: what were people selling? What were they buying? What advertisement jingles were thrusted into the consciousness of your characters? Say, "And what are you wearing, 'Jake from State Farm'?" today and most people will get the reference. Why not search for something in that vein that you could throw into your story-world?

5.) Look at artifacts from the period at a museum, if possible: find an artifact that captures your interest and make it a part of your plot. Perhaps it's a certain pipe on display at a WWII exhibit in one of the DC Smithsonians. Can you make that pipe belong to your MC's father? And if you want to be masochistic about it, can you have someone crush that pipe (on purpose) in your MC's presence later, further rubbing in the fact that his father was a Jew and killed on Kristallnacht? Or maybe you find a striking photo of an artifact buried on the ruins of Pompeii that wants to make its way into your Roman-seasoned fantasy novel. Swing it however you want, but use a tangible object to churn your inspiration. Your descriptions will ring true because they will be true. Some of the easiest writing I ever did was in The Windy Side of Care. Why? Because I had a tangible person on whom I based the character of Alisandra. Her personality was one thing I didn't have to fabricate.

6.) Substitute pop-culture for generalities: when I wrote certain lines in Anon, Sir, Anon, I often stopped a moment and chose a crimson reality as a replacement for the beige generality of which I had originally thought. Example? I mentioned something about Vivi's emotion-choked nerves rivalling a soprano's in pitch (or something. I forget exactly). Instead of leaving it as "a soprano," I did a quick Google search for the top ten famous sopranos in the 1930's and chose one on the list. Thus, "her nerves sang a higher pitch than a soprano," became something like, "her nerves sang a higher pitch than Lotte Schone," and what had been a graham-cracker sentence  tottering against a cardboard house suddenly had the banana smashed in.

However you find your details, commit to finding them. The readership does appreciate it. And if you have any "eccentric" ideas of your own for finding the Rummage-y Bits, please share them in a comment below! I'm always looking for new ways to bring my settings to life.

A Writer's Untapped Paradise: People-Watching

 "I'm just people-watchin', watchin' people watchin' me..."

-Jack Johnson "People-Watching"

I like to shake things up a bit in my class and give the gals writing assignments that aren't your run-of-the-mill short stories. Since I am working from my own resources and not following any set of curriculum I get to choose each week's topic; having taught them the versatility of Action Beats Vs. Dialog Tags, I thought it'd be a fun assignment to go out to lunch and have them people-watch in order to add originality to their action beats. We piled into the van at lunchtime and headed off to Panera where I assigned them each a position in different corners of the restaurant to eat their own lunch quietly and observe everyone else eating theirs. (On the ride over I instructed them minutely on how to people-watch without detection so the poor customers don't feel like butterflies on pins. "No Customers Were Harmed In the Making of This Post" and all that.)

"He ain't a 'tec, he's a bloomin' busy-body!"

(did anyone get that reference?)

Even I, a dedicated people-watcher was surprised at the variety of descriptions we came up with as we scribbled madly and tried not to let our soup go cold in between. There was a woman who had grown up in Japan and been abducted for half an hour because of her white-blonde hair. The same women's parents live in Ireland now, and the rest of her family in Tuscany or Tuscon. (This pupil wasn't quite sure which) Another has a step-daughter who married a man who earned $75-80,000 a month and spent oodles at posh clothing stores.  Other scraps we got down were just bits of description of peoples' actions...it's amazing the stories you can unearth just by sitting there and not-quite minding your own business...

And because we came up with such random gems, I thought I'd show you the notes I managed to get down in the hour we were people-watching; it's like a different sort of Snippets post because I wrote them all in third-person...heehee.

She leaned on her fist and ignored her meal, focused instead on the screen of her iPhone.

The woman tore pieces of bread from her roll and dipped them into her soup one by one.

"Feel free to open that." She shoved a packaged cookie toward her friends.

The woman seemed to be at odds with her ponytail, always flicking it over and tossing it behind her shoulder. Babies and long hair do not, apparently, mix.

He left his plate and soup bowl at the table while he got a refill as if, she thought, there were no hungry beggars in the world who might descend upon it like buzzards while he was gone.

The expression on her face as she crossed her arms was meant to pronounce definitive judgement on the thing of which she disapproved. 

She wiped each of her fingers between bites in what seemed a strikingly fastidious manner, considering she had been eating bread.

"Him? Oh he's not married."

"Did I hear he beat you?"

The woman folded her receipt after she had been seated and took an age filing it in her purse where it probably now lay cheek-to-jowl with a coupon for 50 Cents Off Tomato Soup and a pamphlet from her granddaughter's ballet recital.

"What did you have to eat for your birthday?"

"Uhhhhh-huh....her usual."

"Well they were good...OH! I forgot to tell them to put that stuff over it!" (what stuff, we wonder?)

When she laughed, her head jerked down and her shoulders forward like an eager, strutting pigeon taking halting jerks across the pavement.

The manager refilled the baskets of cookies and squeezed out from behind the counter with a fawning smile for a passing female customer. His grey hair was pulled back in a slick, respectable ponytail and when he walked it was with a certain feline grace that she knew, somehow, was part of his act.

The boy had an uncomfortable manner of fastening his eyes upon you as you talked and chewing rapidly like a concentrated and famished hare. Also, one of his eyes stared slightly in an alternate direction which only heightened his rabbity-ness.

"He put up his great big paws and WOOFWOOFWOOFWOOF he was out the door and I was chasing him and I realized I was naked. I hid myself but next time I was outside cooking fish, my neighbor said, 'That was some show.'" (now I am scarred for life.)

He used a form of God's name instead of adjective which somewhat marred the impression of an educated man.

He crossed his arms across his large belly so his elbows looked like hams and stared like a large and somewhat disgruntled genie. 

One half of her mouth appeared to be permanently hitched up in a snip of a smile showing a few white teeth in the left corner of her mouth.

She held her drink while she talked and it was fascinating--if you were bored enough to notice--to watch the slosh of liquid in the cup as she punctuated her conversation.

"She gets herself in more predicaments."

The old man possessed a humped back so that his head appeared to be glued to the front of his neck instead of the top.

"My wife's daughter spends spends spends all his money."

"He used to earn $75-80,000 monthly."

"They used to go to a place on Taylor Rd--it's closed now, thank God--but it was called Madamoiselle's and it was the kind of place you'd buy three outfits and it would cost $2,500. I told her, 'You do not take your mother to Madamoiselle's any more.' So she called her mother one day and said, 'Come on and meet me in front of Madameoiselle's--Steve put me on a budget and I have to stay within the budget.' " 

A pretty good catch for a single lunch-hour I think.

Yo-ho-ho and all that

On Monday I got the privilege to go to Norfolk and visit the OpSail and Harbor Fest in commemoration of the bicentennial of the War of 1812. I got gobs of research done for Scuppernong Days. It was a blessing straight from God, that just as I needed lots of ideas and facts and knowledge about sailing ships, 51 of them sail into a harbor nearish-by! We almost missed it (second to last day!) but everything worked out so that I got everything I needed, and even more. I research partly by listening, partly by looking, and a great deal by absorption. I spent the day on sailing ships. It'll help far more with my writing than sitting and reading a whole book on sailing would ever do. :) I also indulged in a deal of people-watching, which is one of my absolute favorite sports. I overheard so many funny conversations, including one between a woman and an Indonesian sailor who had been sailing since January to get here.

"Are you homesick?"

"No! I wanted to see world so I joined de Navy."

 (at least he was honest. :) 

Very hard at work researching, as you can see. ;)

Ahhh... that's more like it. :)

Sarah and I on the Godspeed.

^ The salt-breeze-intoxicated Authoress posing for her personal photographer in front of Information. ;)

It was a fabulous jaunt and I am so filled with a ripping, tearing thirst for travel that it isn't even funny. :D Or maybe it is slightly comical, seeing as I am entirely broke and couldn't buy a tram ticket, let alone a pass to the West Indies. But all in all I had one of the most exciting, fabulous days I've had in a long time. There were enough memories made to last me a life-time. (and to exhaust 7 pages of a letter to a friend. *smiles at Felicity*) This is by far my favorite manner of doing research!