Where ever you go, there you are
A mother is boiling water on the stove. She wipes her brow with the back of her hand. Carefully she carries the heavy pot of water to the tub where her child is waiting a few feet away, as to not get splashed with the hot water. The mother pours the water into some waiting, standing cold water in the hopes of warming it up enough for to make it a pleasant morning wash for her child. She leaves the child in peace to continue getting ready for school.
Welcome to Little House on the Cul-de-Sac. We’ve had no hot water since yesterday. And I couldn’t help but think how our very 2008 existence wasn’t feeling so 2008 at all. It didn’t seem like we were where we were supposed to be. Boiling water and pouring it into a tub is not consistent with the world in which we live, where we’re able to take a hot shower in a single bound.
It would have worked quite nicely in a scene from a Regency novel with some kind of chamber maid carrying the water. The mother would have been wearing one of those big poofy dresses and calling everyone Miss.
How we represent where and when our novels take place and how important it is to write it right so that your reader arrives and stays when and where you want them.
Is it a city? You might want to write up a little crowding.
A suburb? I envision kids and backyards.
Writing a far-off exotic land? I hear accents.
In the past? In the present? In the future?
It’s crucial that you take your reader to the right time and place.
Summers at the North Carolina shores are always humid, which Lucy hates, because riding in the carriage is always very uncomfortable, even when she is fanned by her chamber maid.
The reader knows these characters (I’m into chamber maids today) are on the coast in the South before the age of automobiles.
Maybe you’re building an unfamiliar world until it’s palpable — when dragons and magic and vampires are real. I mean, they are, aren’t they? If didn’t want to believe that, we wouldn’t read the book.
We’re literary travel agents. It’s our responsibility to help a reader transport to the destination of their choice (your book) and make it worth the trip. They don’t second-guess the time and place of our novels, even if it’s central to the story. They don’t read the name of a town and think you could’ve come up with something better or wished you’d chosen a different color for a rug, unless maybe you’re writing a mystery. We have all the information and pass it on in a neat package so that the reader can simply enjoy the destination.
Therefore we must paint a believable backdrop for our stories, one that is consistent throughout and one that adds to the story or simply plays a supporting role. Maybe the town your characters live in is so generic that it could be anywhere, but that’s intentional.
This is part of our job. Because wherever a writer takes a reader, that’s where they are.
Which means my characters are always somewhere with running hot water.
