Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Setting: Making the Ordinary Extraordinary by Jo Ann Brown

Throughout my writing career, I’ve enjoyed writing about distant times and places. That requires a lot of research, because what did I know when I first started about Regency manners
or the hills and valleys of the Middle East or the gold fields of the Yukon? Not that I’m complaining. I love doing research, finding all the ways people and their lives in other times and places are different from ours...and how they’re the same. Sometimes I found facts I hadn’t expected and which made me change my story to fit the reality. I was astonished—and more than a bit pleased—to discover during the Yukon gold rush, Canadian saloons were closed on Sunday in honor of the Sabbath. A tidbit I could share with readers to make them feel the same aha moment I’d had when I found the information.
Finding a fact that makes my story real is a reward for me after hours of research and trying not to be sidetracked by other information that doesn’t have anything to do with my story, but would be oh, so delicious to track down to its origins.
Being able to learn more about other eras of history and faraway places was what brought me to writing in the first place. I’d been working on the Mayflower Puritans and suddenly, instead of facts and figures, I found myself wondering what it must have been like for those people traveling from their homes to the New World. The words flowed for what would become my first completed short story, one that I wrote wholly for myself. But that story set the path for my writing for years to come. I’d write about, as the song says, “those faraway places with the strange sounding names.”
Then I happened upon the tidbit during research that inspired the Amish Spinster Club series. I needed to figure out where I should set the quartet of books. I knew the Amish had begun buying farms in the Whitehall, New York, area. That’s about thirty miles north of the small town where I’d grown up. Common sense suggested I put the series in my home town, but a part of me balked. Wasn’t I supposed to write about exciting places instead of an ordinary little town?
I began to think about other books I’d enjoyed and how the authors had placed their stories in their hometowns. Those towns weren’t familiar to me, so it was fun to walk the streets along with their characters.
I realized it could be the same for readers if I introduced them to the small town of Salem, New York.
All I needed to do was find a way to make the ordinary a moment of extraordinary discovery for readers. I recalled what I’d liked about growing up in that town and what I hadn’t. I thought about the stories I knew of those who’d lived there before me and after me.
With that, Harmony Creek Hollow was born in Salem, and my characters soon were settling in and walking along the streets as they did their errands and lived their lives. What startled me was how much research I still needed to do. I realized I didn’t know the mileage from Salem to many other places around the area which I’d driven many times. I hadn’t paid attention then, but I had to for my characters and the time line in my books.
So I guess it’s not true that you can’t go home again. I’ve been going home again while writing the series...and I hope the readers I’ve taken along with me have enjoyed getting to know my hometown just as I have all over again. The Amish Bachelor's Baby, the third book of The Amish Spinster Club, is available now in print and will be available on March 1 as an ebook. C'mon along and visit my hometown!

7 comments:

  1. Jo Ann, thanks for sharing the backstory behind Harmony Creek Hollow. The name alone makes me want to visit. Grab a cup of coffee and sit for a while. I love the photos of the quaint town you grew up in. The perfect sitting for a book.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mary, thanks for the comment! I tell folks back in my home town that the version of the town in the book is the one I grew up with combined with the one of today. The mixture of everything that was good.

      Delete
  2. What a great idea to make a series set around your own town! I would never have thought of it. And readers will be able to learn more about their favorite authors' lives, too. A win-win.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Katy, my sister's granddaughter has gotten permission to use the series as a class read project, so I'm sure I'll be getting comments from the kids who don't see their home town the way I do...but then again, I didn't see it that way when I was their age either. LOL!

      Delete
  3. I set my first Love Inspired, Love Comes Home, in my home area. I grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains and it was fun to remember and research about the town and history and learn things I hadn't known. Of course my book was a contemporary but I was able to add in a bit of the history and also add in things from my own experience. I like the name Harmony Creek Hollow. Makes me think of Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Terri, I love the area where you grew up. Again, it goes to show that we see the other areas as more "exotic" than our own home towns. But as Katy said above, I love reading the stories set in someone's home town because it offers insight into what the author loved about the place.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Lovely blog post, Jo Ann! How fun that your Puritan research turned into a sold short story! Living vicariously through our characters and our research is always fun.

    I made up a fiction military post for my Military Investigations series. My Fort Rickman was a melding of Fort Knox, KY, where I had lived with my parents for a number of assignments, and Fort Benning, Ga, where my son was stationed. The two posts blended perfectly, at least in my mind, into that fictional Fort Rickman.

    ReplyDelete

Popular Posts

Write for Love Inspired Romance?

Write for Love Inspired Romance?
If you do and would like to join this blog, please contact either Margaret Daley or Pamela Tracy

Total Pageviews

Blog Archive