Writing Home: Using One's Home Town for Setting

Creating fiction requires many essentials. One needs characters, a plot, setting, time period, and other factors which narrow the concept down to a point where the author may begin to write. Setting is key; and, as it often is with literature, characters are based on the writer’s persona, and very often, the characters live in where the writer does. How many authors can you name whose works place their protagonist in the very town where they grew up or where they currently live? I’ll give you one: Nelson DeMille has written books set on Long Island where he currently resides, and in New York City where he was born. This is a practice which I have only recently embraced.

My first novel, “The Tin Age,” is set in suburbia, and the main character, Martin Spratt, is a county police officer. I imagined the county based on the one where I reside and added many of the qualities which made this setting attractive to me: Hamlets full of quiet, tree lined streets, wooded areas on the outskirts of towns, and a government structure which allows for a full service, county-wide police department were the factors I needed to make the story work. In retrospect, instead of concocting a name, I should have simply utilized the actual region where I live as it would have been familiar to any potential local audience.

That is an attractive aspect to applying this technique as the residents of the municipality depicted in your story would be more likely to read your work and create buzz for you and your novel. This is a factor not lost on literary agents and publishers; in addition, this type of ingredient in a story works when employed the moment the task of writing the manuscript is begun. In my case with my fictional county, it would take a little effort to change village and street names to match existing locations; but, none of these roads and communities is described accurately in this story and a major re-write would then be in order to achieve authenticity. It is best to plot your location as well as your storyline at the outset as the two are intertwined.

With fiction, writing about genuine locations is useful if one wishes to add color, depth, and breadth to the story. Each locale has a unique and rich history. Customs are inbuilt, and reasonable expectations can be placed on climate, local customs, geography, and the speech of its inhabitants. Using one’s own native state, town, or actual place of birth allows a writer to draw upon their own individual experiences and include them in the narrative, albeit an imagined one.

For example, a writer may draft a scene where two brothers are walking to school. In an imaginary town, more elements may have to be explained to the audience by the author because the reader may not have a clue as the where these school boys are. The reader sees a blank, nondescript boulevard the boys are traveling on, and illustrative gaps need to be filled in by an author with different ideas than his or her audience. Experiences of the reading audience dictate how they perceive your imagined community. The more closely the reader connects with your characters' surroundings, then the more the reader gets from reading your book. If you write about a genuine place, then existing structures and sites can enrich your writing.

You can save yourself some time and set the story in San Francisco, for example, and mostly everyone knows that the roads there are all hilly, and the reader envisions streetcars as well. Write about real cities and towns and you draw the reader in. Use the environs of a region where you reside, and you’re an authority. The knowledge you have of the locale and the facts you provide enhance what you put down on paper.

With my latest novel, “The Daddy Rock,” I used my native Long Island as the backdrop. This allowed me to celebrate the beauty and diversity of the landscape as my protagonist, Roger Price, migrated from the low lying, seaside marinas along south shore to the rocky and elevated north shore. My childhood was spent growing up in a small hamlet by the Great South Bay. My south shore sensibilities are apparent in Roger as he is transplanted to the more affluent north shore hugging the Long Island Sound where I’ve settled and decided to raise my family. Familiarity with my place of birth allows me to effectively guide my characters and blend them seamlessly into a world with a readily available supply of buildings, landmarks, customs, and people where they can interact and play out the drama. Also, it is always easier to write about a place you are passionate about. Frequent readers of this blog are aware of my deep affection for my home, Long Island. That made writing my latest novel more natural.

In summary, when writing fiction, a valuable shortcut to creating a story’s setting may be to place your characters in the very town where you live in order to draw upon your own knowledge of the area, take advantage of a local audience, and to rely on local history, customs, geography, and landmarks to help you tell your tale. On a side note, I am writing a novel about a young man who joins the Russian Army and I may have to relocate to Moscow for a few years. Do they have the internet in Russia?





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A “Now” Fangled Story

When starting a work of fiction, a writer must understand that when it is completed, it is going to be a different piece of work than when initially begun. Writers mature a bit more as story tellers and practitioners of their craft with each project undertaken. When editing a first draft of a manuscript, authors may notice changes in the voice, tone, and timbre of their tale as it progresses. The characters may even speak differently. A large part of the editing and rewriting process involves searching for errors and improving the sentence structure, etc. However, authors sometimes make the mistake of not looking for anachronisms.

My first novel took me five years to write and about two years to edit. Since I wrote this tale about a man traveling into his past, I didn't have to worry much about items being out of date. It took four months to write the first draft of my latest work. Yet, I have been re-writing and editing it for the past two years. Society and technology haven't been altered dramatically in that brief time span; but, there are subtle changes which may leave the reader wondering.

This story takes place in contemporary times. Small details such as talking on a cell phone in a hospital need to be addressed. When I first wrote a chapter with my protagonist having life saving surgery, my mother was hospitalized, and using a cell phone in a hospital was forbidden. Now, I am almost done with my editing, and I've noticed that it does not matter if you chat on your cell phone in a hospital anymore. Without any reference to the year in which the action is taking place, technical gaffes like that can cause the reader to doubt the story's accuracy. My style of writing is such that I do not want the reader to know that they are in fact "reading." With that said, I do not wish to risk losing even one member of my audience to carelessness.

A few years back, I started reading a novel by a well known author who shall remain nameless in this article. The reason for not mentioning this writer’s name is because I loathe to speak ill of an author’s work if he or she has been published by traditional media and I have not. Still, from a reader’s view, the point I have is valid. The novel in question is about an attorney who gets the bulk of his cases from a much larger law firm which sends clients with dicey or unseemly problems to him. The lawyer-protagonist winds up investigating a string of homicides. My problem was not with the plot, but with the police tactics.

As a former police officer, I retreat quickly when it comes to watching police dramas on television and in the movies. Nor do I run to the bookstore when the latest police procedural is published. Often times, I find such huge inaccuracies in the methods employed by the fictional police officers that I can’t watch or even read about them. I’ve seen movies where the officer gets into several shootouts a day and they never have to fill out a single report much less testify at a grand jury. The Constitution is non-existent as they burst through doors without warrants, arrest people on the flimsiest suspicion, use excessive force, and the list goes on. That is why I found it odious when I read the book based on my father's recommendation.

What concerned me was that whenever the main character had interaction with the members of the New York City Police Department, the cops always had to use a pay phone to call “headquarters.” One scene depicts a shootout with one of the officers fumbling for change in his pocket to call for backup. This book was written in the middle 1980’s. For the record, I was an NYPD officer during that era and we employed curious devices called “radios.” In addition, street cops do not call “headquarters,” which is actually known as “One Police Plaza” to rank and file “members of the service.” If anyone does call “1PP,” it would be someone far up the chain of command, and only after several other events happened, and only after a string of procedures was implemented.

Those are major holes in the story which as a reader I could not handle. The unfortunate result was that I had to put the book down. It wasn't the quality of the writing which turned me off, but a credibility gap created by the imprecision of plot details which canceled any suspension of disbelief for me. Was I being too technical? Could have I dismissed that the fact there were no portable radios were issued to uniformed patrol units? I don’t think so. Those are important components. While only police officers are likely to have noticed the error, authors should be unwilling to part with anyone in their audience for the lack of research or insufficient editing.

With regard to my story, I do not believe I would have caused anyone consternation if my characters had to go outside the hospital to call someone on a cell phone; still, I repaired that point. But, I am still wary as it is now three years sine I wrote this story and more anachronisms may pop up when, and if, I ever do have it published. My older works of fiction may not need any such tweaking as if by some miracle they ever see the inside of a publishing house, it would be obvious the story’s setting was decades earlier.

My lesson is to remember that the novel I set out to write today is going to be very different when I finish it tomorrow. Reading for mistakes is obvious; but making sure your story details are still relevant to the time period is not as apparent. Now I’m off to finish my current project which is taking me ages to complete. It’s a contemporary novel about a young man who needs money to buy a new boom box so he can listen to his audio cassette tapes and practice the singing and become a rock and roll star. Oh wait; they have iPods now, don’t they?





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My Characters And Me

It's that instant when you get a great idea for a story; you're in the shower, in a meeting at work, or waiting for someone to quit talking to you so you can nod and walk away. Yes, we writers are always writing, even when we're not in front of our computers. For me, when that moment of inspiration hits, and I'm able to ditch my responsibilities and scurry off to find a pen and a scrap of paper to jot my ideas on, my characters begin to come to life.

In my head, their personalities are formed first. I'll imagine someone with the fortitude to rescue an entire nation, or merely reach for a ball in a sewer, or whatever the plot calls for. I’ll then see that person's human shape assemble itself in that section of the brain reserved for a writer's special talents. For me, it's the character’s behavior and traits which dictate their physical characteristics.

In my latest story, my protagonist, Roger, is a former police officer in the process of grieving. He's not very active because he finds it difficult to get out of bed everyday because he does not have a whole lot to live for. He does not work and lives off his police pension. He becomes overweight because of his sedentary lifestyle and the fact that he does not take care of himself. Later, he takes a job as his life and spirits improve. After a few months he begins to lose weight and gain some muscle tone. Roger's emotions dictate his physical appearance in this example. As the writer, I had to be true to Roger and describe him as was necessary based on his emotional state of being; heavy at first, but then slim and in shape, only because he changed as a person and became active again.

That is just one example of how my characters form. There are, however, shortcuts to my characterizations. In my first novel, Sergeant Fukes is based on a sergeant I had in the police department, physically, and psychologically only by half. His personality is an amalgam of both my squad sergeant’s and another sergeant I knew at one time in my career. The two were dissimilar in looks and persona, and I thought is would be ideal to combine their mannerisms into one person because they both would have handled certain situations in the story very differently. I thought their dissimilar habits would make for an interesting character. One sergeant was a brown nose who never would question a superior, and the other was a stickler for department regulations which very often were obscure and rarely used. The man I created was a rigid, rule worshipping nebbish who also could not say no to anyone who outranked him or was senior to him. This created friction as there were policies to be obeyed, but he did not have the fortitude to enforce them with anyone who wasn’t below him in rank. As a result, he was ineffective as a supervisor.

Finally, instead of shaping characters from my imagination, or basing them on other people, more than once I based a protagonist on myself. Writing is indeed therapy, and using the space of entire novel to reconcile my religious faith or my misspent youth does have a healing effect. Also, I hope it may be enticing material for someone to read. Another benefit of using me as inspiration for a character is that it is less likely that someone would think I wrote about them.

These are just a few examples of how I create characters. Once my central character is born, he needs family, friends, co-workers, etc, and they seem to spring up around him and fill in the spaces in the story neatly along the way through each chapter as I write them. Notice how I said “they spring up around him.” That’s because I have yet to write a story completely around a woman. Maybe it’s because I’m still writing about myself, or maybe it’s because the only story I want to tell about a woman will be based entirely on someone I’m very close to and I don’t think I want her to read it yet. It’ll be tough to keep that manuscript from her because my wife reads every one of my stories. Oh great, she’s going to read this post too.

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Writer's Plot Notes: "Someone Has to Die"

With my method of writing, I try to construct my story in a manner that efficiently moves the plot along without bogging the reader down in unnecessary details. Unfortunately, a few people get hurt or killed along the way. It's not like I'm a boy sadistically stomping on ants in the backyard; I am a writer who needs to knock off a few decent, and sometimes not-so decent folks every once in a while to tell a compelling story.

Of all the tales I've authored, I can't think of any which could be considered extremely violent. My first story has a victim who is viciously stabbed and raped and one homicide by way of gunfire. In the court of public opinion, I couldn't be accused of writing something sensational just to attract an audience. To support that claim, I didn't find any audience for that story. I was turned down so many times, I had to fit all of the rejection letters into two, giant manila envelopes, meaning I didn't create anything which stood out among all of the other stacks printed, 12 point type in the slush pile.

My second work of fiction deals with a character who winds up in Hell. But, Hell is supposed to be a bad place, isn't it? Three people were murdered in that story and I still don't think I meant it to be an overly-brutal narrative as it is a theme about redemption. My last novel has three people getting attacked, with only one of the gunshot victims succumbing to his wounds. Maybe my characters have lousy aim; but, I couldn't bear to kill the protagonist as he had to survive to be the hero. My point? Authors are Gods in their worlds, and we have the power of life and death over our characters. The question is, how to dispatch them?

There are those who can coldy kill off their characters in hideous, evil ways. Think of Saddam's torture rooms, shut your eyes, and cup your hands over your ears. This writer can't travel down that road toward hideous torture and greusome death. Maybe if I'm tailgated again on the way home from work by some idiot on the Long Island Expressway I might become inspired to...forget it. I'm not that type of writer.

Still, I was stunned when I took inventory of all the acts of agression in my stories. Yes, the protaganists in all three of my novels are police officers as I excercise the old "write what you know" concept. I figure it'd be easier for an ex-cop to get police stories published than to entice a literary agent with a medical thriller. There is an inherant amount of danger in police work, so it stands to reason that there is the potential for gunplay in a any scene where an officer strolls in a building as a drug dealer hides, panting and sweaty, behind a doorway waiting for him to approach.

Yet, the question remains, how do I kill off my future charcters? I'm sort of weak-willed when it comes to death. Bullets are clean, easy, and impersonal in a way. It was many years ago when I wrote a chapter where a poor woman was dragged into a wooded area, stabbed repeatedly, and savagely raped. When I go back and re-read that portion of the manuscript, I get a bit queasy. That's not because I am such a powerful writer, it's because I had to imagine all of the gory, terrorizing details and hurt someone I cared about. Yet, as sure as I sit here typing this blog post about inserting murder and death into one's writing, someone is going to get hurt in my next novel. I have an idea who it is, and I don't like him. Maybe you'll read about it one day. Whether or not this one gets published remains to be seen; but, either way....it's going to be murder.

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Don't Be Afraid To Write About...You Know

As a writer who is woefully terrible with quotes, I am going to paraphrase this one and give credit to the first author who lays claim to it: "A person does not really become a writer until their parents die." It's a funny line, and I'm willing to bet that there are a few of you out there who get it right away. What that quote means to me is that writers often edit themselves and don't write anything too controversial as not to embarrass themselves, or their readers. Only when that writer's mother and father are gone, can that person feel relaxed enough to author content which may make Aunt Bessie red-faced if she saw it. My biggest hang-up has always been the sex scene. In my case, as a side note, I still have to pretend that my wife is never going to read anything which can be considered “adult” for fear that she may think that I’m really writing about my own fantasies. I can see the scene playing out between the two of us if she ever read the stuff I edit out of a story.

Angry wife: “So you want to bang the baby sitter? You pervert!”
Me: (sweaty brow, hands shielding my face): “No honey, not me…the guy I’m writing about wants to. I think our baby sitter is ugly.” (Gulp)

Okay, I’m exaggerating. She supports what I do, and understands the process, I hope. But, I digress.

We all “do it”, ya know. Even our (gasp!) parents “did it” or else you wouldn’t be here, duh. So, naturally our characters are going to feel a bit romantic for each other and want to act on it every once in a while. My goals when typing out a “roll in the hay” scene between two characters is to have them learn something about each other, or to illustrate a plot point. Mostly, I want them to be complete human beings who react as the rest of us three dimensional individuals do when we’re around other people. I wouldn't want to turn one of my stories into an orgy fest; but, I think that at least one person in each of my stories would like to see another one naked.

How you actually describe the scene is up to you. Your technique can be to chronicle the entire event from the awkward first kiss, all the way around third base and across home plate. You can be vulgar, or clinical in your description of body parts, or follow the amorous couple as he carries her upstairs to the bedroom and slams the door in your face, leaving you, the reader to guess what's going on inside. All of this is relative to your skillfulness as a writer, and how much of a risk you wish to take. Even the voice used to tell the story has influence on what verbiage is used or how graphic it becomes. A wedding night between newlyweds may be narrated differently than the new inmate's first visit to the prison shower where there's a welcome party awaiting him. But the point of this article is not to lay out how to write a sex scene; it is basically to encourage you to write about what is perfectly acceptable. Also, you don’t have to kill your parents in order to work up the nerve to write that scene between the young woman behind the counter at the local deli who always wears a tube top, and the beer delivery guy.

Your audience has to remember that you're writing about human beings, and a complete human character needs water, food, shelter, clothing, etc. They even want to get frisky with each other. Those are all elements of good drama. You should feel free to sketch your characters to a point where your readers will be able to handle it if a twenty-year old Au Pair strikes a pose on the living room couch in her nightgown while watching Conan O’Brien, and then Dad wanders downstairs for a late night snack. Au Pairs can help a lot around the house and we can afford one, right honey?

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Incriminating Evidence

One of the methods I use to get that sort of sweaty, pulse-pounding emotion that writer's hope to achieve when creating fiction, is to write about people in my life and create events which I pray to God never happen, or would never do myself because it would be so, so wrong. I perform an exercise where I work out plot details by pretending to do some of the bad things my characters are going to commit by placing myself in their shoes. In order to generate an authentic environment for myself, I take real people from my life and put them into situations with myself as the actor so I can achieve an understanding of how it may feel for my character to do the same thing.

If I have a character who wants to kill his best friend, I’ll boot up my computer and type out a scenario where my buddy Frank gets on my nerves and I will go nuts, grab a rifle and…you know. Of course, no one, not even my wife reads these texts as she would never understand what it is I am doing. It'd be a bit hard to explain that I really don’t have a crush on the woman I bring my dry cleaning to.


The girl at the dry cleaners is in her twenties, thin with a dancer's build, dark hair, single, and has at least one tattoo I noticed on the small of her back. Her skin seems to be permanently tanned, even in the winter, and she is always happy to see me. In truth, she's happy to see anybody. But, when I am working on characters, I imagine more. One of the stories I am crafting at this moment involves a police officer who is cheating on his wife with his partner's wife. There's a lot more to my new story than mere infidelity (as if that weren't enough) but I wanted to make sure I knew what is was to actually cheat on my wife without going out and having a bona-fide affair. That's where Leah, the dry cleaning "hot babe" comes in.

On paper (okay, in Microsoft Word) I drop off my dry cleaning one day and notice Leah bending over in front of me to write up the receipt. Her blouse is opened a bit more than usual and I can see an ample amount of cleavage. Her bra, black, with spaghetti-thin straps is also a tad loose and there is a nipple slip. There are no tan lines, and my eyes are fixed on her breasts. Leah looks up and notices that I was peeking. Looking away, I'm embarrassed. My face feels warm, and my mouth begins to spew out all kinds of nonsense about baseball, the weather...anything. Leah smiles, and bends over again. Now what do I do?

This simple, married, slightly over-weight, middle aged guy can take this many different directions. Does Leah want me to see more of her and less of her clothing somewhere more private? Or is Leah oblivious to the fact that she is exposed? What if I go in there again and we begin some sort of heavy flirting? All of this can be written out and lead to something that reads like a porno movie script, but, it is not the text that is the point. The objective is to vicariously experience cheating without actually doing it.

In real life, Leah would probably smack me if I looked down her shirt. I'd be a fool to believe that I had any sort of a chance with someone like her, and I'd never flirt with any woman while my wife was still living. Nevertheless, this sort of exercise can be used to imagine murder, betrayal, abuse of different kinds (No, I am not a good father after all, you rotten kids) and the key is that I involve real people whom I know so that I can relate to what happens on a very personal level. This becomes the grist for my writing which contains even more emotion because I can readily imagine what the characters are going through.

Leah will not show up as a character in this story. Still, I used her because she is forbidden not only because I'm married, but because she is twenty years younger than me and she is way out of my league looks-wise. This example with Leah is more than just a mere sex fantasy; it is taking my normal encounters with her and attempting to establish a believable context where the two of us could be together for an illicit affair. In my effort to create a "suspension of disbelief" in which the reader would go along with the premise that a forty-four year old man can seduce a twenty-four year old woman, I plotted this out with someone I know in order to create an air of authenticity. The character for my story is my age, and his new partner is a rookie in his twenties as well as his young wife who is beautiful. That is why it was necessary for me to choose someone like Leah because she the same age as the person my protagonist will be having a licentious affair with. But, no one will ever read the actual piece about me and Leah, especially my wife.

So far, these exercises where I work out plot details using friends, relatives, and acquaintances of mine has worked; at least from my standpoint. It is fun, in a way to take innocuous dealings with my friends, family, and acquaintances and carry them to extremes. It is also imperative that I keep these notes private. If my wife ever got a hold of my secret "files" and read them not understanding how I employ this technique, I'd find myself in divorce court the next day and she'd be looking over her shoulder for a hit man, testing the brakes on her car, and having the dog taste all of her food. After all, I can't offer to drive Leah home from work after her car's engine mysteriously siezes if my wife's alive, can I? That would be cheating.

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