Choosing Locations in “Perceval”

Writing about the near future gives me some freedom in choosing and describing locations.  Do I create a completely fictional city or use a real one?  Each has its challenges and advantages.  I decided early in the first draft that I wanted to ground Evan’s future world as much in the present as I could.  I wanted locations in Europe that I knew and that had good symphony orchestras, but I also wasn’t afraid of research.  

In Perceval, Evan’s primary physical location is Vienna, Austria, a city in which I’ve lived.  Vienna has a rich cultural life and two major symphony orchestras, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna Symphony.  It is a city of music.  Evan’s psychological location, however, is Minneapolis, where he grew up and spent most of his life.  He also had lived in St. Louis and New York City.  But from the beginning I wanted a tension between Evan’s locations — Europe and America, present and past.

Another tension in locations for me was between real and fictional.  As I worked on the first and subsequent drafts, I realized that I wanted to use as many real locations as possible, such as the Musikverein in Vienna, or the canals in Amsterdam.  Personal locations I created from imagination.  For example, the apartment Evan rents is connected to a house on Sternwartestrasse in Vienna’s 18th District.  Sternwartestrasse exists, the house and apartment are fictional.  Then I also fictionalized real locations.  For example, Judenplatz exists in Vienna’s 1st District as does the cafe Evan visits there, but I fictionalized the cafe’s name, owner, and interior. 

Characters sometimes choose locations for me.  For example, in Perceval, Viennese Police Chief Inspector Klaus Leiner needs a safe house for Evan that’s not far from Vienna.  The first place that popped into my mind as I was writing the relevant scene was a lovely town on the north side of Neusiedl Lake southeast of Vienna.  The lake is famous for its shallowness — only four feet at its deepest — and its use by refugees as an escape route out of Communist Hungary because it straddles the Austro-Hungarian border.  The town is a vacation haven and Leiner knows it well.  He takes his family there on summer weekends to sail, swim and fish.  I was drawn to this location because of its past as a refugee sanctuary.  So, Leiner takes Evan to a fictional safe house on the lake but outside of town and isolated.

An element that affects location is time of year.  For Perceval, I wanted the story to begin during Vienna’s annual music festival which occurs late spring/early summer.  Evan conducts his last tour concert during the festival.  Originally, I thought the action would take place during a year, but as I wrote, I realized the action occurred within four months, over the summer and into the fall.  Keeping in mind climate change, I researched the weather during summers in Vienna because I had not lived there during an entire summer, what would be open or closed, what cultural life was like.  As I worked on subsequent novels in the series, I discovered that I wanted to contrast the seasons with Evan’s psychological weather, and I also discovered another point of contrast that my imagination chose without my knowledge — landlocked Vienna vs. coastal cities with canals.  I haven’t yet worked out what that means, if anything, although the coastal cities could represent a physical openness which would fit thematically.

I’ve had to research some locations without travelling to walk their streets, observe their residents, smell the air.  I’ve relied on friends who’ve travelled to the locations, their impressions and photos; and people who called the cities home but were living in America.  The internet has saved me a lot of time, but I love to read books about places, especially by a good travel writer who can capture the atmosphere and personality of a place, and peruse guidebooks which are a treasure trove of information and resources.  Because I am writing about the future, I have a certain freedom but I don’t take it lightly.  I try to ground my future in the present so that it will make sense to readers.

And the research continues….

Reading as a Writer: “The Road”

In 1983, President Reagan ordered missiles sent to Europe to protect the NATO countries and the USSR reacted rather badly to what they perceived was a direct threat.  We learned later that our two nations had been as close, if not closer, to a nuclear exchange as we were in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

During this extraordinary and tense time, a question loomed in the sky for many: what would you do?  I live in a metropolitan area known to be on the USSR’s nuclear missile target list.  If someone had pushed the button in Moscow, we’d have had approximately 30 minutes left to life as we knew it.  What would you do if you knew you had only 30 minutes left to live?  This question blazed through most conversations.  The one answer that has always stuck with me came from a scientist, a biologist, who stated emphatically that he’d drive to where the projected ground zero would be.  He could not imagine the world after a nuclear attack, nor would he want to live in it.

Cormac McCarthy, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, has imagined America after some sort of widespread catastrophe that occurred several years before.  His descriptions of the landscape and weather suggest a post-nuclear winter.  Desolate, burned-out and cold.  He tells the story through a third person personal point of view, homing in on the experience of a man and his young son walking on the road.  They travel south, but this road trip is far different from any other road trip I’ve seen, read or experienced.  McCarthy explores how human beings would survive, what the landscape would be like, the weather, availability of food and water, and how human beings would interact.  The young boy asks about their status as “good guys” and who the “bad guys” are — McCarthy proceeds to give them the experiences to show who each are. 

McCarthy’s prose pulls the reader down into the maelstrom of this primitive world with what a poet friend called “Anglo-Saxon words.”  They are strong words, hard-sounding words, unusual and old.  He described a man’s teeth as being “claggy,” dawn as “chary,” hands as “claws scrabbled.”  I kept a notepad and pen next to me as I read in fascination both of the story and the use of language which supported the world he described.  Some other favorites:

1. “The plaster ceiling was bellied in great swags….”
2. “Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
3. “…a sound without cognate….”
4. “Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.”

And some interesting words: granitic, meconium, rachitic, colliculus, seawrack, pampooties, pipeclayed, swale, chert, wimpled, torsional, middens, knurled, stoven…. 

His use of prepositions also interested me.  Instead of camping on land, they camped in it.  Instead of standing on the floor, they stood in it. 

The man has a pair of binoculars at the beginning, and McCarthy describes him as “glassing” the landscape or road when he looks through them.  The man “laved up the dark water” when getting water for them to drink.  The prose also has an off-rhythm feel to it, like it’s somehow off kilter but definitely not flowery.  These are two males he’s writing about in this story, and there are only one or two women that they meet, never under happy circumstances.  But then all the people that they meet are strangers.  The man and his son are friends to each other because they have no one else, “each the other’s world entire.”

I was prepared for a depressing book when I first picked it up, and a violent one because I’d heard that McCarthy’s stories can be brutally violent, but I wasn’t prepared for the horror at their experiences or the fear I felt for these two characters or for the despair I felt in my heart for humanity.  I understood why that scientist had responded the way he had back in 1983.

This novel will haunt me for the rest of my life, much as A Canticle for Liebowitz (by Walter M. Miller, Jr.) has since I read it in high school or the movie Testament.  I recommend it strongly, but also with the warning that it’s not for those who want fun entertainment or for the faint of heart.  This story will change you.

The Redhead

On a recent day just before rush hour, I waited at a bus stop with two large bags of groceries.  The wind blustered cold, and the overcast sky threatened to let go of its load of snow on the world around me.  A city bus pulled up.  Through the windows I could see people standing in the center aisle, all the seats were taken — an unusual occurrence before rush hour.  I boarded, hefting my full grocery bags up to the floor near the driver.  As I paid, a man in the front stood and offered me his seat.  To get the bags out of the way so people wouldn’t trip over them (or destroy the eggs in the carton on top of one), I set them on the seat and stood, holding onto the bar above and bracing my knees against the seat. 

Six or seven people crammed in around me.  I looked toward the back.  Usually, those standing in the aisle will move farther toward the back when people board.  No one moved.  Blocking them at the very end of their line stood the Redhead.

Her red hair flipped up at her shoulders and a swatch of it fell diagonally across her forehead connecting with one side of her black thick-framed eyeglasses at a 45-degree angle.  The lips of her small mouth pursed in determination.  She stared straight ahead.  She looked like she’d stepped directly out of the 1950’s.  

No one said anything.  The bus moved forward.  I stared at the Redhead, wondering what she was thinking.  She looked to be in her late-20’s, not particularly pretty but not homely either.  How could she be oblivious to the situation?  Open space yawned behind her.  Did she think to move back was beneath her?  Her expression could also be interpreted as haughty.  It definitely said, “don’t bother me.”  Angry?  Who was this young woman?  Where had she boarded the bus? 

I began to spin a backstory for her in my mind.  I decided that she must be affluent, forced to ride the bus because her car was being repaired.  I decided her facial expression meant anger, not determination, and it had erected an invisible wall around her.  I toyed with the idea that she had a mental illness and might suddenly begin screaming or something equally dramatic, but suddenly, I was no longer curious about her.  Nothing about her appearance or the situation compelled my imagination to play anymore.

This is one way characters can arrive and depart my life and mind.  Nothing is ever completely discarded from these little mind games.  Details can stick in my mind and pop up months, even years, later to become a part of a character that decided to stay with me for a while and share his or her story….

And the score is…..

A quick marketing update: sent an e-mail follow-up today to the literary agent who has the manuscript of Perceval. It’s now been nine months….

Another agent in my most recent batch of queries has responded: a “no thanks.”  The score now is 4 rejections, 6 still outstanding….