Making Your Settings Come Alive

To make your settings believable, try visualizing the location where the scene takes place. Best yet, use a photo of or a visit to a real place.

In Where Love Once Lived, I could see in my mind the places where each scene took place. Some settings were imaginary and some were real, but they were all clear to me as I moved the characters about in the scene.

There is one scene in the book where the male and female protagonists meet on the campus of the University of Texas. I'd been there often enough to easily describe the scene, but before I began writing, I went there again.

I walked along the same sidewalks described in the book and sat on the bench where my fictional characters sat. I went to the Student Union and found out Brian and Karen's favorite place to eat had been replaced by a cluster of fast food stands you find in malls and airports today. I went on a Friday and listened to the Carillon play.

I took photos and posted them on my website, not only for future readers of the book, but for me to look at as I edited.

The photo shown here is of the bench where Brian and Karen had a picnic lunch while talking about their future. To see the other photos, go to http://sidneywfrost.com/settings.htm and click on the setting locations to see the photos. There are also photos taken at the State Capitol, the Cabin, Mount Bonnell, and a church in South Houston that was in my mind as I wrote about the one set in Redondo Beach, California.

Let me know what you think about setting descriptions. Have you read books that made you feel you were there with the fictional characters? What if the author is describing a place you know quite well and you find errors. Does that bug you the way it does me?

In an early version of Where Love Once Lived, I described Manor as being west of Austin instead of east. None of my writing classmates noticed. But as soon as my Austin friends read it, they all pounced on me.

Is Where Love Once Lived Finished?

I've reported on two occasions here that I have completed Where Love Once Lived and turned it over to the publisher. Well, I lied. They sent me the final proof and I couldn't help reading it from cover to cover. To be honest it is the first time I'd done that since it was rejected by White Rose Publishing about a year. Guess what? It's good! The changes I made for White Rose tightened it up just right.

However, I found a few problems that had to be corrected. Since we were so far along in the production process, I had to pay CreateSpace an extra $100 to get the changes in, but there was no choice. You'll understand when you see the following.

First of all, I found a reference to Brian's sister. This is a sister I cut out of the book many revisions back.

A major problem I have in editing is not rereading the whole sentence after making a change. For example, I must have changed "...will help sell them" to "...will help sell the idea." But what I ended up with was "...will help sell THEM idea." That had to be fixed.

There were some missing words. I'm not sure how they got past the publisher's copyeditor, but they did. Example, "How is that the children..." should be "How is IT that the children..." Also, "What wrong?" instead of "What's wrong?"

I found several errors caused by changes in other areas of the book. In one place, Karen says, "I did tell Julie not long ago and felt better after doing so." Sixty some odd pages later Karen actually tells Julie for the first time. You can't catch errors like this without reading the whole book in a short period of time. I'm a slow reader, and I was searching for problems, so it took me about eight hours to read it.

One of the things I learned in writing classes is not to repeat the same word or phrase too much, especially on the same page. I've been careful about that in my writings. However, they creep in during edits unless you reread the whole scene. I found more than a few places where I needed to make changes because of this.

I found two punctuation errors. A missing closing quote in one place and a combination comma period in another place. Not bad. Those missing quotes are hard to spot.

In one place, Brian refers to the Manor school bookmobile stop as his favorite when clearly everyone would know his favorite stop would be Holden Elementary School where Karen taught. I fixed that.

As the author, I have a lot of back story in my head about the characters and I know what's happening next. Sometimes I wish I could read the story the way a new reader would. However, because I hadn't read the book in so long, I did spot a possible problem for a new reader. This had to do with one of the Austin characters suddenly being in Redondo Beach, California. I know how she got there, but it wouldn't be clear to anyone else. I found an easy way to fix it.

As long as I was making changes and it wouldn't cost any more to make a few others, I fixed this sentence: Karen felt God had led her to the perfect time. I deleted "Karen felt" because that is implied by it being Karen's point of view. Other non-grammatical changes included moving the order of sentences in a paragraph to help the flow and leaving out the word "then" which is implied in a narrative.

There were 26 such changes, but I probably didn't find them all. When you spot a problem while reading the book, please let me know. It won't hurt my feelings at all and I'll correct it for future editions.

Learning About Alzheimer's -- Part 1 of 5

In Chapter Eight of Where Love Once Lived, the male protagonist, Brian Donelson, learns that his mother has Alzheimer's. This week, I'm going to give you the entire chapter to read. I would love to hear what you think about it. I know that Alzheimer's patients react in different ways, but I'm basing this on my own experience with my mother.

Brian parked his rental car in front of his parents’ home in Redondo Beach, California, and glanced at his watch. Last week, at this time, he was parking the bookmobile at Karen’s school. An image of her walking across the parking lot was as clear to him as if he were there now. He wondered if she’d miss him when he didn’t show up today. He started to call her before he left, but he wasn’t ready to talk about why he’d shut down the bookmobile service. He owed her an explanation after barging into her life the way he did, but he wasn’t sure what he’d say. He still wanted her to love him the way she once did and the way he loved her still, but the bookmobile approach hadn’t worked. Perhaps this trip to see his parents and his daughter would give him time to decide what to do next. He stepped out of the vehicle and breathed in the smells of his youth. Even though his future was fuzzy, he felt a calmness he only found here in his old neighborhood with its palm trees, stucco homes, and the fresh smell of saltwater from the nearby Pacific Ocean. As he walked toward the house, he noticed Dad hadn’t kept the yard as neat as he usually did. Perhaps Brian could give him a hand with it while he was here. It’d be fun to trim the bushes, dig up the weeds in the flowerbeds, and mow the grass again.

The front door opened as he approached the house, and his daughter stepped out. She shut the door behind her and put her arms around him.

“Hi, Daddy.”

He’d planned to stay in his old room while at home, but when he called Amy to say he was coming, she’d insisted he stay at her place. She wanted to show him her new condo, she’d said, and it’d give them more time to visit. Even though he talked to her by phone and e-mail frequently, seeing her now reminded him why he’d stayed in a loveless marriage for so long.

“Hi, sweetie. What a nice surprise.” He backed away and looked into her eyes. “But what are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

Her smile faded slowly and her eyes took on a seriousness he’d seen only once before, the time he told her he was getting a divorce.

“I need to talk to you before you go in.”

Something was seriously wrong.

“What’s happened? Is it Mom? Dad?”

Amy reached out and grasped his hands, her brown eyes focused on his eyes. “It’s Grandma.” She gently squeezed his hands. “Don’t be alarmed, Dad. She’s in no danger. It’s…it’s Alzheimer’s.”