Where do my characters live?

Writers have to get the details right in order to create what John Gardner called “the continuous dream.” This means if I choose a location that is near a highway, I have to get the exit numbers right, the scenery as the driver pulls onto the roadway from the ramp. When a character begins speaking, his language—grammar, vocabulary, inflection—should match what we know about him or her. Details matter.

One of the features of story invention I spend time thinking about is where my characters live. Unless I have a specific home in mind for an important character, I can’t feel the story growing because the character has no context. I have to know where each character lives. This means research.

I'm not the only one who seeks the perfect setting. Agatha Christie's And Then There Were Nonecan't be set in any house. "Crimson Shadow," the opening story in Walter Mosley's Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, introduces Socrates Fortlow and his two-room apartment, in a location that defines the story. Where a character lives matters.

I haunt open houses, review real estate sites on line, and study my friend’s homes. Not everyone I know lives in a place that would be suitable for one of my characters or a story, but I occasionally find one. When Chief of Police Joe Silva moved to Mellingham, he was a single man committed to a new job in a small town. Instead of buying or renting a house, he at first rented a condo, until he got a sense of the new community. This put him in touch with a landlady, an elderly woman who lived upstairs and knew everyone in town. For Joe’s new home, I chose the two-family home owned by a friend of mine. Before I began using it, however, I asked her permission.

In Family Album, the home of a particular character is important to the plot, so I chose for that person a home that I recalled from my youth. It has been renovated and expanded beyond recognition for some, but the original structure gave me what I wanted, and I could use it without worrying about infringing on someone else’s right to privacy.

In the Anita Ray series, I faced a similar problem. I stayed at a family-owned and operated guesthouse in Kovalam, South India, and returned over fifteen years later to find it greatly altered and expanded. But the core was still recognizable to me, and I remembered well how it had been. Nevertheless, I drew a diagram of the two main floors, numbered the rooms, and made minor adjustments to the original building. This was the home Anita lived in throughout the series, beginning with Under the Eye of Kali. For traditional family homes, such as the one in The Wrath of Shiva, I used traditional Nair homes I’d visited throughout Kerala. Since these followed a standard design, I didn’t worry about using them. An important location surrounded by heritage trees appears in When Krishna Calls. 

For Felicity O’Brien’s home in Below the Tree Line, I adapted a late seventeenth century farmhouse. These homes also follow a standard design, so I wasn’t using anything unique or unusual. Tall Tree Farm has a farmhouse, a barn, and various small outbuildings that are really just sheds.

In my current work-in-progress, a suspicious death occurs in a Victorian house in a seaside setting. The death and its aftermath require a house with certain features—two staircases, an old cellar with a dirt floor, and rooms that flow. I found the perfect location nearby, and toured it during an open house. So far, as the story progresses, I haven’t had to make any adjustments to the structure, and I can move on to the homes of some of the other characters in the story. Once I have a solid location, one I can also move around in, the possibilities of the site become clear, and the story develops additional, often unexpected dimensions.

To visit Felicity O’Brien’s home, go here.

To visit the other series, go here.

And to learn more about Susan and her books, go here.

More about Writers and Their Animals--Sheep

Below the Tree Line

In my new mystery, Below the Tree Line, Felicity O'Brien has three sheep on her property. She has taken on the job of caring for them to earn some extra cash from the fiber artists who own them. I wondered how worthwhile this could be for the artists, so I began my research there. One pound of wool can produce up to ten miles of yarn, and one sheep, depending on the breed, can produce from two to thirty pounds of wool a year. That's a lot of mileage out of one smallish animal. The main artist in the group, Nola Townsend, uses the idea of owning her own sheep and raising her own wool as part of her sales pitch. Felicity is impressed. 

For additional research I made my annual visit to the Topsfield Fair, which includes a sheep and goat barn, which is mostly sheep. I went with a good friend, Carol, who likes sheep as much as I do. We spent well over an hour there getting a good look at the residents. This was judging day, and some of the contestants were not happy, bleating and bumping, and others were blase. Most being examined for the meat market had been sheared and tidied up. Unless sheared, the fleece on a sheep will keep growing forever, sometimes getting so heavy that the animal has trouble moving. Domesticated sheep don’t shed.

This brings me to the strange fact that sheep have been domesticated so long that if released into the wild, they don’t become feral. Sheep were the first animal to be domesticated. The oldest wool cloth dates to 10,000 BCE. 

The oldest breed is the Jacob sheep, so named because it is mentioned in the Bible. Which brings me to a detail I hadn’t known about, though like many other details the evidence was in front of me for most of my life. In Psalm 23, the line “He leadeth me beside the still waters” is not merely a sweet, pastoral description; it is meant as a literal reference to appropriate care. Sheep can’t drink from moving or running water because of the structure of their snout. If they tried to drink from a flowing stream, they’d drown or choke to death. They also have no upper teeth.

When you look into their sweet faces and strange eyes, you are also seeing an animal that can look behind it without moving its head. Their peripheral vision is 270 to 320 degrees, compared to that of humans at 155 degrees. I still find the black slits in a pool of yellow disconcerting; it completely undermines the animal's cuteness in my view, but the shape of the eyes helps the animal see predators approaching. Sheep flock for the same reason fish school--to make it harder for predators to succeed. Both fish and sheep cluster less when the threat declines.

But sheep aren’t stupid. They recognize faces—sheep and humans—which Felicity learns, to her good fortune. And they are like humans in one other respect. They are the only other species whose gay members remain so for their entire lives, meaning they remain sexually interested only in their own gender for life. 

To learn more about Felicity and her visiting sheep, go here:

To learn more about sheep, go here or here:

To learn more about my books, go to www.susanoleksiw.com 

Writers and Their Animals

I've been thinking about writers and animals lately. Many of us like to be around animals, to sense that connection to the natural world we sometimes seem to have lost in other areas of our lives. We may be drawn to a particular animal, as though a certain one expressed how we see the world. Instead of the world arranging for us to encounter our totem animal, we choose it. 

Some of the totems for writers are easy to spot. Clea Simon loves cats and writes movingly about them. The same goes for Susan Conant and Paula Munier with dogs. Sue Star admits to a fascination with moose. 

By Photo Dharma, Sadao, Thailand

My favorite creature has been the elephant. A Bengali friend named after this creature at first disliked her name until she saw the drawings at Ajanta, the famous Buddhist caves in central India. The elephant figures on the cave walls are graceful and beautiful, and lift the spirit.

My first encounter with an elephant occurred in 1976, in India, when I was walking down a roadway without sidewalks in the early part of the afternoon when the stalls were closed and people were at home. On the opposite side, coming toward me, was a mahout and his elephant, a large one. The animal had no chain on his leg, no rope. As we drew closer, the elephant looked at me, turned and crossed the street, coming straight at me. The mahout gave one command, and the animal turned back. I must have looked interesting.

I got used to seeing elephants on the street and lined up at festivals. They seemed to be everywhere, especially in the countryside. They are less evident in cities today except during festivals, but out in the villages they are still a presence.

Dakshini

In recent years I visited the royal family's elephant, Dakshini, who stayed in a small field near a palace. Her job is to appear in festivals and temple rituals throughout the year. She's relatively small, and now elderly, but sweet and careful around people. The mahout let me and two friends feed her carrots and apples, and get to know her, and we visited regularly, feeding and petting her, and talking as though she might understand us.

We think we know these animals from stories on television and information provided by zoos, but standing close to Dakshini taught me more about her than any scientist could. She gave the sense she was adjusting to us, a demonstration of the elephant's quality of compassion and intuition. I was surprised to learn elephants can purr, just like cats, and they communicate not only by trumpeting and touch but also by subsonic sound that travels faster than sound through air. They can run/walk up to twenty-five miles per hour, but can't jump. All true.

In recent years my attention has turned to sheep, for a specific reason. We had sheep when I was a child and they've reappeared in my newest mystery. In Below the Tree Line: A Pioneer Valley Mystery, Felicity O'Brien has three sheep to tend on her farm, along with a dog and cat. In an ordinary day Felicity has to be mindful of the coyotes and later she discovers a bobcat living in her woods. But these aren't the real threat to her farm. 

Animals are only a sideline for Felicity, but in growing fond of the sheep she sets in motion a small incident that will turn out to be life-saving.

To learn more about Felicity O'Brien and Tall Tree Farm, go here: