I have been traveling for a couple of weeks. Italy and the UK. It’s been years, so I had to stretch my comfort zone a little, which was overdue.
From day to day and from place to place, I never woke up and wondered where I was. I always knew. Then when I came home, I woke up the first night without a clue where I was. My first thought was that I was back in Rome. Then I looked around at the darkened room and that conclusion made no sense. Everything looked wrong.
I was, of course, in the same room I have slept for most of the last twenty-three years. I gave it a beat and then realized what was going on. My mind expected to be in a different place, an unfamiliar one, and my sleepy consciousness had trouble accommodating the fact that I was home.
I was, in a way, lost at home. If that was true, then perhaps a corollary might be that it is entirely possible that I had been comfortably in place while away, at home in unfamiliar surroundings.
Not exactly earth-shaking, transformational, or epifanous but an interesting feeling.
Because I write historical novels, getting the setting right has always been a challenge. Readers have to feel both at home and very much not. Research, lots of it, is essential. There are times, though, that research is not enough. If you’re placing people and events in Cairo, Istanbul, and Warsaw 150 years ago, you really need to read and write Arabic, Turkish, and Polish in order to be completely confident. I don’t, so I cheat.
This is where the feeling of being comfortably in place comes in. You have to give the reader enough to make them comfortable yet interested in reading more about the context and how it might affect characters and events. It’s not easy. An editor wanted me to more thoroughly describe the lower decks on a steamship in 1872, a context that was important in one chapter, and I had to reply that I had NO idea what that looked like because I had found no good sources. So, realizing that the editor was right and that the chapter needed more description of the steamship, I made it up.
Will someone catch me out?
I hope so.
That would mean someone read it.
So, that makes me comfortable about lying. Because I’d be lost telling the truth.