  Romance/Love
This week: Making Foreign Places Real Edited by: fyn  
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"The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page." - St. Augustine
"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign." - Robert Louis Stevenson
"The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are." - Samuel Johnson
"People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home." - Dagobert D. Runes
"One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things." - Henry Miller
″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings." - Moslih Eddin Saadi
"When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in." - D. H. Lawrence
"To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world." - Freya Stark |
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It is easy to write about a far off place if you've been there, to capture the flavor and cadence of the market place or describe the view from the castle walls. But if you haven't been fortunate enough to travel there, how can you still impart the sense of the place to a reader? Easy. Research!
Due to the joys of the internet, one can travel the world (sort of) and see pictures of virtually everyplace on earth. Need to write of a villa in Tuscany as I did recently? Research that area of Italy. Explore travel sites of the towns and see pictures of the buildings, markets, towers and countryside. We are writers, it is easy then to describe what we see and add the background flavors to a scene. There are translators on Google so you can sprinkle in some comments or conversations with the local dialects. Pull up Google-Earth and see the lay of the land, get directions. Go to real estate sites and wander (virtually) through villas for sale and pick the want you want as often, you can see a plethora of inside photos, floor plans and get a history of the place to boot! Plus, you can get a sense of the places that the locals would know, love or avoid!
Writing a story set in a castle in Scotland? Research the area. There are castles everywhere and one can even check the castle registry sites for the crumbling ruin castles and see drawing of what they were like once upon a time. Read up on the history of 'your' castle and see if you can play with the actual history to make your story fit the place, time, era and people. Do the research so that you don't have a highlands name or clan inhabiting the borders. Know the history of both the era and the locality such that your setting, characters and their history make sense in the grand scheme of things.
Meandering the streets of Paris? Make sure you are on the correct bank, that the type of garret you are describing is the sort that one would find in a particular area. Would you really have a view of the Eiffel Tower from your window or would it, instead, be one of Sacré-Coeur? Or both? Again, take advantage of places like Google-Earth, numerous web-cams or panoramic camera shots to bring the reality to your work.
Writing of a character on a farm outside Rome? Know when lambs are born so that you don't have them being born three months later than they are. Research the crops grown locally and find out the growing seasons. Writing about a vineyard? Do the work to find out everything from the perfect weather and when you wants rains and when they'd be a disaster.
We are truly fortunate in this day and age to have such a tool at our disposal, yet, too many do not take advantage of it. The examples I've mentioned were things I found in recent forays around wdc where stories had issues that needn't have been issues with a little research.
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Romance/Love: July 20, 2011 Issue [#4511]
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