Being in the scene

 Part of the challenge of writing is taking readers to the setting of our books without writing a travelogue. Other challenges are writing a hook that pulls readers into the story, and creating engaging characters that readers relate to, like, and care about.

The plot for "Peril in Paradise" had been bouncing around my head since a trip to Volcanoes National Park several years ago. Anyone who's ever written a book can happily expand on the difference between having an idea and writing a book. They're about 80,000 words and six months of writing different. I made the transition from idea to story early one morning. 

Having been warned repeatedly by my cop consultant not to talk about my imaginary friends, I'll say that an acquaintance woke me up at midnight. As sometimes occurs, Jill Fletcher wanted me to write down her ideas for the opening of a book set in Hawaii. Rather than allow her to keep tormenting me, I got up and together we wrote the opening chapter of "Peril in Paradise". With the first chapter written, she let me go back to sleep for a few hours, until she dragged me out of bed again at 6 am to continue the story.

Powered by caffeine, Jill and Doug's words, and visions of Volcanoes National Park, I wrote like a mad man. At some point, my wife wandered out of the bedroom and glared at me. Having survived over two decades of my writing, she shook her head and made herself breakfast while I pounded on the computer. She knew I was "in the scene". Yep. I may have been staring at the computer screen, or the blank wall behind it, but I was driving the Chain of Craters Road with the brown/black lava flows. I was eating papaya and warm banana bread in a Volcano Village B&B. I mean, I could smell the baking banana bread and perking Kona coffee as I wrote the scene. As my characters walked outside, I could smell the sulfurous "Vog" from the nearby volcanic eruptions. 

While drafting this book, a reader came to a book event and said it felt like I'd been to every place I'd written about in the Pine County mystery he'd just finished. The answer is yes and no. I've driven most of the back roads in Pine County, just as I've been to Devils Tower, Walnut Canyon, Padre Island National Seashore, Everglades National Park, and canoed down the St. Croix River. However, my mind's eye has taken me places I haven't been.

A prime example of that was when a reader called me and asked how to find an unnamed cop bar in Minneapolis mentioned in an early Pine County mystery. He'd just read a scene set in that bar and was ready to drive there with his wife for supper. I had to admit that particular scene was set in a place that was a composite of several of my favorite restaurants. Sorry, Mike, it's a fictional place. Not to say I wasn't sitting in that fictional bar when I wrote the scene. I could smell the stale beer and the burgers frying on the grill. I saw the walls covered with shoulder patches from dozens of police departments, pinned on the walls by cops from all over the world. Car doors salvaged from old police cars hung from the ceiling. I apparently did such a good enough job of creating that fictional bar that the reader was ready to go there for a juicy burger on a homemade bun.

I hope I've created enough of those places in "Peril in Paradise". I hope your mouth waters when the waitress delivers hebi (short-billed swordfish) in butter wine sauce to Doug and Jill. That you can smell the fresh white chocolate and macadamia nut cookies at their B&B. And maybe even have your nose tickled by sharp sulfur smell at the Kilauea observatory. I saw, smelled, and felt each of those scenes as I wrote them. I never left my chair, but I was there. My stomach even tightened during the helicopter ride. 

I hope I can take you there too.

Hovey, Dean - BWL Publishing Inc. (bookswelove.net)

https://books2read.com/Peril-in-Paradise