Small Town Settings-Big Author Challenges

By Linda Lovely

I write romantic suspense and mysteries with romantic elements. My choice of setting—large city or small town—plays a large part in shaping each of my novels. Of the five books I’ve published to date, all but one feature small towns—well, actually small communities, which is slightly different.

My decision about setting is driven by two factors—familiarity and plot. Since I’ve lived in smaller communities most of my life, I have a good grasp of their social fabric and how things work, including who has power/clout and how it can be used for good or evil. This helps me construct credible plots that are intimate and personal.

In big-city thrillers, the villains (and heroines) tend to be individuals we’re unlikely to meet face-to-face. I find plots far more compelling if the villains could be signing my paycheck or passing the collection plate at church. I’m also more passionate about rooting for heroines and heroes who sound a lot like next-door neighbors who share my everyday joys and troubles.

That’s not to say there aren’t problems writing small-town fiction. Here are three biggies:

• Accuracy & Research. If your fiction is set current day in a “real” small town, you’d better be committed to doing solid research. You also have to expect disconnects between your research and readers’ experiences. The trendy restaurant where your heroine hangs out may have gone belly up by the time your reader visits it on the written page. The woods where you have a crucial chase scene may be leveled to make way for a used car dealership. Streets may be renamed. Courthouses may be moved. The list is endless.
• Permission If you plan to include real institutions and commercial entities in your book, seek written permission if there’s any chance someone might think the mentions put them in an unflattering light. An example? Saying your heroine is poisoned at her favorite restaurant—even if the villain (who has no association with the eatery) slips in the poison while your heroine visits the ladies’ room. Still most restauranteurs would not want “poison” and their business name coupled in the same paragraph. 
• Unintended Slurs. Okay, we’re talking fiction, but that doesn’t mean “real” police officers, sheriff’s deputies, bankers, preachers, developers, university presidents, or entrepreneurs who reside in your real burg won’t see the depiction of any unsavory characters in their professions or institutions as being a potential slap in the face.  

So, how can an author solve these problems? Here’s what I’ve done on a book-by-book basis.

DEAR KILLER: I lived on a barrier island outside Beaufort, South Carolina, for a dozen years. I wanted to capture the special flavor of the Lowcountry and life in a small residential/resort community. However, I didn’t want to use any real island since the plot included less than admirable characters in the island’s power structure. My solution? Fictional Dear Island, a composite of several islands. I located it near Beaufort, but in a fictional adjacent county. This compromise allows my characters to visit many favorite tourist spots in Beaufort, Hilton Head, and Charleston without the risk of accidentally impugning anyone’s reputation.  

NO WAKE ZONE: My second Marley Clark mystery is set in Spirit Lake/Lake Okoboji, Iowa. I love this real community, having spent many wonderful summers there with my aunt, uncle and cousins. There’s a statue of my late cousin Steve Kennedy on the waterfront, honoring his contributions to the area. I collaborated on the history of the area with Steve. After he died, I asked for special permission to include the Queen II excursion boat, the Iowa Great Lakes Maritime Museum, and Arnolds Park, a century-plus old amusement park, in the plot. It’s worked out beautifully.

DEAD HUNT: This is the second romantic thriller in my “Smart Women, Dumb Luck” series. I now live in Upstate South Carolina, and wanted to incorporate real and very special Foothills wilderness locations and state parks in this plot. However, I once again decided on a fictional town and county. In this case, the heroine is head of security for a private university, and I didn’t want to associate threats with any real university so I created fictional Blue Ridge University.  

LIES:  Unlike my prior novels, this romantic suspense is not set current day. It takes place in 1938 in a real Mississippi River town, Keokuk, Iowa (my hometown). While I did considerable research to make things as accurate as possible, I also asked two librarian/historians to review the manuscript for accuracy. While I attempted to get most things “right,” I did create a fictional bank to avoid maligning the history of any current institutions. At the suggestion of one of the reviewers, I’ve also changed the names of a couple of my fictional characters to avoid any possibility of offense. For example, I had no idea that the name I picked for one of my characters was the owner of a bank in 1938 and his relatives still live in the town. LIES is set for release this summer.

If you’d like to know more about my settings or my writing process, please visit my website— www.lindalovely.com —or add in any comment here that you’d like to receive my newsletter. Don’t worry, you won’t be inundated. I tend to send an average of one newsletter a year!  

Respect, Mystery and Ancient Reptiles

By Linda Lovely

Growing up in Iowa, I became personally acquainted with my fair share of barnyard animals—cows, pigs, horses, goats, and chickens. My sister and I also fussed over an assortment of household pets—goldfish, parakeets, and dogs. On circus and zoo visits, we oohed and ahhed over the jungle’s more exotic inhabitants from elephants and monkeys to lions and hippos.   

Yet none of these inter-species encounters prepared me for cohabitation with the wet and wild creatures we met during the dozen years we lived on barrier islands in the South Carolina Lowcountry.

On Fripp Island, a feisty ten-foot mama alligator, our closest neighbor, frequented the drainage canal that ran about 25 feet from our house. The reptile considered this shallow stretch her personal nursery, and we met her newborns each spring. En route to our mailbox, I once counted 18 vocal babies crawling on her back. These youngsters chirped like baby birds, and their bright green, almost neon, coloring wasn’t exactly camouflage. Guess if your mama has 80 razor sharp teeth and jaws that could snap a Suma wrestler’s neck in two, you don’t worry about calling attention to your living sundeck.

This gator did change our lawn-mowing practices. My husband always kept the blades between his size 13 shoes and the drainage canal. If mama crawled up on the bank and started doing push-ups—that’s exactly what they looked like—he did not interpret her open yap as a grin. That’s when Tom decided it was Miller time and headed inside.

We saw gators most days. Our house was on the golf course and the gators appeared to have their own favorite holes. Our golf foursome adopted home rules for lost balls whenever errant shots landed near gators—even if they appeared to be mid-snooze.

I’m told large gators—those in the say the 12-foot and up range—can only run 11 miles per hour, and they can’t keep up that pace for any distance. I’m also told humans aren’t a preferred food source. These ancient reptiles prefer bite-size meals.

Yet observation encouraged me to respect these creatures and give them a wide berth. I’ve seen them spring from the water in a blur of fury to capture a wading heron. And, even though the creatures might prefer multiple small snacks to a giant meal, I’ve seen a gator push a full-grown deer down a waterway. En route to a dinner party? Not an answer I’m keen to know.       

With regularity, we saw tourists (residents called this particular human subspecies “tourons”) feed marshmallows to gators and poke and tease them with sticks. Once I even watched a golfer smack an alligator on the snout to get him to move away from a golf ball. I’m still surprised the alligator didn’t attack. Maybe he was allergic to dumbbells.

Now that we live in Upstate South Carolina, I like being able to dive off my dock without first scanning the surface of our lake for floating “sticks” that might turn out to be alligators.

Nonetheless, I’m glad I shared their territory for a time. To me, alligators will always remain mysterious, alien creatures that inspire awe and fear that my characters can experience in a variety of situations—even with no reptiles in sight. Alligators also are certain to have at least walk-on parts in any novel I set in the Lowcountry. (They earned more than a walk-on in DEAR KILLER, my first Marley Clark Mystery.) 

So what animals do you find mysterious? Do you use the emotions that creature encounters evoke to color your human characters’ reactions?