I am grateful for

The view of San Francisco’s skyline from Sausalito’s waterfront

The view of the Pacific Ocean from high above Stinson Beach

The view of the Golden Gate Bridge from Fort Point

Farmers markets

Pho

Panna cotta

Raw oysters

Memories

Anticipation

Shucking both of those to sit zazen and simply be

And I am grateful for

You, and

You, and

You, and

You.

Yesterday I took a trip back in time. I boarded a painted bus that was blowing bubbles, said hi to a cute driver in “Yellow Submarine” era pants, and surrendered to a soundtrack that began with Elvis and proceeded through the Mamas and the Papas to the still-amazing and too damn early dead Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. It’s a helluva show, a multimedia experience on wheels, a tour of San Francisco circa 1967. Chris Hardman, the founder and creative spark behind Antenna Theater, developed The Magic Bus, and I heartily recommend it.

But for me and the woman I didn’t know sitting next to me, at least, it wasn’t all about belting out old songs and laughing about the psychedelic thinking of the era. There was a segment that had my seatmate and me, separately and silently, in tears: President Kennedy shot. Martin Luther King shot. Robert Kennedy shot. George Moscone shot. Harvey Milk shot. (Hardman could have added four dead in “O-hi-o,” three shot and buried in Mississippi, four little ones bombed in Birmingham.)

History is powerful, and history one has lived through is perhaps the most powerful of all because it calls up the emotions of the time in a bewildering, condensed, personalized, visceral fashion. I remember how I felt, I remember who I loved, what I thought my life was going to be. I even remember a favorite mini skirt (and wonder what happened to it).

The experience was a reminder for me as a writer that using times the reader might recall from her own life is a powerful tool for getting that reader to jump into your story. After all, it’s her story too. It means, though, that you’d better get the times right – Elvis and the Rolling Stones were not on the Top Ten list together. The world stopped for many people when the President died in Texas, but not everyone mourned. And a lot of the kids – and we were kids, as Hardman’s archival footage illustrated –left bewildered and upset parents back home when they hitchhiked out to San Francisco for the Summer of Love. So much material to lean on! A feast of history in which to place your characters and then see how they react to the freedom and the experimentation and the strangeness and the music that, even know, is astonishingly good.

I think that’s the lesson for me – pulling your reader into the story is what we all want to do. Anything that triggers an emotional memory can accomplish that as long as it’s true to the moment and you write about it in a way that doesn’t denigrate the truth of your reader’s experience.

NOTE: I HAVE NEW READINGS AND TALKS SCHEDULED. PLEASE CHECK OUT THAT PAGE ON THIS WEBSITE FOR DATES AND DETAILS. I’D LOVE TO SEE YOU AT ONE OF THEM!

How important is it to have spent time in a location you use for your fictional story? Can you write about a place you’ve visited only in the imagination, or in travel literature, or online? Authors of historical novels can’t literally recreate the reality of a place, so how do they deal with describing something that no longer exists? Few of us can live in New York or Shanghai or Paris for months at a clip just so we can record and play back for our readers the daily habits of residents. But I think most readers can tell when the sense of place is real, crackling with energy, and specific without being pedantic. (I do not need to know every step the protagonist takes along a street in Oxford, but I like to feel the chill of old stone under her feet.)

Lisa Brackmann’s “Rock Paper Tiger” blew me away from the first lines. It’s a Beijing that simply reeks of life, shabby, crowded, the threat of trouble always in the air.  Lisa has lived and traveled in China and her keen observations help make this book an outstanding read.

Kelli Stanley has two books out set in San Francisco circa 1940, the latest of which is “City of Secrets.” At a recent panel on San Francisco noir, she explained how she conjures up a different time in a familiar place. From old souvenirs and vintage perfumes to reading the newspapers of the day, Kelli steeps herself in the times. And she visits the places as they are today, some quite different and others remarkably the same.

My fellow blogger on LadyKillers, Ann Parker, has a whole series set in the Colorado Rockies town of Leadville late in the 19^th century. The latest is “Mercury’s Rise,” which is launching this week. Ann spoke at a panel at Left Coast Crime last year in which she talked about the extensive research she’s done in the region, in the library, in conversation with people, and even by devouring old diaries. Reviewers and readers agree she brings the place and the issues of the day vividly and believably to life.

There are other books that don’t do this for me, that seem to be cribbed from travel brochures or movies. And when I’m not in the place, I have a hard time staying involved with the protagonist unless the writer is brilliant and is deliberately holding his hero at arms length from his surroundings, keeping them abstract in order to show me something important about the character.

Note: There is a bonus for committing to doing place well in a novel: You can write off your trip. And if you must set your novel in a city’s sewer system, be sure to have it be Paris’s, as Cara Black did in a recent Aimee Leduc novel!