Earlier this week, my husband and I were watching American Pickers on The History Channel. For those who aren’t familiar with the show, it depicts the adventures of two businessmen who buy historical items from collectors. This occupation rarely takes them to pristine locations since they often find their treasures in neglected yards and storage sheds. This week, a declaration from Mike struck me. I posted his paraphrased comment to Facebook and Twitter:
We are watching American Pickers. Mike said kids should take a field trip to a junk yard to learn about history. Um, I’m thinking Mike is not a parent. #tetanus #rats #filth
I hail from a rural area so I’m not a big city snob. Maybe that’s the reason why I think of inherent dangers first. I was taught to be cautious with respect to the outdoors.
My comment earned a couple of “favorites” on Twitter but some of my Facebook friends agreed with Mike. I enjoyed reading their ideas and some accounts of visiting junk yards. And though Daddy hasn’t visited a junk yard lately, my friends’ insights spurred memories of how he occasionally visited them in the past because he needed parts to, “Keep my junk cars on the road.”
I don’t have plans to visit a junk yard any time soon. But my friends took me to another time and place, and renewed my perspective.
Your Turn:
What location would you like for a book to take you?
Have you ever made a field trip or taken a vacation in part because of a book you have read?
Another quote (slightly redacted)Literary fiction is fiction that examines the character of the people involved in the story; popular fiction is driven by plot. Whereas popular fiction is meant primarily as a means of escape, one way or another, from this present life, a kind of book equivalent of comfort food, literary fiction confronts us with who we are and makes us look deeply at the human condition. Henry James said that it wasn’t “the rare accident”—the plot—that made a story worth our attention but the “human attestation” to that plot: how people deal with their histories rather than those histories in and of themselves.” From a new book by Brett Lott http://www.amazon.com/Letters-Life-Being-Writer-Christian/dp/1433537834
When I’m suffering a book can take me anywhere else and I am satisfied. When my mother was dying I read books that took me to Europe, South America, New York, Mississippi, Alabama, Africa, and the like. I don’t take field trips or vacations (except to the woods to relax and hike) but a good book inspires research through other books and leads me on long quests for deeper knowledge.
The stories I’ve written so far have been set on a NC beach or in KY. These are the areas I know and love.
But where would I like to travel? I would love to travel to Paris one day. I can create characters and plot and set them in Paris. I’ve dreamed of Paris since the first day of high school French. One day I’ll get there and the love story that’s been percolating in my brain will burst forth with all the details I need to make it realistic.
Numerous books compelled me to take my wife on visit to the D-Day beaches of Normandy, plus other historic sites in western France. I believe I enjoyed Normandy with its hedgerows and rolling hills more than I enjoyed Paris. I definitely liked the traffic in the countryside better than the Parisian traffic jams in our rental car!
Now I want to make a trip to Mongolia, but Pam already opted out of that destination.
Nearly every time I finish I novel which I enjoyed, I jump on Google maps and plan a trip to that location. Ok, I’ve never taken one of those trips, but it is so fun to check out other places! And when a book I have read brings those places to life, how much more fun is that!
First I have to say American Pickers is probably my all time favorite TV show. I’m a history buff and so I love hearing about the pieces of history they find. As far as taking a trip because of a book I have read, I’ll be doing that in a few weeks. The novel Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet has the real life story of The Panama Hotel in Seattle written into the book and I’ve planned a trip for my sister and I to visit the hotel. You can still tour it for the historic significance of the Japanese American internment during WW2. I’m researching for my next book and this will be a fun and informative trip. I’ve also visited places prompted by books I’ve read for research for my WIP. That’s the perk of writing historical fiction!
My hubby & I enjoy American Pickers, too. It’s amazing the things you learn. They talk often about Vespa motor scooters, which I’d never heard of before. Then this week, when I was watching Call the Midwife (excellent PBS show), they got a motor scooter. A Vespa!! Kinda cool.
I’ve traveled to Peshtigo, WI to research a book. I’d love to go to the Netherlands to see the place my novel Snow on the Tulips is set. What I’m trying to figure out now is how to turn a trip to a tropical island into a research trip 😉
What a fun post. I would also chalk it up to the difference between the way men and women perceive things. 🙂 If I had the means, I would love to visit PEI. I LOVED the Avonlea books. I’d also love to visit Mackinac Island (I think I spelled that right. :)), just because of what I’ve heard and read about it. I’d love to visit more of Europe. I think it would be fascinating to visit WW2 places places where underground activities took place.
If I was going to write a book about anywhere, I’d love to write one set in Hawaii or in the mountains. Or in Canada.
After reading John’s Grisham’s book, The Firm, I planned a trip to the Caymen Islands! I took that trip and loved it!
Have you ever seen the History Channel show, Pawn Stars(not sure if that’s the correct title of the show). These guys own a pawn shop and people come in with antique stuff wanting to pawn it. It’s really neat because the pawn guys usually know something about the old items. If they don’t know the authenticity of an item, they call in an expert.
I’ve never watched American Pickers, so, I’ll keep it in mind to watch in the future.
Whether its getting into the cockpit of a spitfire or panning for gold in the North Georgia mountains, I’m big on experiencing history. It connects us to the past and in many cases points out pitfalls to problems we’re dealing with now. So I’ve visited most of the places in my books–thank goodness all of them are within driving distance!
But I am heading over the pond to London in a few weeks for a vacation/research trip. Came across an interesting little tidbit of information about WWI spies that I’d love to write about so I’ve made an appointment at the Imperial War Museum in London to gather more information. I’d also like to go to mainland Europe to visit WWI and WWII sites.
I like my books to take me back in time which can be multiple places; Victorian/Regency England, WWII, the days of the early church, etc. I’ve always wanted to go to England because of so many works of British lit I have read and I was thrilled when we went there last summer. We were picked up at Heathrow by a business associate of my husband’s and on our way to where we were staying we passed by a sign for Tinturn Abbey. He heard my gasp of delight and graciously stopped so I could take pictures. He was very pleasantly surprised to find an American who had read Wordsworth’s poem. 🙂
I didn’t discover Laura Ingalls Wilder until after my first two children were born. I devoured everything by her and about her in about a month. It wasn’t long after that we were traveling through South Dakota. I begged my husband to take the hour or so drive north of the interstate to DeSmet, but he was convinced it didn’t fit in our schedule. (And he was right.) I also daydreamed about repeating the covered wagon journey to Missouri. Yeah, that lasted about thirty seconds. 🙂
Laura Ingalls Wilder! A childhood favorite!!
I just read a book set in Nantucket, and I want to go there so much.
Sarah Dessen’s books have me wanting to visit small beach towns.
I’ve traveled to Tybee Island, Georgia and Garyville, Louisiana to research novels. But I think the most fun involved traveling…back to college 😉 I went back to study forensics to authenticate the details in my suspense books — lots of fun! However, I think some of my questions may have caused my classmates to wonder where I’d buried the body 🙂
That’s the fun of reading and being a writer, you get to travel to locations you may not otherwise have visited. I enjoy learning about careers I would never have the opportunity to experience, and live vicariously through a character who is say a . . . Game Warden, Fire Cheif, Vineyard owner, etc. Its fun!
When I read this post though, it made me think about how when a scene in one story doesn’t make the final version, I keep it in case I can use it in another. Like recycled parts.
Junk yards and antique stores have been interesting places for me to visit from my childhood forward. Sometimes there are treasures to be had. You just have to look specific and settle at the right price. As for my characters and settings my favorite place to visit is the Texas, southwest and west coast of my life. My WIP presently is an interesting fit in that its Texas but set in 1925 for books 1 & 2 and possibly 1933 for book 3. I love researching historically much like your example of those spending time in junk yards and antique venues. Knowing the setting and characters its fitting story with facts and eras of popular culture (music, movies, art, appliances and lifestyle) into the story itself. For me its a vacation in my mind to a simpler era.
My grandmother Lola Myers had one such shop from 1970 to about 1990. It was in the corner house they also owned in the small town of Aspermont (my present WIP location) when she was in her Antique Store phase. She had some treasures in that house where my father grew up as a boy and teen. Many items wound up in our home and collection as my aunt and uncle. Its gone now as is Lola. She lived to be 97 and Dad to 80. But its those things in our home now that serve as reminders of decades past of our lives and the original lives in which they were a part of too.
I will say your photo for the article is quite interesting. It reminds me of the stories we craft. Yes, a bit overwhelming at times with rusted items, rats, snakes and spiders (forgot to mention those surprises). But its like an actor looking for wardrobe and in the search the fun of finding pieces that fit. Its the same with our stories finding the accents and makes the journey worthwhile.
I so benefit from your blogs Tamela for education, inspiration (mental vacations) and reassurance while writing and editing. Thanks for another mental picture with your photo illustration and compelling thoughts as I take a small break from the WIP. I can’t help but think there are mental shopping ventures into the antique store that will bring some color, twists and turns accenting my characters and the times in which they lived.
Prince Edward Island in the fall!
The Anne of Green Gables series was the first one I read on my own as a girl and since then I dream about going for a “rambling in the woods” to stroll among the rolling hills of “red poppies outflaming against the dark coppice of young firs in a cherry orchard” and listen to the “sweet music of the wind through the fir-tress at evening” where I’ll gaze upon a “ruby sunset light”.
I can imagine myself walking Gilbert’s and Anne’s bridge at dawn, looking down at the river that resembles “shimmering glass” and smell the air that is like “transparent golden wine”.
Sigh.
Someday. Someday… And until then I’ll keep “dreaming away” just like the Anne-girl 🙂
I’m in the mood to get my creative mojo going, whoop whoop. Thanks, Tamela!
After reading Killer Angels, I had to visit Gettysburg. We finally did a few years ago and it was everything I imagined. I had to go to Little Round Top and find the monuments for every division mentioned in the book (especially the Michigan division). I would like a book to take me to the fort in Mackinaw City (tip of the Michigan mitten) in the 17th century. It was a French outpost then. I want to imagine what it was like for that sentry on duty in the middle of a cold winter night, as far from home as a Frenchman could be at the time. It was wild and lonely. It must have been incredible.
Victoria Holt novels transported me to England when I voraciously read them in my teens. I have yet to go there though.
After I visited Key West two years ago I became more and more intrigued with the history of the area. Now I’ve written a romance novel set during the height of the 19th century salvage industry.
My WIP is set in a beautiful location two hours from my home-Point Reyes. Many research trips loom on the horizon. 🙂
Thank you all so much for sharing. I always enjoy your comments!