Guest Blogger: PAT BERTRAM, author of Daughter Am I

Please welcome my returning guest host, Pat Bertram. Her new novel, Daughter Am I has just been released and this week she's doing her virtual book tour. I'm thrilled to have her back.

Pat Bertram is a native of Colorado and a lifelong resident. When the traditional publishers stopped publishing her favorite type of book — character and story driven novels that can’t easily be slotted into a genre — she decided to write her own. More Deaths Than One and A Spark of Heavenly Fire, available at Amazon and from Second Wind Publishing, are Bertram’s first novels.

I once got in an argument with someone who claimed that writers have no business writing about places they have never visited. To be honest, it wasn’t much of an argument since I never got a chance to speak. Still, he did make a point -- there really is no way to impart the true flavor of a place unless you have experienced it. On the other hand, how much do you really need to say about a location to put a reader in place? If you are writing a travelogue, you need to know a lot, but if you are writing a novel, you only need to know enough to set the scene.

I’ve been to very few of the places I talk about in my books. I’ve lived in Denver, stayed in northern Wisconsin for about a year. I visited the outskirts of Chicago once, perhaps drove through Peoria. But I never went to Thailand or the Philippines. Never went much of anyplace. So does that mean I’m not allowed to let my characters visit exotic locales? Nope. It just means I need to do a bit of research. Find a few significant details that let the reader envision the scene, smell it, hear it, taste it. Even better is to show those details through the character’s eyes, through the character’s emotions. And lastly, include an aspect that is so common all readers have experienced it. If this aspect is real, if the character’s emotion is real, then the place will be real.

In Daughter Am I, I have Mary Stuart, my hero, driving along North Avenue in Chicago. The house where her grandfather had grown up, along with most of the original buildings on the street, had been bulldozed and replaced with modern townhouse developments already showing signs of age.

Mary drove slowly down the street, ignoring the honking horns of irate drivers, and wondered what it had been like when her grandfather lived there. Had there been so much traffic? So many people? So much noise?

I found the information about the townhouses in a travelogue, and for the rest of it, we’ve all been there -- a busy street is a busy street is a busy street.

I’ve never been to Cluculz, but I could write a scene that takes place on the lake. The character would be slapping idly at mosquitoes, listening to the cry of a loon, feeling a cool breeze and thinking about the coming winter, perhaps see a fishing boat silhouetted against a stunning red and orange sunset, maybe hear the cry of a baby from the nearby Lakeside RV Resort. Novelists don’t need to have experienced the places their characters visit. They only need to find enough details to make the reader feel as if the character has been there.

I’d never write an entire novel that takes place somewhere I’ve never been -- it would be too easy to make a mistake. But a scene or two? No problem.

-- Pat

* Pat will be back Monday for her one on one interview