Building the Future in a Novel

The not so far future as shown in the film Elysium.

From Contributor Lance Charnes

With Google, Flickr, YouTube and all the rest, you can get a pretty good idea of what other places look like now, and what they used to look like (see this post for my experiment in remote location scouting). But there’s one thing you can’t get yet: what places will look like in the future. Or can you?

South, my latest thriller, is set in Southern California and the

American Southwest in 2032. In my version of the future, the local, state and Federal governments have been starved of money; what little government spending survives is entirely devoted to the military and police. The elimination of most regulations, taxes and the social safety net have brought back the pre-Progressive Era, pre-New Deal America of 1890, except with the Internet and drones. In this new Gilded Age, the wealthy live extremely well, while the other 90%+ of the population are poor and hopeless. (If any of this sounds familiar, that’s exactly the point.)


So what does this look like, exactly?


Two of my own decisions complicated the world-building process.

• First, the story is set only twenty years from now. You can get away with almost anything if you project out fifty or a hundred years in the future (such as J.D. Robb’s …In Death series, or William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy). But twenty years? That’s practically tomorrow. So whatever I did had to use the people who are alive today, and technology that (at the most extreme) exists in the labs today. 
• It’s been said that the future comes slowly to the poor. My main protagonist, Luis, and his family are poor. He spends most of his time in the poor areas (where 90% of the population lives). So he (and we) will be seeing twenty years of devolution, not progress. 

Let’s look at one of South’s locations to see how this worked out.

Today’s Santa Ana is the seat of Orange County, California. Over 78% of its 324,000 people are Latino, mostly working-class. The city isn’t rich by any means. Still, it has a vibrant downtown arts district, a bustling Latino commercial area, and all those government jobs…most of which have gone away in South’s scenario.

We all know what American urban decay looks like: a blossoming of liquor stores, no new development, empty storefronts, peeling paint, chain-link fences, and so on. Those exist already off the main streets in Santa Ana. However, this is so familiar that I knew I had to push the place’s future poverty to the next level – to the Third World. Since this is all seen in passing as Luis is going about his business, I could add in only the most emblematic features of a future Third World Santa Ana.

• Street markets. When you can’t afford the rent for fixed storefronts, when your grocery stores go bust or move out, you set up a pipe stall and a couple tarps and keep selling. Street markets like these are omnipresent outside the developed world. Right now they’re affectations in the U.S. (the yuppie “farmer’s market”); in South’s world, they’re necessities. 
• Surgical masks. If you don’t have regulations, you have pollution and constant epidemics. Surgical masks are a common fashion accessory in many parts of the developing world. I saw a lot of them just recently in both Hong Kong and Tokyo – both part of the developed world – and they’re ubiquitous in China. 
• Advertising overload. Poor people don’t get to have aesthetic standards for their public areas. It’s hard enough to control billboards and outside advertising now; imagine how hard it is when city and county governments don’t have any money or people. It was interesting to see that even in the ratty parts of Hong Kong, ads covered every square inch of available space. Of course, the state of the art in advertising delivery will keep marching on even (or especially) when people don’t have any money to buy things. 

Street Markets in Honduras

Advertising Overload

Surgical Masks throughout China

Here’s an excerpt that shows how this goes together on Santa Ana’s 17th Street:

The car drove eastbound on 17th, crashing over potholes and busted pavement, Pitbull rapping on the oldies feed. The pipe-stall-and-tarp jumbles of street markets in the parking lots of failed strip malls added back some of the color lost from the faded signs and bleached paint. Vidboards flashed splashy moving ads for booze and cigarettes and guns. Gray smoke and smog hid the hills in the distance. Luis was glad for the car’s A/C so he didn’t have to smell the place.

Another excerpt, with ICE Special Agent McGinley driving Luis down Fourth Street toward downtown Santa Ana:

“Well, I just found out this morning, but I ain’t first on their mailing list, if you know what I mean.” He stopped to let a mixed group of Latino women and kids—faces half-covered by grubby surgical masks—cross the road on their way to a street market set up in front of a dead gas station. “Let me tell you how this works…”

Other indicators of change:

• Business mix. Modern-day slums attract certain types of businesses: liquor stores, pawn shops, payday loan outlets, bodegas, dive bars, the worst possible fast food. What kinds of similarly exploitative businesses might be common in South’s world? Tire rentals (it’s already happening). Slate (tablet PC) rentals. Overpriced Internet cafes. Storefront clinics run by unlicensed doctors. 
• Tuk-tuks and pedicabs. Mass transit is just a memory in Orange County by 2032, but cars are expensive to own and operate. How do people get around? The same way they do in the developing world: tuk-tuks, pedicabs, and microbuses. They’re cheap, easy to maintain, and don’t take a lot of skill to operate. 

Tuks-Tuks

McGinley and Luis continue their drive into downtown:

Luis tried to find a way to sit that didn’t hurt and kept his face turned away from McGinley. He watched the busy sidewalk as the car nosed through the tuk-tuks and pedicabs jamming Fourth Street in Santa Ana’s Latino business district. “Someone else already made a play for her. Not the FBI.”

Later:

[McGinley] threaded through the northbound traffic on Main, heading away from downtown and La Paloma into patchy low-rise commercial buildings and a blight of vidboards, pawn shops, tire- and slate-rental stores and payday lenders. The gold late-afternoon light didn’t make the area any more attractive. “Do you know a Jorge Casillas?”

It wasn’t hard to find precedents for the world of 2032 in South; what was hard was resisting the temptation to overdescribe it. Because we’re so familiar with this type of cityscape – we see it on the news every night, or in our own blighted neighborhoods – readers need only a little prompting to fill in the details themselves. The excerpts I’ve included are South’s most extensive descriptions of the Santa Ana of 2032, yet readers have commented on the realism of the settings.

If you know the politics and economics of your future world, you can find an example of how they turned out somewhere on Earth, and there’ll be pictures on Google. Once again, the interwebs come to a writer’s rescue.

Lance Charnes is an emergency manager and former Air Force intelligence officer. He’s the author of the international thriller Doha 12 and the near-future thriller South. He tweets (@lcharnes) about scuba diving, shipwrecks, archaeology and art crime, among other things.

Noveling Advice From Jane Austen

Google vs. Feet On Location

Philadelphia's 30th Street Station - The setting for a scene in DOHA 12 by Lance Charnes

I met a great Author, Lance Charnes, who conducted a fascinating experiment perfect for Novel Travelist. He mentally built Philadelphia's 30th Street Station via google and then compared his accuracy during a trip to Philadelphia. 


Building 30th Street Station By Lance Charnes

In my international thriller Doha 12, assassins follow our heroes Jake Eldar and Miriam Schaffer to Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. There, the bad guys launch an ill-prepared attempt to kill Jake and Miriam, which devolves into a three-way shoot-out running the length of the terminal. This is one of the major set-piece scenes, and because the place is so familiar to a large number of people in the Philly metro area, I wanted to get the setting right.

One problem: like most indie writers, I’m not working on an advance. All travel and research is completely on my own dime. I needed to do as much research as I could for free, since I had no idea when or if I’d ever get to Philadelphia to check out the place in person.

Interior of 30th Street Station - View from Stairs

Whenever I select a setting for a scene, I try to harvest as many high-quality pictures as I can from as many angles as possible. Google Images is perfect for this; put in your search term, and you get back a flood of photos from all manner of sources, including Flickr, newspapers, TV, and so on. If you do this, keep crawling through the results; the farther in you get, the more offbeat the sources. 

• Train enthusiast websites had close-up pictures of the Amtrak information desk and board, and shots of the arrival platforms. 
• An advertising firm showed an ad placement it had done in the main hall. 
• Someone thought to take a snap of a women’s restroom. 
• Another traveler had been there at Christmas (the shoot-out happens in early December), so I got much-needed pictures of the decorations, including the giant, perfectly conical tree at the east end of the concourse.

At the end of this process, I had a big collection of still photos, but no good idea about the layout of the place. I’d found only one small, blurry floorplan on the Amtrak site. From that and basic photointerpretation skills (I used to be in intel), I constructed a reasonable plan for the concourse; everything else was a guess.

I had lots of random still photos, but no clear idea of the layout.

Next, I turned to video. YouTube offered up 23,000 hits on “Philadelphia 30th street station.” Here’s where the weird diversity of the Internet truly came into play. There were tons of trainspotting videos; after digging through these, I found the one I needed, an end-to-end video taken in a NJ Transit commuter train going from Cherry Hill (NJ) Station to 30th Street – exactly the route our heroes take. I found videos taken by people walking through the concourse (note to future videographers: whip pans are lousy to watch), waiting for pickup outside, a flash mob dancing in the concourse, and a guided tour of the station at Christmas courtesy of a Philly yoga enthusiast. I plowed through a lot of truly awful video (too dark/too bright/out of focus/taken during an earthquake), keeping the links for the ones that were the most helpful.

The videos showed me: 

• How people move through the space
• What you can see from where
• Some of the ambient sounds (note to future videographers: shut up and let the location speak for itself). 

I still didn’t have a good floorplan, though. I used the videos to refine the less-than-wonderful one I’d been able to scratch together, then forged ahead and wrote the scene.

A couple months passed. During an editing session, I decided to see if anything new had surfaced on the web. Lo and behold, the website Metro Jacksonville (Florida!) had posted an essay on the Amtrak Keystone Corridor train service, holding it up as an example for Jacksonville transit. The post included a reproduction of 30th Street’s visitor directory. Not only was it a clear, accurate floorplan, but it told which vendors were in each of the commercial spaces. Eureka!

It also showed that beyond the concourse, my cobbled-together floorplan was mostly wrong.

I dragged this treasure into Photoshop and did some measuring. The real concourse is 135’ wide by 290’ long. The map concourse was 177 pixels wide by 352 pixels long. With a bit of fudging, I was able to lay down a 9’ (three-stride) grid on the map concourse. I could finally measure distances and sizes throughout the terminal, time out how long it would take my characters to move from place to place, estimate how far they could shoot and what they could hide behind. I rewrote the scene using this new information and hoped it was good enough.

Fast-forward to October 2011. Through a series of circumstances I won’t bore you with, I got to go to D.C., Philadelphia and New York City. A few days before Halloween, I found myself standing in the concourse of the real 30th Street Station.

First, it’s a tremendously strange feeling to finally be in a place you’ve known only through photos. (Going to the Parthenon felt exactly the same way: damn, it really looks like the pictures.) Secondly, it’s very strange to go someplace you’ve never been and know exactly where everything is. I spent the next ninety minutes roaming the station, taking pictures and making notes. I traced the steps my characters ran, took cover behind the obstacles they used, checked the sightlines, confirmed which windows would get hit by the missed shots. I have no doubt I’m now on some Amtrak Police watchlist for all the suspicious things I did that morning. What kind of law-abiding citizen takes pictures while crouched behind a bench?

Statue - Great for my hero to hide behind.

The upshot? I had to make only minor adjustments to the action. What I’d pasted together off the Internet turned out to be about 95% right. The other 5% involved the passage of time and the tricks camera play: signs and trash cans had moved, some of the stores had changed out, the half-walls around the stairs leading to the tracks were lower than they looked (or I’d been measuring them against short people). I took notes and made these tweaks when I got home without causing another rewrite.

I also used this research method for some of Doha 12’s other settings, such as the Manhattan Diamond District, Central Park East’s Temple Emanu-El, and Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. It worked time and again. Still, there are limits. Photo lighting isn’t always normal lighting; some places are darker or lighter in real life. You can’t feel the air temperature (chilly in the station), and until online Smell-o-Vision happens, you can’t get the ambient smells (cleaners and donuts in the station). This wasn’t a major drawback in my case. However, if your scene is set in a Kolkata meat market, the missing information may be crucial.

The take-home lesson: just because you don’t have an advance doesn’t mean you can’t accurately describe a setting in your writing. Another bonus: you can surf for hours and call it “research.”
________________________________________

Lance Charnes is an emergency manager and former Air Force intelligence officer. He’s the author of the international thriller Doha 12 and the upcoming near-future thriller South. He tweets (@lcharnes) about scuba diving, shipwrecks, marine archaeology and art crime, among other things.

Verbal Sketching

Getty Center, photo by me

I find comfort in museums. Many people find comfort in nature, a return to their primal instincts. Me, I'm at peace in a room filled with paintings and statues from the past. Museums hold the best of humanity. Whenever I'm disappointed in the human species, I go to a museum and I'm wonderfully reminded of the greatness and beauty that human's can accomplish. 

Currently at the Getty Center (Los Angeles) is a great show about the negative space in drawings. The Poetry in Paper runs until October 20, 2013. The curator, Stephanie Schrader, did something very unique with this exhibition. Instead of detailed labels for each drawing, she wrote a Haiku poem describing the piece. The union of past greatness with modern elegance made me laugh, gasp, smile and term the phrase verbal sketching.

Here are some examples:

I've sat in the Capitoline Gallery in Rome several times. I've sketched, I've written, I've hidden from the rain amongst the halls of broken statues. The words "Antiquity looms," captures the mood perfectly.

I love this haiku because it teases the drawing with regards to the negative space. "No chair but not a drop spills," made me giggle like a child who wants to point at the drawing and enter a discussion regarding elementary physics. 

This haiku really captured the idea of verbal sketching for me. Walking along the foggy moors of Scotland, where the air is so thick a castle may lay hidden, undiscovered, only a short distance away, remains a strong memory with me. Yet I've never written a description of those moments. But here, the "Blank expanses" are the endless moors, that at first appear blank. The "Fog dense as citadel walls," is absolutely true, except it is a wall one can wonder through blindly, then a creature jostles near and quickens your heartbeat until you learn it is only a sheep with a blue splotch of paint upon it's white wool. Then the sheep vanishes as suddenly as it appeared. As you get closer to the discovery of a castle, you find yourself surrounded by the structures of a medieval city on the banks of a Loch - an "Old city shrouded" - with battlements poking their heads above the fog as it sinks lower, pouring over your feet and pulling you toward the water's edge. 17 Syllables captures my entire paragraph. That's why haiku is AWESOME. (5, 7, 5, that's all you need.)

This sketch could have been so many haikus because the expression on the old woman's face is in my opinion, rather flexible. Who doesn't love the phrase "Wrinkles of red chalk?" That's just fabulous. That's why haiku is fun. It forces you to bring together multiple concepts in a few words. 

This haiku captures not only the description of the environment, but the attitude and character of the subject which I wouldn't have thought about without the haiku. At first glance, I thought, "That's a nice figure drawing." End of story. I walked away. Then I went back and read the haiku and suddenly an entire person burst forth in my head. This is wealthy young man, accustomed to his spoils and leisures, but soon, his elegant supports will fall out from under him (notice the negative space below him) and he will be forced to discover what skills he can master for his own survival. 

So when wondering a museum, or sitting at a cafe, if you don't have a sketchbook or notebook handy, doodle a haiku on a napkin. It will force your mind to capture a moment, a memory, in a verbal sketch.

Travel Quest - Museum Short Story

Wes McBride sketching at the Getty Villa in Malibu, CA

Every Saturday morning, Wes and I pick a location and go out to sketch and write. Last Saturday we went to the Getty Villa and while Wes sketched, I created the coolest museum game for writers!

I ran around the museum gardens and took random pictures of whatever caught my eye and a few other indoor pictures. I didn't photograph any paintings as that's typically a No-No at museums. Here's a collage of my pictures.

Random photos from the Getty Villa used to inspire a story

As Wes sketched, I sat next to him and toggled through the photos on my camera. As each photo popped up, I incorporated it into the story. 

This can be done at any museum around the world!

So here's the story, with a play-by-play of which picture inspired which section:

THE MERCHANT AND THE MUSE 

By Sara McBride

In the days of splendor, in a place long remembered, where day turned to night and endless ash fell, there once lived a man whose trade was to sell. A merchant of fine wools, he stood draped in his wares. His strong face and sharp eyes sat framed by graying curls, a reminder of his struggled youth, long passed. Now wealthy, a man of habitual income, but lost in search of new purpose. When his hair was dark in color and his skin smooth with bloom, he struggled from day to day, simply to eat, to live. Now life existed as a blur of days, a smear across the heavens, all needs being met and no needs being satisfied. He asked the gods, “What is my purpose?” The gods did not answer, or so he thought.

Everyday he passed the Stream of Muses on his way to market. A long set of colonnaded corridors leading out to the sea, the Bay of Naples, contained crowds of buyers and sellers, hawkers and shoppers. Until one day, as he walked along the shady Stream of Muses, a muse stepped into his path. Her hair was braided and set high, in a royal fashion.

Her scent danced with flowers and mint. She was all summer freshness, but for her eyes. Her eyes, the window to her heart, her desire, her source of inspiration to others, her eyes held sadness.  The wool merchant knew she had lost the most precious holding of a muse, her gift to inspire. Unsure how to help such a pitiful creature he dressed her in his draperies and took her toward the market.

   They came across a young boy bartering wine for other useful objects. The muse smelled the wine, observed its silky texture and gained a smile to her face. The merchant, upon seeing the muse so altered, offered the boy a cloak of moderate wool for a jug of his grape elixir. The deal was done. The merchant drank from the jug and patted his belly with pleasure as a demonstration

to the muse. She hesitantly took the jug and drank the smallest of sips. The merchant encouraged her to drink more, certain it would make her happy. In her effort to appease, she did drink more, but her face filled with a tortured gaze increased by each swallow. The merchant, seeing her displeasure, halted her and begged her to drink no more.

Farther down the road, they came upon a group of actors rehearsing a play. The merchant and the muse stopped to watch. The play developed up to the Deus Ex Machina, but the cloth used to conceal the machine of the Gods was threadbare and torn. The actors bemoaned their sad fate. At that moment, the muse stood and began to detach her body’s drapings, the drapings that the merchant had dressed her in. The merchant caught her before such unseemly revealings could occur, his eyes crinkling with laughter at her innocence. He pulled from his wares an enormous bolt of solid cloth and draped it around the God’s machinery. The actors cheered. A masked man revealed his whiskered face, ink long dried in his beard, and thanked the merchant with a gift of blank scrolls to be writ upon. They continued the play to the end, and the muse smiled joyfully at the hero triumphant. But when the play ended, sadness once again consumed her.

   The merchant sighed, but pushed on toward the market. They found themselves admiring the stroll of a peacock, whose neck was fastened round with a gold chain held by a portly young man. The peacock and the portly youth followed a mature, lean man of the military, holding a helmet under one arm. The helmet was ingeniously carved with wings that mechanically flapped with a strong wind and an eagle’s head perched above the brow. This identified the military man as a watcher from the mountain rims of Vesuvius.

Before the merchant could make an introduction, the muse approached the portly youth and pointed at his elegantly feathered bird. The youth being kind, and enjoying her attentions, bent down and plucked a long tail feather from his pet. The squawk surprised all. The military man turned to behold the scene. He struck his chest with his hand. He gasped. He declared the muse to be an angel and that she embodied the good omen he sought. He now knew that he must return to his family and no longer patrol the mountain rims. He handed his helmet to the merchant who inquired how long a journey he must partake? Upon hearing the great distance, the merchant gave the man a thick cloak to assist him on his travels. The muse smiled at the merchant’s unsolicited generosity.

   The merchant and the muse entered the market, but the muse would not let him stop. She continued to the waters edge and further down the road. She walked and walked, leading the merchant, their roles now reversed. Finally, after the wind had rubbed his face raw and his cart of wares felt numb in his hands, she stopped at the cross roads of Vesuvius and Naples. Then, unexpectedly, she reached into the cart, pulled out the helmet and placed it on the merchant’s head. She touched all the objects in the cart: the jug of wine, the blank scrolls, the peacock feather with a fine point for a quill, his last four cloaks, and the helmet upon his head. She smiled. She smiled so brightly her eyes filled with stars and night fell instantly. She vanished. The last remnants of daylight returned, Apollo ending his ride across the sky. But she was gone. The merchant looked in all directions, but she was not to be found.

The Iris made me think of Ink.

The sun glinted on something in the cart. The merchant reached for the object and discovered it to be a small glass bottle of solid black ink. It was the ink of a moonless night. He opened the bottle and out danced the scents of summer freshness, of flowers and mint. He corked the bottle and kissed it.

     
Wearing his eagle’s helmet, he turned away from the road home and journeyed forth onto new soil, up the path to the rim of Vesuvius. There he found a small encampment of Roman Eagle soldiers, four men. He offered them wine. He gave them each a new, much welcomed cloak of fine wool, and they embraced him into their simple ways. The merchant soon forgot he was ever a merchant. His new purpose consumed him.

The Stream of Muses continued to babble on. But one muse, the Muse of History, is not always there. Often she is visiting her old merchant friend atop Vesuvius as he records the histories told to him by the many soldiers who pass their military time at the rim. Now she is never without a smile, as the merchant has discovered perspective in his own life and by helping others do the same, he finds purpose.

THE END

So now I've written this fun little story. What do I do with it? I'm going to put it in my Jane Austen - Ireland book. The book stars two sisters who are competitive with each other. One evening, they are both trying to impress the same gentleman by telling stories, a fabulous Irish fireside tradition. The serious sister who loves history will tell this tale. On our next museum trip, I'll figure out the story told by the whimsical sister. 

Get thee to a museum - Inspiration awaits!

Turning Real People Into Characters

Photo by Sara McBride

The people one meets in life often inspire literary characters. It’s interesting to read an author writing about another author and how she might have met real people that morphed into literary characters we now know and love. 

I’m reading Scott Southard’s new book A Jane Austen Daydream and marveling at how the characters are often a mash-up of several defined Austen characters. For example, Mrs. Catherine de Bourgh, with a sickly, pale daughter, is the physicality of Lady de Bourgh and her frail daughter Anne, but the character contains the jubilence and vulgarity of Mrs. Jennings from Sense and Sensibility, and the silliness of Miss Bates from Emma. Not just personality traits are witnessed, but also behavior habits, like in Emma, in an effort to include her elderly mother in conversation, Miss Bates is constantly asking her mother's opinion, but then continuously rattles on with or without a response. Scott Southard’s character of Mrs. Catherine de Bourgh demonstrates the same behavior, but toward her sickly daughter. 

I expected A Jane Austen Daydream to be filled with “Real Life” people from Jane Austen’s world that directly and precisely resemble her well-defined characters. The film Becoming Jane is extremely guilty of this. But instead, Mr. Southard has given truth to the practices of an author. Authors take pieces of people and jumble them together. 

In one scene alone, Mr. Southard gives us pieces from several Austen books. The high-and-mighty, always-extolling-advice personality of Lady Catherine de Bourgh is contained in a slender, tolerant woman who asks that her guests do not embarrass her, and offers advice on how a lady should present herself at a ball. Also in the scene are Jane Austen, her sister Cassandra, the aforementioned Mrs. Jennings/Miss Bates character and her sickly daughter. In the single scene, there is the creation of the malevolent Lady Catherine de Bourgh by transposing a personality of one person into the physicality of two others. 

We also witness Jane Austen and her sister conversing about the ball, much as Elizabeth and Jane Bennet in Pride & Prejudice often do. Then Jane Austen is slighted by the woman giving advice, much like Fanny in Mansfield Park or Anne Elliot in Persuasion is never considered worth anyone’s real attention.

Rarely does a real life person or scenario completely transpose themselves into a novel. We, as authors, take pieces of events and people and mix and match to our liking. I’m pleased that Mr. Southard realized this when creating the fictional character of Jane Austen. All of Southard’s characters incorporate pieces of Austen’s characters, but nothing is blatant, it is all subtlety, as Austen is herself. 

Another interesting point about Scott Southard is the he’s a He! Very few men have the nerve (or interest) to tackle Jane Austen. I’m very much looking forward to finishing his novel and gaining a man’s perspective on the iconic authoress. 

A Jane Austen Daydream, by Scott Southard is published by Madison Street Press, is available from Amazon.

So next time you’re on a plane and the drunk christian scientist seated next to you wants to buy the entire row a drink (This happened to me last Friday!), do what Jane Austen does (According to Scott Southard), and embrace the eccentricities of your fellow humans. Make a study of behaviors, traits, sayings and histories and start cobbling together the puzzle pieces of a character. You never know when parts of a Lady Catherine de Bourgh or a Mr. Bennet might leap out at you.

Novel Traveling for the Budget Conscious

Novel Traveling is all about the adventure; it’s about the mysterious and beautiful places (and characters) you meet along the way. Exotic places, far away things which simply don’t exist in our everyday lives. It’s this break from the mundane which can inspire creativity in us.

So then how does a writer on a budget travel to these places? Google Image Search can really only get you so far. Sometimes, you just need some firsthand experience that only visiting a place can give you.

Well fear not, for there is a way to gain this experience without spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars traveling to some foreign, exotic place. I call it: Backyard Traveling.

Allow me to explain. I live in Los Angeles.

LA is one of the biggest cities in the US. Culturally diverse, yes, but somewhat lacking in landscape other than “crowded city.” But for those willing to research a little, there exists places to go which, while perhaps not as fancy as Bali, are very different from what I see everyday.

Though even if you live in Bali, Backyard Traveling is an option. The capital of Bali is Denpasar, a city not unlike Los Angeles. Outside of Denpasar are the more remote regions that tourists rarely travel to. Regions like Singharaja, where beats the artistic heart of Bali. So in a way, no matter where you live in the world, Backyard Traveling is always an option.

To accomplish Backyard Traveling, you need a few things:

1. A place to visit, somewhere local yet out of the ordinary. 

(Frommers.com for your city.)

2. A local, someone who knows the area and is willing to help you out. 

(A friend, or check our list of location experts under "For Writers.")

3. A list of things to do during your travels.

Not a very long list, which is what makes this so easy. I took a Backyard trip recently, so here’s my checklist.

1. Catalina Island, one of the channel islands off the coast of Los Angeles.

2. I’ve been blessed to come to know a woman, Amy Keating-Rogers, who supplied me with knowledge of the island.

3. Mrs. Keating-Rogers also supplied me with a guide to the island that she wrote. The Internet is also a valuable tool.

So now that you have completed your checklist, all that’s left is to pick a date and head out.

What makes Backyard Traveling good for the aspiring Novel Travelist? 

Surely if you want to send your characters on an adventure in the artistic heart of Bali, then what does a little island in the US have to do with that?

The answer is a lot. Catalina Island, despite being only 27 miles from Los Angeles, is vastly different.

It’s a change in scenery, a new adventure, something to kick start inspiration. Then you can consult a fellow Novel Travelist, like Michelle Em (Under "For Writers"), who lived in Bali for further details.

Stuck on what to do next? Use your travels to inspire something. Perhaps wander around somewhere. Need a new location? Relocating yourself can often help you dream up somewhere new to throw your characters. Need a new character? Surrounding yourself with new people helps. Someone you meet can inspire you to make your best character yet.

All in all, a Backyard Trip can be just the thing to either inspire a new story, or help you out of a rut in your current one.  It’s cheap and easy, so even the Novel Travelist on a budget can head somewhere and have a real life adventure.

Credit for the information on Bali goes to: Michele Em, a Novel Travelist location expert listed under “For Writers.”