LOU ALLIN

Layering the Landscape

LOU ALLIN is the author of the Belle Palmer mysteries set in Northern Ontario, ending with Memories Are Murder. Now living on Vancouver Island where the rain forest meets the sea, she completed and published the first two novels in a new Vancouver Island series: And on the Surface Die and She Felt No Pain. In 2010, Lou debuted That Dog Won’t Hunt, a novella for adults with literacy issues.

 

 

There are a thousand and one ways to write fiction. I agree with Ortega y Gasset, who said, “Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are.” Setting is critical to me. In the diverse environments where I have lived since I left Ohio, ignoring nature can easily kill a person. I seek to traverse, transpose, and then transport the reader to my world: once the wilderness of Northern Ontario and now Vancouver Island.

In my first visit, I write only the bare essentials. Who’s there and what they are doing. Conversation is at a minimum because later the scene may whisper more and increase my options. At this point, I may complete only one or two pages.

The next time, I add sensory details, starting with sight. I’m not the kind of a person who painstakingly writes a scene inch by inch, savoring everything in my path, perfecting one sentence before moving to the next. Some sensations I don’t think about. Others don’t occur to me until the fifth or sixth draft. Adding hearing, touch, smell, and even perhaps taste, I visit and revisit and revisit until I am satisfied. Layer upon layer, the painting emerges. Each time, another ten percent on average is added to the text.

Both of my literary homes have had four distinct seasons. And as each season emerges, it offers different opportunities. Northern Ontario has very severe winters, but only during the winter does the land open for travel by snowshoe, skis, or snowmobile. Summer is humid and frantic with high temperatures and murderous bug invasions. It’s hard to imagine -40 degrees Fahrenheit in Northern Winters Are Murder when it’s 104 degrees in Blackflies Are Murder. Solid walls of rain during Vancouver Island’s winters stand far apart from the droughts and forest fires of summer. The seasons change as I go through my drafts, and at a leisurely pace of a book a year, usually I come full circle. I always live where I write. The one exception was my stand-alone novel, Man Corn Murders, which took place in the red-rock desert of Utah. For that I depended on a month-long trip to the canyons.

My reference library includes books on birds, animals, plants, fungi, geology, history, astronomy, fossils, everything important about my landscape. I’ve bought topographic maps to guide me. I’d rather not construct a road where there isn’t one, or stick a river in the middle of a bog. Once I did make an old brewery into a grow-op near an abandoned rail line designed to carry shipments of marijuana. I got a big laugh out of the aptly named Budd car (a single coach with engine on board used in the far north).

My clintonias don’t bloom in early September when the yellow flower has become a purple fruit. April is the time for skunk cabbage. Salmonberries ripen before blackberries. Wherever I have lived, I keep a monthly diary of emerging plants. Nor do I want to make a mistake about local animals. There are no foxes on Vancouver Island, nor are there moose, but you may see an elk. There are plenty of black bears, but very few grizzlies.

Instead of the devil, the angel is in the details. By the time I reach the final version of the scene, the reader knows whether sweat is evaporating on skin, what the wind is like, what’s on the path, what’s singing in the stillness, what trees are in leaf in what order, and, if bare, how the snow on branches is behaving in the thaw. How does the frosty air feel in the nose and are the hairs prickling? Is the rock face granite or sandstone? When the sensory experience is complete, the final process begins. That’s when I add subtleties like an analogy between nature and the individual. Some may call this the pathetic fallacy, but nature often reflects the way I feel.

EXERCISE

Here’s a bare-bones page where I begin the scene with only the roughest idea of the setting. It’s northern Ontario in the dead of winter. Belle Palmer and her new friend Jack MacDonald have taken a walk to clear their heads and plan how they might help Jack’s wife, who has been accused of murder. The complete scene is about ten times this original:

They climbed into the woods on their snowshoes. Finally they sat down. Jack threw a pine cone for the dog to chase. He began telling Belle about his marriage to Miriam (Mimsy). He lit a cigarette. Noises and images from the forest surrounded them. A bird. A moving tree branch. Melting snow. She pointed out favorite landmarks. Finally they rose and reached the top of a hill overlooking the gigantic lake.

What kind of specific sensory details could you use in this scene?