Not from Around Here

Lurker, I’ll get to your crowd post next.

Every so often, I am reminded that not everyone lives in Minnesota. I was reminded of this forcibly a few years back at a fabulous Minicon panel at which five editors graciously consented to, in essence, read slush for an audience. The idea was that they would take Page One of various stories that folks had submitted and then each of them would say whether they would read further or reject the story, and why.

It was a really remarkable panel, and I sat there nodding through the first three or four submission-explanations, until they got to the one set on the first day of a summer camp in the north woods, where the head councilor was lecturing campers about not feeding the bears. The editorial feedback began with an editor complaining that the situation was totally unbelievable; nobody would build a summer camp where there were bears, and if they did, nobody would send their children to it.

She was taken aback when almost the entire audience burst into laughter, because if you are going to build a summer camp in the Minnesota woods, you’d have considerable trouble finding a place that doesn’t have any bears around. Heck, the city of Duluth routinely has problems with bears scavenging at the city dump, and at least one got as far south as the Twin Cities in the last twenty years, if I remember the news reports correctly.

This comes to mind because I’ve spent the last week working on the first chapter of The New Thing, and most of that chapter is set at the Minnesota State Fair. (Which cleverly gave me an excuse to visit the fair three times during its twelve-day run, gorging on fried olives-on-a-stick, cheese curds, Sweet Martha’s cookies, and other traditional State Fair foods, as well as spending lots of time in the Creative Arts building and wandering around the Midway…but I digress.)

The Minnesota State Fair is a really big deal around here; everybody knows about it, even those who’ve never been in their lives. It’s on every TV station and radio show (most local stations have a booth at the fair and do at least some of their broadcasts from there while the fair is going on). It’s inescapable.

Most of my readership, however, does not live in Minnesota. They don’t know about the “food on a stick” tradition (which includes everything from common stuff like corn dogs and cotton candy to deep fried pickle, lobster, and fudge), or about numerous other fair traditions like the butter heads and crop art. And as if that were not enough, there is one other important consideration.

Neither my editors nor my agent live in Minnesota.

What all this means is that using the State Fair as a setting for Chapter One is a fairly tricky balancing act. On the one hand, I have oodles of real-life material. On the other hand, some of it is likely to raise questions from my editors if I don’t handle it right (fried crocodile on a stick? Really?). On the third hand, I’m only setting the first chapter at the fair; after that, everybody goes Elsewhere, and I don’t want the fair itself to be so interesting that my readers are disappointed when they get to the other world where they’re going to spend the rest of the book.

And honestly, coming up with an Elsewhere that is weirder and more wonderful than the Minnesota State Fair is hard.

So the task boils down to writing a Chapter One in which I 1) portray the fair’s weirdness accurately, 2) but in a way that is convincing and believable for people who aren’t familiar with it, while 3) not making it too interesting compared to the rest of the book.

This can be harder than it sounds. Several times over the past umpty years, I’ve read books where the writer did a brilliant portrayal of a part of the country they knew well (Georgia, North Dakota, small town Manitoba, south Florida, Arizona), and then veered off into a more-or-less standard Magic World that was much less well-realized…and consequently, much less interesting to me, as a reader. (In most cases, the reviewers agreed with me on that score.)

The problem, I think, was that the writer was so familiar with the place that to them it was not interesting – it was just an ordinary spot that they wanted to escape, preferably as quickly as possible. Whereas for their readers, it was the fantasy world that they’d seen before, and the real-world setting that was new and strange and fascinating.

Writers need to be aware of this on two counts: First, things they take for granted (like bears and fried-crocodile-on-a-stick) may not seem believable to readers who aren’t from around here (wherever “here” is), and therefore, may need more setup and clarity than the writer expects; and second, incorporating some of the ordinary, everyday, uniquely local traditions into one’s fantasy world may make it a lot more interesting to those same readers.

Now all I need is a reason for people in my other world to dress llamas in costumes and eat deep fried Twinkies-on-a-stick…