Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Andy Abramowitz writes about Darling at the Campsite from Lake Union Publishing.
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Research for Darling at the Campsite, or Why would anyone have to do research for Darling at the Campsite?
I will admit that my new novel, Darling at the Campsite, does not lend itself to a compelling elevator pitch. It’s basically this: an aimless thirty-something is still trying to get over his high school girlfriend. Nor can I pretend there’s anything exotic about the setting. It takes place in present day Illinois, which is not exactly Paris 1789 or the international space station. Our hero, Rowan Darling, doesn’t even have a tragic backstory. He’s not, say, a survivor of abusive alcoholic parents. At best, he’s a survivor of bruised feelings inflicted by children he grew up with (and who, frankly, aren’t so bad). This is a book about ordinary people living in an ordinary American town right now.
And yet, writing it required a good amount of research. Maybe not the ostentatious kind, like riding shotgun with a hard-nosed homicide detective, or spending a year getting snapped at by sea turtles in the Galapagos. All the same, the characters in this book, average Joes and Janes though they might be, get up to some things that I personally never have. Someone launches a website. Someone takes a booze cruise in Colombia. There’s a cellist. If I tried to write about such things without properly educating myself, I wouldn’t fool you. You’re too smart.
So I did my homework. I acquainted myself with the geography of coastal Cartagena. I learned what pieces of classical music might appear in a chamber orchestra’s setlist. I learned that chamber orchestras don’t call them setlists.
Here’s some of the stuff I looked into in order to convince my readers that my characters actually did the things I say they did:
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The Local Cocktail in Cartagena
Looming over this story is a boating accident that occurs while a family is vacationing in the Colombian port city of Cartagena. While none of the characters seems to know much about the event, we can only assume that the ill-fated excursion involved some festive sampling of the local cocktail. Aguardiente — which translates, without irony (I’ve sampled it), into “fire water” — is an anise-flavored liqueur derived from sugarcane that typically clocks in at around 30 percent alcohol. The drink, which has been one of the most popular in the region for centuries, is to be consumed neat from a shot glass. There’s also a moonshine variety, if you want to check that out. It’s reputed to cause blindness.
Nicknames? Guaro. Health benefits? Nope.
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Working the Day Shift at a Funeral Home
A few scenes in the book take place inside a funeral home (did I not mention a boating accident?) where one of the characters happens to be employed. I’ve attended my share of funerals, but I don’t personally know anyone in the biz, and before writing, I had very little concept of what it’s like to work at such an establishment. Is everyone respectfully solemn all the time, or do they all become jokesters behind closed doors, what with all that tension to release?
Surprisingly, people tend to really like working at funeral homes, the high job satisfaction flowing not from an indifference toward death, but from helping people through a dark hour. A funeral director is a shoulder for mourners to lean on, the one we deputize to worry about logistics. We rely on an embalmer to prepare our dearly departed for a final, lasting peek. These professionals consider funerals a client-service industry like any other, like being a travel agent. Going into work doesn’t depress them because they don’t feel that it’s their place to experience someone else’s grief. In fact, the most depressing thing about the job might be that, because so many of these businesses are family-run, you have to deal with your family all day.
It ain’t all roses. The smell of the coolers sounds like something that would take a whole lot of getting used to. There are, I was nauseated to discover, products made specifically to eliminate the smell of decomposing corpses and embalming fluids. There’s one called Smelleze. You can order it on Amazon.
Most frequent remark made to funeral home employees: “But you look so normal.”
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Being a High School English Teacher
Back in school, I always gravitated toward the English teachers. The math teachers were like code-crackers. Science teachers may as well have been magicians. But English teachers — they had this gleam in their eye like they’d actually stood on the deck of Ahab’s whaling ship, they’d sat in the courtroom during Tom Robinson’s trial. They didn’t seem interested in imparting knowledge so much as wisdom.
I didn’t want that for my character. Patti Darling, my main character’s mother, needed to be more human, vulnerable, just as likely to throw a shoe as a literary barb. I did, however, need to fortify her with a quiver of quotations, and for that, I joyfully traipsed back through the classics that my heroes — those English teachers of yore — raved on about while most of us tuned out. And while the character trait I meant to exemplify through that tendency to quote the masters was not erudition but annoyance (at least as far as Patti’s son was concerned), it was thrilling to get to know Stephen Crane again, and Chinua Achebe, and Hermann Hesse.
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Playing the Cello
When you create a character who plays a mean cello and whose mean cello playing has a role in the story, you owe it to the reader to watch some performances, to check out some instructional videos on YouTube so you can understand some of the mechanics. The importance of inhaling and exhaling, for instance. How slightly relaxing your back yields a fuller, more robust sound. How cellists are taught to allow their bodies to follow the bow stroke, to move up bow and down bow, as opposed to sitting upright and rigid behind the instrument.
I didn’t collect these details in order to dispense them like a dinner party showoff. I needed them so I could conjure in my head a vibrant, multidimensional image of what Daisy Pham (my Darling virtuoso) looks like when she plays. Why was that so important? Because other characters spend a lot of time looking at her.
Incidentally, it used to be that women were taught to sit side-saddle when they played the cello because it wasn’t “ladylike” for women to part their knees. Fortunately, Daisy isn’t dainty.
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Expertise in the Talking Heads Catalog
Two of my characters grew up obsessed with the Talking Heads. No research required. Been living it for 30 years, as evidenced by the CDs (pictured) which I bought after I wore out the cassettes and before I splurged on the digitally remastered downloads.
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