Using events in
another time period to advance your plotline adds interest and color to your
story. Generally you achieve this with either time-travel, which is moving your
present-day protagonist physically to the location, flashbacks to another time
within the protagonists lifetime, or reincarnation, where they emerge as
another person. Your readers really don’t care how you get there; they simply
want to be there. Research carefully, find interesting tidbits about your time
period, like the food, the clothing. Your reader wants to be a tourist along
with having an adventure.
Travelling in
time is only theory and not something you can look up in Wikipedia, but
research into the possible theories, learning new things, investigating new
places adds a whole new dimension to writing that makes the job of committing
some 70,000 words to paper exciting. I learned more than I ever wanted to know
about whaling in 1865 when I wrote Love
Out of Time, and discovered a fascinating event in the Civil War called The Stone Fleet Incident. You didn’t
want to know how they did laundry on a boat, but I told you anyhow.
The wildly
popular, romantic “Highlander” series
by Diana Gabaldon has brought back interest in this genre. She uses Scotland
and the Battle of Culloden in 1746, as her historical period. Her female
character passes through an energy force to get there, and back again. Her
romantic interest is hauntingly memorable.
In my novel, The Haunting of Aaron House, I use
flashbacks of the ghost inhabiting Samantha’s body. The main secret to this writing
is a strong sense of place. Your reader wants to be there with your
protagonist, so you must put yourself
there to observe small details, like clothing, speech, and manners—reacting to
the scene so your readers hear the sounds, smell the odors around them.
Garbage? Food? Blood? In The Haunting of Aaron House, Amalie, the ghost in Samantha,
is having a flashback to the Battle of Gettysburg. She’s in the middle of
Pickett’s Charge.
“Amos! Amos, my beloved, where are you?” She
stopped, holding her mouth, coughing. “I can’t breathe. The smoke from the guns
is choking me. Too much noise. Cannons exploding, and men crying, horses
screaming in pain.” She ran farther, her hands over her ears, staggering to
avoid soldiers, and fell to the ground, crying for Amos.
Love Out of Time uses time-travel,
complicated by shifts to parallel universes. We go to 1865, and a whaling
village in Massachusetts called New Kensington. My main character, Sara
Burkhart, rents a beach house in present day New Kensington that is haunted by
a sea captain, leader of a group of time travellers from the old town. Sara’s
ghost, Caleb, sends her back in time to i865 New Kensington. In this brief
excerpt of Sara’s first visit, she wakes in the middle of the night.
Cautiously she opened one eye at a time,
afraid of what she’d find, peering through the mist. It was night. She was
outdoors. The smell of salt water indicated an ocean nearby. Roughly clad male
bodies shoved past her, ignoring her presence. Judging by the shadows of tall-masted sailing ships in the distance,
the sounds of bells and creaking timber, and the odors of rotten fish, unwashed
bodies, and wet wool, she was somewhere far removed from her time.
Looking up. She saw a sign hanging overhead,
the words “Sounder Inn” painted in coarse letters around a spouting whale—a tavern.
…….Cautiously, she ventured inside. A strange mix of men of all races and
nationalities…..some nearly naked and covered with tattoos.
You get the
idea. Try it and go places you’ll never be.
See these books on my Amazon page. http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B005N0BVCS
See these books on my Amazon page. http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B005N0BVCS
