Living the Fictional Dream

My parents own land and a snug little cabin a few miles outside of the small town where I grew up. For Stephen and I, the cabin has become a great retreat. Being only a couple of hours away from home, it’s the perfect place for a weekend get-away. Holiday weekends, like this one, are even better, because we have two full days at the cabin instead of just one.

The cabin is quite cozy, as far as cabins go. When my mom first told me about it, I pictured a rustic shack with little in the way of amenities—something for guys to use on a hunting trip. Happily, that mental picture was completely wrong. The cabin has electricity, running water, air conditioning/heat, a fridge, a washer/dryer, and what has to be the biggest cabin bathroom on the planet (I think it’s bigger than our guest bathroom at home!). The property also has a shed for storage, a fire pit (great for cooking meat and roasting marshmallows over), two ponds, and plenty of hiking trails.

I love our weekends at the cabin, because I generally get a lot of writing done. Stephen and my dad go out on the property and work—chipping wood, trimming vines, mowing, etc.—while I stay inside (or out on the wrap-around porch, if it’s not too buggy) and type away. And because the cabin does not have the Internet or cable, I am much less likely to be distracted.

The cabin has popped up in several short stories I’ve written in the past year or so. It appeared fully formed in a short story I wrote about a pack of werecoyotes living in the Texas hill country (sadly, I haven’t place this story yet, but it’s gotten close a couple of times—I’m still waiting to hear from one market, so cross your fingers for me!). The cabin also appears, sans modern accoutrements, in the first scene of a story I wrote for my writing group’s 2007 short story collection (every year, we vote on a theme and all write a short story for that theme—several of our members have actually had their contributions published).

It’s funny how real life can creep into your writing. I think that it adds depth to a story if the writer knows the setting intimately. You can really create that vivid fictional dream for your reader by describing the setting with all five senses. Being able to describe the sounds and the smells, anything in addition to what the place looks like, really adds to the depth.

One of these days, I’m going to write a story set in a dentist’s office. My dad is a dentist, and I worked there part-time for several summers during high school and college. In one of my grad school fiction workshops, a classmate wrote a story about going to the dentist, and someone raved on the setting, saying that having the main character in the chair with the dentist’s hands in her mouth was a great hook. So, one of these days, perhaps I’ll put all that dental office experience into some fictional good use.

Of course, first I actually need to come up with a plot where that setting would be appropriate! And I have plenty of short stories in progress that actually have plots, so the dental office idea will stay on the back burner for now. Then again, that’s the thing about being a writer (at least in my experience)—there are always way more ideas than there are completed stories or time to write them.

Happy Memorial Day, everyone! I hope you all have a relaxing weekend, and I hope that all the writers out there are able to get extra time in on their works-in-progress this weekend!