It seems like everyone wants to visit Paris. Maybe not the Paris of today’s tourists with long lines outside the Louvre Museum and very expensive coffees? The romantic daydreams are of another Paris — the city of Ernest Hemmingway, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and company.
Many places shine at particular moments in history and they become perfect settings for fiction. Sometimes it’s historical. The Cairo of 1922 when Howard Carter discovered King Tut’s tomb is one of my fantasies. (Probably too many Mummy movies as a child.) Other people yearn to visit Richmond, Virginia as the Confederacy crumbled; London in the MOD 1960s (or during Jack the Ripper’s reign of criminal terror); Rome during the time of Claudius; or the Tower of London when Anne Boleyn was about to face her executioner.
Sometimes it’s the clothes.
Where would all those Regency Romances be without the beautiful gowns and complicated lingerie? Sometimes it’s the music — Detroit when it was the cradle of Motown. Sometimes it’s the art — Gauguin’s Tahiti.
Most places shine at several times in different ways. I’ve seen productions of La Boheme set in Paris of the 1920s and Paris of the 1950s and loved them both. They were different and equally valid, poetic and vivid.
New York City has a bunch of moments that have inspired writers. My part of the city is full of these TIMES/PLACES. Some readers long to visit the city of Henry James’ “Washington Square” and others long for the Bleecker Street of Bob Dylan. I’m fascinated by the 1920s when The Village as the nexus of writers while Broadway sang the latest Gershwin tunes, Tammany Hall controlled politics, and immigrants crowded into the Lower East Side.
What Time/Place draws you to a story?
I have been living in future realms lately. I guess this means that my time and place hasn’t happened yet.
Time/Places in the future have to start someplace — most often in the present or past so… where are you going? Looking forward to finding out!
I’m with Jon. lol Future all the way. But if I had my druthers I wouldn’t mind being on James Cameron’s Titanic – with lots of handsome Hollywood stars prancing around, of course. Oh and my own, personal, private lifeboat….
Can’t forget that lifeboat!
Readers, like me, who are fond of historical settings usually have one or two best bets for a literary time travel destination. I think you’re more of a science fiction fan so your divining rod points to the future. I think my interest in historical settings comes from my childhood steeped in old movies. Majoring in history in college sealed the deal. I have written a little historical fiction and will eventually e-publish the series of mini mysteries set in and around New York in the early 1920s. Prohibition, jazz, women getting the vote, immigration, Gershwin musicals, flappers, Fitzgerald, modern art….Yes, I will have to get moving on getting those out!