"Strictly for Research"
While in London, we took a river boat tour down the Thames. Even though the captain told us he was not a professional tour guide, he did share some interesting anecdotes, clever jokes, and entertaining stories along the way, which he said he had just collected from years of living in the city. Near the end of the ride, the captain announced (in his heavy cockney accent) that after the tour, he and his first mate would be going to the local pub, "strictly for research."
There are a dozen places in the world that I have wanted to visit for years (Buenos Aires, Cyprus, Paris, Seoul, and Venice, just to name a few), and part of the reason I haven't yet is because I couldn't decide where to begin. But about five years ago, something started to happen in my life that set me on this trajectory to make Scarborough, England, my first overseas destination.
I love Jane Austen books. I can't tell you how many times I've read Pride and Prejudice and giggled at Mr. Bennet's dry sarcasm, cringed at Mr. Collins' proposal, and sighed over Mr. Darcy's confession of love. I am in awe of Austen's clever writing style and brilliant character development and wish I could write a novel that could be even half as beloved as hers.
In college, I took a class on children's literature and learned about how important it is for readers to have literary characters that share physical features or social qualities with them, that they can relate to and connect with on deep and personal levels. This resonated with me, as some of the characters I most closely identified with as a child were blonde girls from wholesome, Christian families, like Mandie Shaw and Mary Ingalls. I also recalled that Joni Eareckson Tada wrote a series of books that I adored, about a girl named Darcy Moore, who was smart and kind and in a wheelchair.
And so I casually wondered, "What if Elizabeth Bennett was disabled? How would her story have looked differently? Would Mr. Darcy still have been hopelessly and ardently in love with her, against his own will and reason?" This thought lingered with me for years, as I hoped for my own romance, my own Mr. Darcy (or Mr. Tilney or Mr. Knightley, for that matter) to come along. There were a few times when my author eye was convinced it could see the potential, but the Great Author disagreed.
During the covid era, I was bored and homebound, so what does a nerd do when she is bored and homebound? She embarks on a second master's degree through an online program. As part of this program, I had to take a few classes outside of my field of study, so I thought it seemed as good a time as ever to take a couple writing classes, one nonfiction and one fiction. In the fiction class, the assignment was to develop a plot and character list for a novel and then write a complete first chapter of a novel. Since I'd had this concept in my mind for so long, I decided it would be fun to play with it in this context. Thus, Roselyn and Robert Mayfair were born.
The class was too short, the assignments too easy... so after it was over, I spent the next two years doing research. I researched what life would have been like for someone who couldn't walk in the Regency era, what medical treatments and prognoses were common, what social stigmas there were, and what a young lady's prospects for true love and high adventure might have been if she was bedridden. I also got to know my characters more, drawing sketches, writing descriptions, plotting out development and chemistry between each other. And then there was setting...
I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want it to be in London or anywhere else Austen had already written about. I wanted it to be a small coastal town, a seaport, a fishing business, a shipyard, a spa resort, near the countryside, with a castle and beach and cliffs and hills... And that's how I learned about Scarborough. I read and googled all I could about the town as it was and is and even contacted the librarian there to ask for more resources, which she generously provided through book recommendations and digital copies.
Throughout all the research, a story slowly took shape in my mind and on page around these characters in this place with these unique challenges. Initially, I tried to mimic Austen's style and voice, but eventually I found my own voice and was caught up in my own journey of creating and discovering. My imagination took what it knew of Scarborough and filled in the gaps, and I felt like it was my second home where I've lived for the past three years, even though I'd never actually been there.
"You just need to go there," my auntie June said one day last fall when we were talking on the phone. I knew she was right; I needed to see it, to hear the accents, to smell the sea breeze, to feel the cobblestones. So I made plans, and on June 9, we arrived.
Tourist season in Scarborough doesn't begin until July, and we were the only Americans in town, as far as we know. So naturally, locals wanted to know why we were there. I would say I was "working on a novel," but my dad proudly called me a Writer, speaking blessing and trust over me in a way I still can't bring myself to hope for, even with a fully formed 350-page manuscript saved on my laptop. When the residents of Scarborough heard that I was writing a novel about their town, they were excited to give their own input. Everyone had a suggestion for something we should see or do while we were there, and several shared with us their favorite things about living in the town. Our tour guide at the castle gave us specific information about the time that I am writing about and even made suggestions for how it could influence the storyline. It felt like the whole community was invested in my novel!
And then there was the library. I got to meet Angela, the dear librarian who has been so kind to help me. She showed me their local history room, where artifacts from different areas of history are cataloged and stored safely. She had pulled out a ton of resources for me to look through: books, journals, brochures, play bills, lithographs, maps... They piled up on the table before me, and every time she set a new stack down, she apologized and said, "Just one more!"
I spent all afternoon there, madly taking notes in my journal and taking photos of pages from her books. She gave me a copy of one of the lithographs from the 1700s, of people promenading on the bay. And she told me to be sure to let her know when my book was published, and that maybe I could come back and do a signing and reading.
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