I loved taking George and Frances and some of the supporting characters to Paris for a couple of books. It was so much fun to learn about a new place, the history, and culture as well as what was happening at the time. I always planned on their return to London, that’s their home, but I’ve been wondering where else they might be likely to go.
It’s not as easy as I first thought to have my main characters travel. For one thing, they can’t take the entire cast of characters with them and creating new characters is like starting the series all over again. It takes at least one draft just to start understanding who these new people are, what they want, and how they’re likely to behave. If I have too many characters to create, I can run into that dangerous territory of not meeting my deadline.
A new location can also come with a new language that I don’t speak and laws that I don’t understand. The laws I can probably learn from books, but a new language means I do not get to read the newspaper archives, and they are a treasure trove of information! The front-page news stories tell me what was big and important at the time, but those inner pages tell me what people cared about—the local stories and the advertisements. Even the classifieds can tell me what people did for a living, where they lived, what their houses were like, and what things cost.
Fortunately, the US and British newspaper of the day will alert me to events happening around the world. While it might be interesting to drop George and Frances in a city in the midst of a general strike, I would not want to put them in a war zone.
Another aspect for me to consider is where did the rich people, or the upper classes, travel in that era? In my most recent newspaper research I’ve seen advertisements for wintering in San Remo or Cannes, so the French and Italian Riviera was already a “thing” in 1900. The tricky part is that I doubt I can afford to travel there, as much as I’d love to. After all, when researching a book, nothing beats boots on the ground. Even though these locations have changed over the past century, there’s still a sense of place that lingers. And on the practical side, the streets are often still there even if the buildings have changed. It makes a huge difference to actually go to the place I’m writing about.
The most likely place for George and Frances to travel is New York. Frances has family there, after all, which means characters that you (and I) know already live there. What do you think? I’m a few books ahead of you and the one I’m starting now has them firmly in England. But where would you like to see them go in the future—if you want them to go anywhere, that is? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
