Setting the scene

Place is a character in many books. You couldn't have A Tale of Two Cities in New Jersey. I read a haunting book earlier this year The Stalin Epigram that needed its setting to be in Moscow and a prison camp.

But is it important in the hundreds of romances people read every year? Nora Roberts set a trilogy (eventually a four-book series, a quartology?) in Baltimore and the Eastern Shore. Could the Hamptons have worked as well?

Nevertheless, once a writer decides the setting, what's the best way to convey how it looks, smells, feels. It's important to spark the reader's imagination. Everybody knows what Narnia or Oz or Hogwarts looks like. (And they would even if they'd never seen the movies...)

Just as I want Jane to look a certain way, I want the places she's about to go to be clear to the reader. I want them to see her short, plump frame standing before the stone shops of Ellicott City or watching the Wednesday night sailboat races from Annapolis' city dock.

Souvenir Shopping (the title isn't sticking) -- can't you tell by the non-working title? -- includes a road trip. The scene might not be a character but readers will have to know where Jane is at all times. So will Jane.

An exercise, just for fun:

A butter-yellow swallowtail -- now two -- bob among the feathery flowers of the mimosa tree. The yard now crowded with trees, azaleas and banks of perennials was once a plain brown quarter acre. Ten years ago, only a few saplings stood sentry along the edges of the sunburned grass. If not for them, the suburban yard might still be barren. The grey and tan colonial houses set so close together once seemed intrusive, as if they were bending to hear the whispered conversations on our sunny deck. The oaks, maples, dogwoods and mimosas now shield the view and the family secrets. The air conditioners still hum nearby but the songs of birds make the din fade away.