Places that inspire a story

by Rain Trueax

When writing fiction, why is it set where it is? Some authors create places. I prefer placing mine in real towns and landscapes. Sometimes where that is will be influenced by the problems the characters will be facing. Because I know them best, Oregon, Arizona and Montana end up in most of my books.

In my books, of course, there's a love story but with complications. When I know the problem, the reason I am interested in writing the story, next comes its setting. I need to know where my characters live, their homes.

To give where these people live, I found some images from my own photos and others I'd purchased. Naturally, their homes are only part of the environment as they move around. Sometimes I only know where they'll roam once I start writing. That's the fun of writing, the discoveries I make along with them.

Desert Inferno

The hero and heroine of this book live in very different homes. She's the descendant of a longtime ranching family near the Arizona border. As a plein air painter, she flourishes out beyond the beyond. As a border patrolman, the hero guards a region where few go. What he can afford is a small home in Nogales, Arizona. It's just a place to sleep. He cares little about how it looks.

In terms of nature, the Arizona desert is diverse, often not what the inexperienced expect. It is full of beauty and danger. Those who are careless find themselves easily hurt or dead. I tried to put that into this book-- both sides. Much of the story takes place out where life can be lost with one bad decision.

Bannister’s Way

Raven Lawrence, as a professor in a small liberal arts university, has a home she has renovated on the Tualatin River. She has turned it into a place she can work on her commissions for sculptures and a sanctuary for herself when she comes home frayed after a day with students who often don't appreciate art as she does.

As a child, my uncle temporarily rented a house on that river for a summer where I got to visit to be with my cousins. It left strong memories, as well as descriptive material for her home. I'd love to live on a river-- above the hundred year flood zone, of course.

Moon Dust

Susan is an interior decorator, who is about to divorce her husband, Dane, a high school principal. Their home has been a classic Victorian in an older district in Portland. Susan wants a very different life when she leaves him. She buys a condo downtown in a modern building. I could imagine myself living in either-- but boy, that condo where the terrace looks toward Mt. Hood, now that I could get into if I could afford it, of course... A problem in real life but none at all when giving it to a fictional character. 

Susan, as an interior decorator, is able to fulfill her inner self with how she decorates that apartment with modern art and furnishings. Dane, on the other hand, has rarely considered what he wants but only what's the right thing to do. He has a secret that has colored his whole life and led to his wife wanting to leave him. Homes played a big role in this book.

Second Chance

Eight years after Moon Dust, the story picks up with one of the youths Dane had helped and Susan’s best friend. Judd’s passion is wildlife rehabilitation and has begun a facility for that purpose, which he funds by driving truck. It's a hardscrabble life for him as he holds the buildings together by hard work, wanting the second chance for wildlife that he had himself. Because of an experience we had with a wildlife rehab center, I used it for Judd's work-- plus wrote us into the book as a couple bringing an injured owl to such a center.

Evening Star

Marla has her life exactly as she wants it with a job in the DA’s office in downtown Portland. Along with her spoiled, Persian cat, she lives in Nob Hill, a neighborhood of nice, older homes. Hers is a condo in the upper half of one of those homes.

Randy, a cop, is renovating an older home in Sellwood, one of Portland’s neighborhoods where it’s up and coming or deteriorating—depending on who bought the house. The book roams downstate to the ranch where Randy’s family lives as well as to Nevada. 

Hidden Pearl

S.T. Taggert is a successful architect-builder in Portland. His home is of his own design, but I didn't find a photo that would do it justice, besides, one of the more important scenes in the book is in a cave above the Umpqua River. It is a place people lived and sheltered with a gatherer/hunter lifestyle for thousands of years. The petroglyphs on its walls, the evidence of many campfires, gave this place a sacred energy, which helped S.T. reconnect with his own roots. 

Her Dark Angel

Widowed in Hidden Pearl, Katie lives in an expensive home in Portland Heights where she raises her two daughters. She comes from a wealthy family and has an invasive mother. Although the book opens in Reno (she's down there to help her uncle), most of the story is in Portland and her home. In many ways, it represents the limitations she has placed on herself by the expectations she's accepted. 

I used multiple places in Portland for various scenes. Writing a book like that lets me take my memories back to places like Portland's Rose Garden.

From Here to There

Where this modern western starts out in Boston, it quickly moves to a big ranch in Montana. Writing it let me use not only what i know of its setting where we've vacationed a lot as well as at one time tried to buy a home, but also what I know of ranch work. I've lived on ours for forty some years. I could put ranch life into the book but also the mythology of the West. You do know that mythology doesn't have to be untrue. It's simply those stories that impact life in a modern world. That of the cowboy is still that for much of the United States. It's gone and yet-- it's not.

Montana Christmas

Not so much a love story as a continuation of From Here to There with a wife

determined to help her husband see Christmas can be a good thing as well as to bring his estranged family to their ranch for a time of healing and love. 

It's a novella, set in the ranch world and the beauty of Montana. My main purpose with it, besides the family aspects, was how with a ranch, the work doesn't stop for holidays. The home is one the hero built for the heroine with all the feel of the West-- including its art.

Luck of the Draw

When I wrote this book in the 1970s, the world of rodeo was different than it is today. Our country is different as that was the aftermath of the Vietnam War. I thought about updating it, as I had the others, but there was no way. It had to stay 1973, which makes it a historical contemporary. 

His transient life seemed best depicted by a motel, and I found this photo on Stencil with about as period a look as I could get. I also wanted the book to have the feel of Pendleton, the city, where I have been more than a few times-- a nice town with a high desert feel, surrounded by wheat fields and cattle ranching country.