Guest post by: David Rocklin

Author of The Luminist, David Rocklin appears at the Wordstock Festival on Sunday, October 9 at 2pm on the Wieden+Kennedy Stage and is leading the workshop The How of Where: On Setting as Character in Fiction on Sunday, October 9 at 4:30pm

I recently returned from a place I still haven’t been to.

My novel, “The Luminist,” comes out on October 1, 2011. For the last few years, I’ve been immersed in its story arcs, its characters, and its setting. That latter element was the greatest challenge for me in writing this novel.

Set in nineteenth century Ceylon, “The Luminist” tells the story of Eligius Shourie, an Indian boy whose father is killed by English soldiers. He becomes a servant in the house of Catherine Colebrook.

Independent and driven, married to a fading Court Director, Catherine is losing herself in the yet-to-be-born art and science of photography. Eligius becomes her apprentice, and a bond neither of them expected is formed while around them, unrest between the native populace and the colonials occupying their country threatens to break open.

When I first began to consider the overarching story and how to research the time period it would occur in, I felt overwhelmed. I lacked even a passing familiarity with India’s caste system, or the intricacies of the East India Company, or the mechanics of early photographic devices. That daunted me. Then I realized the obvious. The Ceylon of this story no longer exists. I could travel to what is now Sri Lanka and I would not find it.

Research ensued. A lot of it. I drew out the rims and borders of the country as it would have been. The names of villages and (to the extent available) where one was in relation to another. The trade to and from. The vagaries of weather. Food, jobs, trees, words – it all helped me fill in the gaps in that short hand we have with the places we know from experience. What I was missing, though, was that sense of having lived there, of feeling it at that level.

I realized that the elements I mentioned above, that have been so critical to other stories (“A Passage to India” is a prime example) were not what brought this story to me. “The Luminist” at its heart is about the moment before photographs ever existed in the world. It’s about what it felt like to see the first image come, and how the quest for that moment changes Catherine and Eligius.

So, after months upon months of research, I turned to photographs. Some were taken by the actual woman who formed the inspiration for Catherine (Julia Margaret Cameron). The first photograph of hers I’d seen is now the cover of the novel. Another (not hers) of a boy at a distance, walking along a mountain path under an outcropping of rock, placed me so intimately into my imagined path for Eligius – the way he walked to and from his home village to the Colebrook estate – that I dreamt of it one night. Research, lived in for a lengthy period of time, began to feel like a memory of my own from a time when I was younger. The setting began to feel intimate.

Still, I am looking forward to visiting.

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I would love to hear from you – what kinds of research do you do? Have you ever written about a place you’ve never been to? How did you find that – challenging, or liberating? Finally, when I see you at Wordstock, remind me to tell you about my “Final Analysis” fear!

For more info about David Rocklin and his book, please visit www.davidrocklin.com  or the book’s FB page. David Rocklin is also on Twitter: @drocklin.