Quick story before I begin: when I go to work at the Community College of Allegheny County, I carry my stuff in a black tote bag emblazoned with a modified Tolkien illustration advertising the 75th anniversary edition of The Hobbit. I’ve gotten several compliments on it from people who love The Hobbit. Colleges are where the good nerds gather!

Second quick story: we went to the opera last weekend — La Boheme — my first-ever opera, though Julie’s been many times, including operas in Europe; it’s old hat to her. But it was new to me, and I loved it! I thought it would be good, a nice concert. It was so much more than that! First of all, the Benedum Center in Pittsburgh is a beautiful building, magnificent with age and golden embossings and frescoes and warm, soft lighting. It’s everything you’d expect in an opera house. Second, operas are staged a lot more entertainingly than I’d thought. I’d expected a chorus in costumes, standing more or less stationary as they sang. But an opera is staged like a musical, like a play, with realistic sets, costumes, and movement all over the stage! It was easy to become immersed in the world of the story. The music, of course, was extraordinary. And finally, there were visual special effects. One section was set in a snowfall, and highly realistic “snow” was falling all through the scene. The house created an intriguing effect with a transparent curtain inside the main curtain. When the velvet curtain rose and a scene began, the transparent curtain was still in place for awhile, though the action and music would begin. It created the illusion that we were watching a projection or perhaps a moving painting — a story in another world. Then this curtain, too, would rise, and all would become marvelously clear. During the breaks and intermissions (yes, there were both), we explored the building, passing along the secretive side passages, climbing up to the second floor to peer down from the balcony on the milling throng of opera-goers. It was easy to see and feel how this was an entertainment that existed before there were movie theaters; it seemed designed with the social aspects in mind, that a large part of the charm was meeting opera-loving friends, everyone bedecked in their finery, all having happy meetings and talking about great performances and the arts. We basked in this soft golden enchantment of the past — while appreciating how opera is very much here today, alive and vibrant!

So anyway, the main thing I wanted to talk about is how, in fiction writing, sometimes there’s no substitute for “getting physical” — for physically acting out what your characters are supposed to be doing, in order to see if it’s possible and plausible. Yes, I do this pretty often.

Nor am I alone. Lafcadio Hearn, who in Japan is known as Koizumi Yakumo, was the writer who revealed the folklore of ancient Japan to the West. If you’ve ever read a Japanese ghost story, it’s almost a sure bet that it reached you through the writings of Hearn. A native of the West, he spent the end of his life in Japan and took a Japanese name. And he was blessed with a wife who would act out the legends for him, showing him how certain movements and dances looked, so that he could accurately write about them.

It’s a helpful technique. When I wrote a weird western story some years ago, I needed to know what twenty paces looked like in the real world. I needed to know what ten paces looked like. So I found out on a sidewalk in Niigata, using a utility pole for reference.

For my current book, I frequently want a mental picture of room sizes — good thing we have a backyard. Most recently, I had to determine whether characters carrying supplies on their backs could crawl along a ledge just over a foot wide, and what the challenges would be. So I used a yardstick, measured myself out a foot-wide ledge on the living-room floor, and crept along it, doing everything the characters did. My wife wasn’t home at the time, but if she had been, I doubt she’d have batted an eyelash. She’s pretty good at recognizing what’s for the book.