What's Opera, Doc?

Had the first response from a beta reader today.

The phrase I want to focus on is,  "I...can tell that you have been there..."

This. This sense of verisimilitude. It isn't for bragging rights, it isn't a sort of academic contest like being able to describe a scene using only words beginning with "B." It isn't even the reproducibility thing I've harped on before (if I tell a reader you can get on the people-mover at Piazalle Roma, then I run the risk that someone might try and do so on their vacation in Venice.)

No, the strongest reason for that intangible rightness is that it makes the story more compelling. It reaches the reader emotionally, in a specific way.

But that, alas, was in reference to a scene I set on the Acropolis of Athens. I just finished the Italy sequence, and through all of it I was reduced to second-hand. I've watched videos, looked at maps, read reviews, talked to friends. But I haven't been there, smelled, felt, heard, tried speaking the language, been part of the rhythms.

What is Venice like at 9 PM? I know how a December night unfolds in Paris; who is on the streets, when the shops close, when the bars close. I know because I was there. Venice? I had to fake it, based on what little information I could scrounge up.

But here is the big contrast.

During the Venice chapter, the following dialog occurs as a busker singing opera excerpts interacts with his audience:

“For my next, I need a little help. You there, Sir, you look like a baritone.”
“I’m not much of a…” the audience member protested.
“Do not worry, Sir, the part of the Sacristan is simple. Here are the words; I will cue you. Now…’Dammi i colori…’”

This, again, is verisimilitude. I worked that opera. I know the aria, the scene, the context. Sure, I could have researched enough to find some hook to build a similar "bit" around, but this came without any need to look up anything beyond confirming the spelling of the opening phrase. Heck, I even wrote "baritone" into the text before checking the parts in a listing for Tosca.

Tosca was on my mind already, of course, because the much later area "Vissi d'arte" is named and described in my scene. The point of all this, though, is that this is how writing from experience works. You write things not just of a kind but in a way that is convincing.

(Okay...the way I experienced this aria through performance, and the way I've seen buskers and others work with an audience through similar things makes me believe you could carry it off as described. The point again being this would not even have occurred if I didn't have this deep experience to draw upon. A video can lead you to believe the roar of the mechanical lion outside a tent at Oktoberfest might be startling. Actual experience tells you the Acropolis feels like it is floating above the Attic plane; you can't even see Athens from much of it.)