Getting started is easy.

Pick a region in North Carolina. Check with a library or bookstore. Find books set in that region. Read them. Go explore the locations the book was inspired by or features.

Cox News Service file photo (ENLARGE)

Scenes from Rocky Mount can be found in the writing of native son Allan Gurganus.

Follow those directions, and you will be a literary tourist, said Georgann Eubanks, author of the "Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains."

"I don't think it is hard. There are tons of books that are written about the North Carolina coast, about our beaches that make good beach reading. So if you are going on vacation to the beach, you could pick up Nicholas Sparks or David Payne. On the other side of the state, pick up Thomas Wolfe, and then go to the Wolfe house or read some Carl Sandburg poetry and go to Sandburg's house," said Eubanks of Carrboro.

Visiting locations featured in a novel, following the route a fictional character takes during a journey or finding the haunts of an author can put an interesting spin on taking a trip in North Carolina, Eubanks said. Given the number of authors past and present who have explored the nooks and crannies of this state, the opportunities are boundless.

If people are worried about the price of gas, they can even practice before starting a longer pilgrimage by checking out some of the local places that have inspired literary minds, Eubanks said.

Start by finding author Allan Gurganus' book of short stories, "White People." A cotton mill village patterned after the old Rocky Mount Mills neighborhood is the setting of the story "Blessed Assurance" about a young man who sells funeral insurance to black people to support his ailing parents. People may recognize the waterfall and owner's house, which can still be seen today.

"Rocky Mount was the only town I knew, and I was very interested in writing about the difference between the owners of the mill and the workers in the mill," Gurganus said.

Readers can also look for similarities between Rocky Mount and the fictional town of Falls, N.C., which is found in Gurganus' "Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All," and three of the four novellas in the collection "The Practical Heart."

Fans of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" might have fun looking for similarities between Rocky Mount and the author's fictional Testament, Va. – the only time he used a fictitious name for a town in any of his books, Gurganus said. Kerouac made extensive visits to the city in the 1940s and '50s when visiting his sister, Caroline Blake, and her family. They lived on Tarboro Street before moving to the Big Easonburg Woods community, now known as West Mount.

"Kerouac would essentially hitchhike there when he had no money and no place to sleep and nothing to eat. His brother-in-law, I think, was not too happy to see him come. He slept on a screened-in porch on the side of the house," Gurganus said.

Eastern North Carolina towns were a big influence on author Michael Parker when he was creating the town of Trent in the novel "Hello Down There," the story of a man who becomes a recluse after a tragic car accident. Parker, whose father lived in Tarboro, said it was the town that most closely resembles his fictional town, though he considers it more of an emotional reaction to the landscape.

"My trips there when I was a kid were always very relaxed and languid. It had a real tight sense of community, and it was a very friendly place," Parker said.

Some of the places people travel to see may bear only slight resemblances to their fictional counterparts, while others might seem like they jumped right off the page, Eubanks said.

"It is sort of like when you read a book and then you see the movie and you wonder how the moviemakers handle the book. It is kind of like that. You read a book, and you want to see how the writers handle the actual place, what it is really like," Eubanks said.

People following in the footsteps in Lee Smith's most recent novel, "On Agate Hill," will not have as hard a time pinning down the similarities between reality and fiction. The author wrote the Civil War-era novel after exploring all the historical landmarks around her house on Churton Street in Hillsborough.

The novel follows Molly Petree, an orphan girl, during her life in Hillsborough at Gatewood Academy, based on the historic Burwell School, and west to the mountains, where Smith has a cabin.

"All of the scenes of the novel are there. ... Again all the mountains are the mountains that you see there. The towns are the same. It is pretty meticulously researched," Smith said. "It is almost like a love song to North Carolina."

Literary tourism is nothing new to Smith, who has had fans tell her of journeys they made to find locations in other books she wrote.

"I have had people e-mail to my Web site saying they have been to my hometown of Grundy, Va., where I grew up in the coal mine section of Appalachia, because of having read my books. They have found all the place names and they have found this and that ... They went there because of that, which I thought was just great," Smith said.

People who go on literary pilgrimages are usually curious and want to share part the author's experience and see if a location rings any bells from what they remember in a book, said author Heather Ross Miller. She said readers of some of her books would find many similarities between reality and her works.

Miller, who grew up in Badin, N.C., used the small industry town for the setting of her novel "Champeen," about a woman remembering her childhood in the World War II era. At the time the town's driving force was the Alcoa aluminum mill.

"Now all that is gone because they moved away, and I don't know what is going to happen to the facility. It is still there. It is quite impressive. It looks like something on the moon," Miller said.

Morrow Mountain State Park, which is close to Badin, provided the setting for another of Miller's novels, "Gone a Hundred Miles." The author fictionalized the life of real-life 19th century Dr. Franz Kron, who lived in what is now the state park.

"The homeplace is there within the territory of the park, and it is available free for anybody to look at, along with the beautiful Morrow Mountain scenery. ... The park is there. It is exactly as it was," Miller said.