Years ago, I was lucky enough to
interview David Almond for the SCBWI’s Words & Pictures online magazine,
and asked him about the philosophical themes in his books. His answer gave me a
great insight into the importance of the concrete realities of place.
He said, “The danger of talking about
transcendence or spirituality is that they can’t exist without reality. The
important thing about my work is the realism in it … The language that I use is
very ordinary. It isn’t abstract. It’s very solid, I think. There are lots of
nouns and verbs. You can’t write
abstractions. You have to write reality. You have to write stories about dust
and dirt.”
Dust and dirt: the stuff of place.
His words were a great relief to me as
place is pretty much where I have to start a story. In the intervening years
I’ve built up a body of notes as to why this might be so, the gist of which
I’ll share with you here.
•
Realism
(even in fantasy) makes characters believable;
•
Realistic
characters exist in time and space;
•
Place
therefore grounds characters.
•
Also,
every scene needs a setting. Physical, sensory descriptions ease us into
thinking about the most important story questions: why is my character here
(motivation) and what is s/he going to do next (intent)?
Whatever
the genre, place is never accidental. It is the unique setting that shapes how
our characters experience the events of this story, and where they
create its outcomes.
Place also establishes genre. If we’re
on a space ship, we’re likely to be in SciFi territory, a battlefield denotes action,
a wizard’s castle fantasy etc.
But “place” as a writing tool is far more
than a rounded description of the physical setting –the sights, sounds, smells,
textures and tastes etc. It includes the fluidity of things, their states of
flux in time and space, foreshadowing or echoing the changes and conflicts of
the story.
If our word choices create a particular
tone and mood, then we’re talking about “voice” as well, which instantly moulds
reader expectations. No one who’s read Thomas Hardy’s opening description of Egdon
Heath in The Return of the Native
could possibly expect a romantic comedy to follow.
When I began writing I allowed place
to dictate my stories. Travelling the world as a journalist, then on a gap
year, I let places inspire me, and followed ideas wherever they led. I’d love
to have the luxury of time (and money!) to travel in this way again, and write “found”
stories, but instead, I’ve consciously adopted a character-centred approach to
place.
By this I mean that I try my hardest to
forget that I’m telling a story. Once I’ve researched a place, I live it
through my main character. It exists exclusively as their subjective
experience of it. I see it only through their eyes and feels it through their
skin.
This approach helps no end when
deciding what details a character would notice about this place at this
particular point in time. They certainly won’t notice or describe anything familiar,
for example.
It also forces me to decide early on how
a character’s perceptions are coloured by their state of mind. Are they in some
kind of emotion turmoil or struggling with inner conflicts, repressed or acknowledged?
Are they grieving or in shock, guilt-ridden or in denial, facing a complex life
decision or experiencing a sense of foreboding. How does their physical
wellbeing or lack of it impact on the way they interact with this setting at
this point in the story?
A cocky young policeman won’t see a
dark alleyway in the same way as the wily old criminal he’s chasing, for
example, or in the same way as a bond trader with cocaine in his pocket, or the
terrified trafficked girl with a gang master hot on her heels and the battery
signal on her phone flashing empty.
Whatever the viewpoint character’s state
of mind, if they react to a significant setting with apt and original language,
the depth and realism of their stories will inevitably be enriched.
A year or so after that interview with
David Almond, I discussed using place at the openings of stories with a local
adult writing group I occasionally teach, using these four examples:
Hilary Mantel’s opening to Bring up the Bodies
•
Falcons
•
Wiltshire,
September 1535
•
His
children are falling from the sky. He watches from horseback, acres of England
stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze.
Grace Cromwell hovers in thin air.
Three early sentences from Annie Enright’s
The Gathering
•
You
cannot libel the dead, I think, you can only console them.
•
So
I offer Liam this picture: my two daughters running on the sandy rim of a stony
beach, under a slow, turbulent sky, the shoulders of their coats shrugging
behind them. Then I erase it.
Lee
Child’s The Affair
•
The
Pentagon is the world’s largest office building, six and a half million square
feet, thirty thousand people, more than seventeen miles of corridors, but it
was built with just three street doors, each one of them opening into a guarded
pedestrian lobby. I chose the south east option, the main concourse entrance,
the one nearest the metro and the bus station, because I wanted plenty of
civilian workers around, preferably a whole long unending stream of them, for
insurance purposes, mostly against getting shot on sight. Arrests go bad all
the time, some accidentally, sometimes on purpose, so I wanted witnesses.
Joanna’s
Trollope’s A Village Affair
On the day contracts
were exchanged on the house, Alice Jordan put all three children in the car and
went to visit it. Natasha made her usual seven-year-old fuss about her
seat-belt, and James was crying because he had lost the toy man who rode his
toy stunt motorbike, but the baby lay peaceably in his carrycot and was pleased
to be joggling gently along while a fascinating pattern of bare branches
flickered through the slanting back window of the car onto his round upturned
face.
For me, each opening is
extraordinarily rich.
Mantel’s is at once
vividly English yet also deeply anti-religious, with the lightness of sight and
movement shot through with that visceral ‘blood-filled gaze’ of the falcons,
who are also Cromwell’s dead children. With intense economy, Mantel creates an
overwhelming mental landscape that is, at the same time, utterly in the moment
and also symbolic, poignant and beautiful. We are inside a mind transcending loss
by a conscious act of will: he is freeing the souls of his dead women-folk not
just from human existence but from God. No purgatory for them; no judgement or
guilt, just lightness and air and the hunt. And by freeing them, he frees
himself. Perhaps.
Movement is also inherent
in Enright’s running, turbulent sky. Her place is roughly textured (sandy,
stony) but her narrator’s mental landscape is detached, a ‘picture’ offered to
a dead man. ‘Then I erase it.’
Child’s analytical narrator
explains as he observes. His movement – the unending stream of witnesses –
is part of the plan; nothing is left to chance. These are the rational words of
a dangerous man with a tactical plan. How different from Trollope’s mother,
boxed in with her noisy children, with only the baby enviably free to
experience the flickering images outside. The make and model of the car don’t
matter to the mother, whereas Lee Child’s Jack Reacher would have noted them
both.
In each case the author
has, by marrying the simple, observable realities of place – David Almond’s
dust and dirt – with their character’s subjective perceptions and purposes, drawn
the reader into that mysterious state where imagined stories are both
believable and meaningful.
@HouseRowena
