For Writers

By Writers

WRITING THE NOVEL

A six-part master class series

by

JACQUELINE JACKSON

It's unusual in a first novel, for an author to choose a location with which they are unfamiliar. The most convincing locations will come from your own knowledge and experience. Often writers can get so caught up in the drama of the situation that they forget that this needs to be played against a three-dimensional backdrop.

Decide on a location you know well. This can be a place near to where you live, one you often visit or somewhere you used to go. The location for your novel must be one that you know through having been there and experienced in some way, one that has made an impression, good or bad, on you. Even in a fantasy or sci-fi novel, where imagination plays a greater part, your readers will still need to identify with the location.

Make your location as real in your imagination as you can; spend time thinking about the place. Go there and take photographs, observe and list the physical characteristics – the sounds, sights and smells. Note down your emotions and thoughts about this particular place. Once you have all these details to hand, it will be easier to recreate a life-like location for your novel. Write detailed notes - and don't worry about how many adjectives you use or whether you've chosen the right vowel; the important thing is to record every detail, so that you can revisit and recapture the feel and sensations of that particular day.

I'm looking out of my first floor window as I write this – what do I see? A tree in the foreground; the rooftops of houses in the middle ground and a huge expanse of the Cheshire plain; small clumps of woodland dotted here and there; the Jodrell Bank telescope, the distant Welsh hills. If I open my window, I can feel the wind and rain, hear the sounds of people and traffic.

Let's take a closer look at the above and make that location a little more descriptive. If I intended to use it as background notes for a novel setting, I would need more than that to go on… For example:

'A budding tree, mossy rooftops and broken black guttering on wind-battered houses, starlings flocking together to keep warm. What's left of the mighty Thurlwood forest in the middle distance. The silver dish of the telescope facing skywards like a giant birdbath, upturned to uniformly grey clouds. The hills beyond barely discernable, grey shadows merging with the horizon. An ambulance, siren blaring, races past on the main road nearby, the sound glancing off the buildings and mingling with the joyful shouts of primary school children returning home from school…'

I wrote this passage in early spring, and each time I read it, the memory of that particular spring day is fresh once again in my mind.

Once you have your notes and can visualise the location, the time has come to put that picture into the minds' eye of your reader. Select your words with care – a better verb will often say much more than a weak verb and an adverb. For example, the description, 'a tree leaning badly to one side ' could be improved by changing the verb + adverb (leaning badly) to 'listing', 'slanting' , or even ' tip-tilting'.

Make sure you attach significance to the relevant features of your description, those that are relevant to the time in which your novel is set. In my example above, I've mentioned the ancient forest, which is now little more than clumps of trees due to farming clearance over the past centuries. If I was writing an historical novel, this feature of the description would be significant – otherwise it would be foolish to draw attention to it. And the telescope wouldn't exist!

Scene setting is exactly that; setting the scene for your readers, so that they have a sense of time and place. You may think that scenes are more relevant to script writing, but it's as important for the writer to know where they are as it is for the reader. A good practice is to jot down, at the beginning of each new scene, just what is happening, at what time and where, in a similar way to a scriptwriter. For example:

'Scene 1. 3-30pm, March 26 ^th . Jenny bringing daughter Ellen home from school. Windy and raining. Ellen is miserable, tired and hungry. Jenny is worried about money. An ambulance siren is wailing in the background.'

There are two advantages to noting down scenes in this way. One is that you can keep track of the time, date, location, characters and subject; the other is that you won't be tempted to jump suddenly to another time, date or place too far ahead.

Remember the maxim, 'make a scene of it', sometimes described as 'show, don't tell'. Let the reader 'see' the scene, using a combination of the five senses showing, rather than simply telling the reader what's happening. For example:

'Toni walked to the end of the pier. She was frightened but didn't want to show the others. After a few backward glances at her friends, who jeered at her because they thought she wouldn't dare, she dived into the water. The sea closed slowly over her head and she thought she would drown.'

That's an example of telling the story. To make a scene of it, try instead to show it. Use the present tense and active verbs, emotions and the senses to get the scene to work for the reader. Here it is again, this time re-written to evoke sensations that the reader can identify with.

'Toni stalked to the end of the pier, fuming. "Bet you daren't," Sam sniggered. Toni glanced down into the foaming water, her heart pounding. She took a deep breath and plunged in, then down, down. The current knocked the breath from her lungs and she choked on the sudden intake of salt water. She peered towards the surface with a curious detachment. The waves were crashing far above her head, where dark sky met darker ocean.'

In this second example, the reader can identify with the emotions of the character – Toni's anger, her antagonist's ridicule, the pounding of her heart, the detachment. The reader can feel and identify with this scene because most readers have experienced these feelings themselves.

Let's study some examples from published novels. The first example is

from a fantasy novel and is an extract from the opening scene.

'Below them, the lake lounged motionless in the late morning sun like a well-fed cat in a window seat… unless you look closely, you don't actually see a lake; just a ring of ingrowing mountains and stalagmite pine trees surrounding an oval of blue.'

From Wish You Were Here by Tom Holt. Orbit, 1998.

Here we know that the time is late morning and that it's a sunny day. The description of the lake uses personification, its likeness to a living thing.

This is a magic lake, in a magic place. Can you see it in your mind's eye? The author has used a place he is familiar with as his starting point, then used his imagination to suggest that something more unusual is there - this isn't any old lake, it's a special one.

Here's another, this time from a humorous detective novel.

'Earlier I had taken one look at the dance floor and beat a hasty retreat. A battery chicken would have sized up the situation and returned with relief to its cage, finding it pleasantly roomy and well-ventilated by contrast.

From The Strawberry Tattoo by Lauren Henderson

Hutchinson, 1999.

The character here is using humorous description to describe a nightclub setting. It conveys the feeling of claustrophobia. Most of us know about the conditions battery hens are kept in, so we can imagine just how cramped the dance floor is.

'Sarah ran for the tram through the darkness, anxious to get home as quickly as possible. It was a miserable January evening… Charing Cross was its usual welter of homegoing traffic surging past the Grand Hotel, taxis hooting, trams clanking, and Sarah walked well in from the pavement edge…'

From The Lonely Shore by Francis Page

Harpur Collins, 1999.

The above is an example from an historical novel. The author has had to imagine what sights and sounds would have been prominent during the time this novel was set. Note the use of onomatopoeia – words that sound like that to which they refer – 'hooting' and 'clanking'. These sounds evoke a bygone era - can you imagine the difference compared to rush-hour traffic at Charing Cross today?

Here's a last scene, where the author uses her character's imagination to set the scene.

'Her fantasies of London were delicious, illicit, fed by books and cobbled together with images from Blue Peter . She always pictured herself on the top deck of a double-decker bus, feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square, or strolling around Bloomsbury, the British Museum, staring at the mummies. London would be colourful, busy, lots of people, big old buildings. A bit like York only dirtier and with more strangers.

From Magpie by Jill Dawson

Hodder & Stoughton, 1998.

These are images of London today that most of us are familiar with even if, like the character, we have never been there. The character assumes that London will be like York, a city she does know. She only has images and past points of reference to go on and will maybe be disappointed to find that the reality of where she is going to live is far different from her imaginings.

The writer here touches on something that is fundamental to all of us; that we make sense of new surroundings, feelings, experiences, etc., by referring to our past knowledge to see if we can find a starting point of reference, a match. We make sense of the world by comparing it to what we already know. In essence, that is what you are asking your readers to do when they read your novel; you are asking them to identify with it in some way.

Wherever you travel, take note of everything you see and hear, feel, touch and taste. You will not only enjoy the experience much more, but will have a ready source of descriptive locations and powerful scenes to help you to paint a realistic backdrop for your novel.

10 Ways to Make Locations and Scenes Authentic

1	Choose a place that you know, rather than a place you have only read about and never visited.
2	Write extensive descriptions of your chosen location, both concrete and abstract, so that you will be able to recapture it later on.
3	Give your readers a sense of time.
4	Use the five senses (and maybe the sixth!) to ensure reader identification.
5	Show, don't tell. Create a scene – don't merely describe it.
6	Think like a photographer or cameraman. Fore-, middle- and background are just as important as the subject standing in the middle of the frame.
7	Use your imagination. Even an ordinary, everyday setting should have something special about it that makes it just that little bit less ordinary.
8	Use close-up, intimate responses in emotional scenes. Let your characters sweat and tremble, let their eyes widen, narrow, their nostrils flare!
9	Read and analyse the scenes and locations written by published writers and find out which words make them work for you, and why.
10	Remember that practice makes perfect. Imagine that you are describing that location or scene to someone who can't see.