Homework and summary

Hi all -

 

This week's assignment is to consider your novel from the point of view of place. Give a brief expository description of the place - or one of the places - in which your novel is set, in one paragraph. Indulge yourself. You may not include it in your novel, or you may split the details apart and introduce them one by one later, but make us feel we know it intimately. Use the tools I mentioned in the lesson and in the summary below.

Bear in mind a quote from Richard Russo: ‘We wont be told that the cocktail shaker is pure silver – we’ll be told that it’s sweating in the lazy Sunday midmorning sun. Rendering such passive details makes us insiders, not tourists. We become giddy, well-heeled drinkers trying to banish hangovers, not sober, anthropological observers of curious behaviour.’

Give your novel a sense of place

How do you describe a novel? ‘It’s a coming-of-age story set in Moldova’. ‘It’s set in a holiday camp in Great Yarmouth in the 1950s.’ The place – the setting – is often an important part of the way a novel exists in the mind of its readers.

‘Place’ and ‘setting’ are slightly different terms. ‘Place’ suggests a town, a country, a locality. ‘Setting’ can be smaller, more intimate – a café, the inside of a coach, a room ­– but also include the wider world: a café within a town, a room within a tower block.

Does an evocation of place do anything more than provide colour in a novel? Or is it more crucial? Emphatically it is. Place can have a key relationship to plot. The country house murder plot is impossible without the country house setting, because the house is an island, cut off by the tide – no-one can arrive or depart without notice. Place can also have a key relationship to characters. In a city of rank alleyways, certain characters breed. But perhaps not quite the ones you expect. A slum may engender order and harmony rather than chaos and crime. 

Place can be a character, almost, in its own right. The provincial backwater is a character in Chekhov. Blandings Castle or the Drones Club are characters in Wodehouse.

In describing a place likely to be unfamiliar to one’s readers, it’s the texture of the everyday that is important. What are the plug sockets like? How do men and women behave toward each other in public? What’s on the stamps?

In describing a place that is likely to be familiar to your reader, you really do have your work cut out. Readers need to be challenged with some new perception. You can do this most effectively by focussing on detail, particularly detail with a sensory element. Something ordinary, but observed in an extraordinary way; something that will make us interested even though we’ve been to the place – or a place seemingly like it – a thousand times. Alternatively use imagery. Or use the names of things, to give your special understanding of the architecture, history, and specific texture of an environment.

A few strokes are generally preferable to an exhaustive description. If your characters are in a bar, don’t describe the whole bar, with all its furniture, people, mirrors, bottles, etc. Give one detail that does the job of ten. A cobweb on the underside of the bar; the sticky sound your sole makes as you detach it from the footrail.

 

See you on the 16th,

Gary