Category: Writing

Someplace to go…

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Reading

The setting of your story can be almost as important as character and plot. The same story set in different times and places can change it completely while demonstrating that despite the advances in technology and differences in lifestyle, humans are basically the same no matter where or when we live.

Fairy Tales have always triggered the imagination of writers, becoming some of the most popular tropes like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. Echoes of these stories can be heard around the world in every conceivable time and place.

Jane Austen’s original classic English Regency romances have been rewritten or “updated”, set in different times and places with varying degrees of success. Even adaptations for movies based on Pride and Prejudice vary widely from the miniseries of 1995 (starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth) and the 2005 movie (starring Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen) to variations like the 2004 Bollywood movie Bride and Prejudice, or the London of Bridget Jones’ Diary. Each has a very different feel and atmosphere while telling more or less the same story.

Look at the novels of Agatha Christie. She definitely knew how to make setting work for her story. Murder is murder whether it happens on a train, a river cruise, an island or in the middle of London such as of Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, And Then There Were None and Sparkling Cyanide.

As a reader, I am grateful to writers everywhere who can spirit me away from the dentist’s waiting room, the sickroom, a long commute or a relaxing holiday to anywhere in the world or outside it from deepest darkest space, anywhere in time or to the familiarity of my own town and time, making stories come alive.

Writing

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Take the pen and write

There are many reasons to write down the thoughts in our hearts and heads.

When I was a child we moved around a lot. My mother, poor woman, told me that she moved 26 times in 23 years, in the latter years with up to seven children in tow. Letter writing was something we did because we loved receiving letters. Mum and her family wrote and received letters addressed to “Dear All” which were circulated to keep everyone up to date with the news. But they were nothing like receiving a letter addressed to me personally, so I wrote quite a lot of letters to various friends and family.

Putting pen to paper makes you focus on the subject at hand. Often, when I’m confused, I go to pen and paper in order to work out what I feel, what I want and how I can achieve it. There’s something about the act of dragging a pen across a lovely pristine piece of paper which forces you to think deeply, drawing up from the heart what normally hides there.

Writing a book, telling a story and following a theme, asking yourself “what if” also has the same effect. It can also fire up the imagination, often resulting in the legendary 3am epiphany.

Until you can explain something, I’ve been told, you don’t fully understand it. Ideas and concepts are like that. Especially early in their careers, writers need multiple drafts and rewrites to refine and clarify their stories and even then, sometimes what ends up on the page surprises the writer as much as the reader.

Good books and their secrets

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Secrets

There are many ways to make your book a pageturner. Here are just some.

  • Craft suspense whatever your genre. Make each scene and chapter a cliff-hanger, leaving the reader with questions for which they need answers.
  • Create a delicate balance between what your reader knows and what each character knows.
  • Foreshadowing what is to come creates anticipation.
  • Lead and mislead your reader at appropriate times.
  • Language and word choice create mood and atmosphere.
  • Lush writing involving all the senses creates an emotional response in the reader.
  • Dripfeed your story, allowing your reader the satisfaction of piecing most things together for themselves.
  • Use pacing wisely. Vary the pace at which the story moves, sentence length and structure to build to a climax or relax the reader before a shock or surprise.
  • Raise the stakes both external and internal for your protagonist, then set a clock ticking on a time limit.
  • Use twists and turns to keep the reader curious.

Words

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Words like x-rays

How can you write ‘words like X-rays’? Readers like to live the emotion of the story. How do you show the emotion so the reader is pierced? Feel the emotion yourself and it will shine through in your writing.

Keep some kind of conflict in each scene, Put yourself in the part of the character, act out the part, sink deep into the role and draw that emotion onto the page and show, don’t tell. How you ask? It’s easy to tell. Just tell it like it is.

I was angry. Furious. How dare she call my beautiful little girl a fat pig? She’s a gorgeous six-year-old without body image problems. Did the woman, who does have an eating disorder herself, not care about the damage she might cause?

Yes, as a reader you may be enraged by the situation. However, did you feel the rage in your body? How might that feel? What do you think about something like this:

My hand fisted at my side, ready to punch the mouth that said such a cruel thing to my beautiful daughter. A red tide of rage rose across my chest, up my throat across my cheeks and wavered before my eyes. I ground my teeth in an effort to hold my tongue, to stop myself giving her a piece of my mind before I took time to think through my response.

‘May I please speak with you privately?’ The softest voice I could muster shook as I restrained myself from adding a curse word or five in front of the children.