The Novelwriter's Toolkit Read online

  Whatever your choice, remember that the setting is the showcase for your work. Give your story the perfect background and your characters will shine.

  Often the location of your story – both time and place – will come to you as part of the idea. Gone with the Wind could not have been set anywhere else but in the Deep South during the American Civil War. Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir is about a policeman in Berlin during the rise of Nazism – that geographical and political background is intrinsic to the plot. In both these examples, time and place are fixed so firmly that they rule out any other options. On a good day this can happen to you.

  On a bad day, the character you thought could live only in Berlin in the 1930s suddenly takes a turn. He has to go to Cuba to escape persecution by the Nazis. You don’t know anything about Cuba except what you hear on the news. You find yourself doing research. That’s OK. Be flexible. If your character has to go to Cuba, let him go. He can always come home again.

  Historical Settings

  Every place, every time period is different. Historical settings allow some things to happen that couldn’t happen in the present day. You can explore the world with Francis Drake or take part in the French Revolution. If you’re a mystery writer, your sleuth can use his sense of curiosity and knowledge of the world to solve crimes, like Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael. He doesn’t need to worry about DNA. But he does need to know about the herbs that might have been used as poisons in 12th-century Shrewsbury.

  If you decide that your perfect setting is Italy in the 1400s, expect to do a lot of research (unless, of course, you are a historian whose specialism is Renaissance Italy). But don’t let that put you off if this is the right place for your novel. Certainly, if your main character is an Italian priest who knows Christopher Columbus, you have no choice but to set your story in 15th-century Italy.

  Remember that accuracy is important to your plot’s believability. This is true whatever you are writing about, but particularly so if you choose a historical setting. It may seem unlikely that readers will know much about 12th-century herbalism or 15th-century Italy and that getting the details right doesn’t matter. But if your background lacks conviction, both you and your reader will lose the illusion that your story is real. Not only that, but some of your readers will know about the period you have chosen – and if you get it wrong, you can be sure they will write and complain.

  Contemporary Settings

  Maybe your sleuth is a monk like Cadfael, but he lives in a modern-day monastery and uses a computer to solve crimes. With a contemporary setting you don’t need to research a historical period, but you still need to research certain aspects of your plot and character. What is the daily routine of a monastery like? How much freedom does your hero have to come and go? Do you know as much as he will need to know about using a computer? With other contemporary settings, you may need to swot up on stockbroking or sky-diving, bus timetables in Oxford or how yummy mummies organize the school run. You need to get this sort of detail right just as much as you would have needed to know about working conditions or travel arrangements if you had stuck with 15th-century Italy.

  And What About the Future?

  The future is wide open. Because no one knows for sure what’s going to happen, in a futuristic novel your characters can go anywhere and do anything. They can live on an Earth that has become a barren wasteland or on a distant planet that is a garden paradise free of hunger and disease. The choice is yours. Just remember that, as you create the world of tomorrow, it has to be as detailed and as convincing as if you were writing about life today or 500 years ago.

  Geographic Location

  Wherever you set your novel, past, present or future, it has to seem real. Your characters could be in the glamorous world of New York fashion, as in Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada, or part of an immigrant community in London’s East End, as in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. You could put your characters in the First World War trenches, as in Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong, or make one of them a detective in ancient Rome, like Lindsey Davis’ Falco. Whatever suits your plot and creates the perfect setting for the characters in your novel to reach their goals is fair game.

  Many authors set their stories in exotic places because they have lived in or travelled to these places. James A Michener’s own travels were the inspiration for South Pacific. Paul Scott served in India during the Second World War; the India of that period became the setting for his Raj Quartet (later the television series The Jewel in the Crown).

  If you haven’t travelled to these places, you have to draw on the experience of someone who has. You need details. You want your readers to feel the heat of the jungle or the cold of the lifeless tundra. You have to know what animals exist there. You have to be able to evoke the smells and sounds, or the lack of them. What does the water taste like? What colours are the flowers, and in what season do they appear? Many of your readers will never travel to these locations: you have to make them feel that they’ve been there.

  So First of All, Do Your Research

  Many writers hate this word. They don’t want to think about what they’re writing: they just want to write it. If this is your attitude, the best advice is: don’t write anything that requires research (see Your Own Back Yard). If you stay exclusively in your field of knowledge, you don’t have to look up anything. The same goes for worlds that you create. All the information you need about them is stored in your own mind.

  But if you want to write about a gunslinger in the Wild West, even if all you do if watch lots of old Westerns on TV, you still have to get a feel for the period and know what you’re talking about.

  If you want to write about Cairo, there’s nothing like going there. You can taste the food, visit the pyramids, feel the sand. But this isn’t always possible – or practical, if you are setting only one brief scene in Cairo.

  That’s why the internet is such an important resource. You can contact people around the world with just a few clicks of a mouse. You can visit museums and see virtual exhibits, view photographs of places you haven’t visited and even look at live cameras. As far as research is concerned, writers have never had it so good or so easy. For far less than the cost of a trip to Peru, anyone with access to the web can read all about the history of Machu Picchu, look at pictures of the site and find details of walks along the Inca Trail. It may not be as romantic or exciting as getting on a plane and going there, but for many people, it’s as close as they can get to the real thing.

  Of course, many generations of writers have used books for research and their local librarian has been their best friend. It’s worth checking whether your local library has an inter-library loan service, so that you can get hold of specific titles that they don’t have in stock. Most libraries will perform this service for a very modest fee.

  Travel books that describe contemporary places around the world are a favourite: if, say, your character has an hour to kill in Rome waiting for a connection and you want her to visit a church near the station, a travel guide may give you all the details you need.

  If you need more detail than that, you’re challenged by the internet and the accounts you find in books are dry, consult your local paper, library, literary festival or specialist bookshop for anyone giving a talk that might be useful to you. Many authors do ‘events’ all over the country to publicize their latest works and travel writers generally accompany these with photos of their experiences. You can learn a lot from what they have to say and there is almost always an opportunity to ask questions. This isn’t a substitute for reading books for background, but it may help bring life to a subject that you know only at second hand.

  Get Out More

  You don’t have to own a computer to use the web for research. Most public libraries have computers for their members to use, free of charge. Or you can go to an internet café and pay a pound or two for an hour’s browsing wherever your imagination wants you to go.

  Your Own Backyard

 
; Teachers of creative writing often advise their students to write about people and places that they know. Let others write about perfumed harems and gilded palaces. You’re going to write about taking your kids to school and going shopping – and you’re going to make it sing.

  It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time doesn’t take place in an extravagant setting. In terms of travel, all that happens is that the narrator, Christopher, goes from Swindon to London. But this unexotic location serves as a backdrop to Christopher’s struggles to come to terms with the world around him. Similarly, David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green takes place in a small village in Worcestershire, but the protagonist Jason’s need to cope with his stutter and with being bullied at school is beautifully played out in this cosy setting. Many horror stories are set in the most ordinary circumstances and places. The rationale behind this is that something everyday suddenly becoming alien is particularly scary: think of Stephen King’s The Shining, in which the hotel itself becomes a frightening character.

  Here’s what successful novelist Caro Fraser has to say about ‘writing about what you know’:

  ‘Write about what you know’ is one of those tired old adages guaranteed to polarize professional writers. In some it arouses spittle-flecked invective about the stifling of creativity and encouragement of dreary, introverted navel-gazing. There are even those who say it’s particularly bad advice to give writers because, as a breed, we tend not to get out a lot. There are, on the other hand, those who believe it to be a sound precept, on the basis that if you ‘re not writing from within the scope of your own experience, you can’t possibly write with authenticity or with a truthful voice.

  So, for the aspiring writer, is the advice good or bad – or what?

  The answer probably lies somewhere in between. Let’s first of all try to establish what is meant by ‘writing what you know’. If it means using only the material of your own life, working solely with events and characters from within your personal experience, then that, at first glance, seems extremely restricting. However, if you possess the talents of Jane Austen, if you can handle social and domestic microcosms with dexterity and humour, and have a brilliant ear for dialogue and eye for detail, then what you ‘know’, in a strict sense, may be all you need. Yet even writers who are using only the material of their own life, like Austen, have to expand beyond the confines of their knowledge – that is, they need to manipulate and explore their experiences in creative ways that make them interesting to readers. It isn’t so much what you know, as how you use it.

  When I wrote The Pupil, the first in my series of Caper Court novels, I used the legal world as its setting. This wasn’t because I especially wanted to write about lawyers or the law – my main interest is in people, exploring human emotions and motivations – but because setting the novel in a world with which I was familiar gave the story authenticity. I’m a barrister by training, so the legal world is one I understand. I’m familiar with lawyers’ concerns, with law courts and with legal jargon. Leo Davies, perhaps my best-known character, is a successful, bisexual commercial barrister. I don’t need to be bisexual to write him, because sexual impulses, passion, love, are universal emotions. All that’s needed there is a little imagination and emotional empathy. But knowing what makes a commercial barrister tick enables me to write about Leo’s world with a fluidity and confidence that I couldn’t possibly bring to bear if I’d made him a brain surgeon. As a writer I believe it’s important to get to the essential truth of a character, and it seems self-evident that this can only be achieved by properly understanding the motivations and preoccupation of that character.

  Inside knowledge is invaluable if you decide to set your stories within a very particular world – take Patricia Cornwell and her experience of forensic science, or Dick Francis and his knowledge of horses and the world of racing. In such instances, ‘what you know’ allows you to manipulate your knowledge and use it deftly – even to subvert it for the purposes of plot. If you ‘re not sure of your territory, your lack of confidence will transmit itself to the reader, and hamper your ability to develop plot and character. The point is, use what you know to its best advantage: your own life or experience may not strike you as a promising basis for fiction, but if you handle it with imagination and inventiveness, and create believable and empathetic characters about whom the reader can care, you may be surprised how much potential it possesses.

  Details That Evoke the Setting

  Whether your setting is exotic or homely, how do you add dimension to it? The five senses are a powerful place to start. What does the beach smell like? How does the sand feel between your toes? What do the waves sound like as they hit the beach? All these things represent the psychology of setting. They are the non-specific points of recognition that contribute to the reality of your locale.

  Look at this piece from DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (it isn’t all about sex, you know). The newly married Lady Chatterley, ‘accustomed to Kensington or the Scotch hills or the Sussex downs’, has moved to the industrial Midlands:

  With the stoicism of the young she took in the utter, soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands at a glance, and left it at what it was: unbelievable and not to be thought about. From the rather dismal rooms at Wragby she heard the rattle-rattle of the screens at the pit, the puff of the winding-engine, the clink-clink of shunting trucks, and the hoarse little whistle of the colliery locomotives…. Even on windless days the air always smelt of something under-earth: sulphur, iron, coal, or acid. And even on the Christmas roses the smuts settled persistently, incredible, like black manna from the skies of doom.

  Can’t you just feel Her Ladyship’s revulsion? Don’t you know from this moment – and this is at a very early stage in the novel, the beginning of Chapter 2 – that her marriage is doomed and she is going to fall into the arms of the first handsome gamekeeper who comes her way?

  Another small but important detail that can be used to evoke a setting is food, whether it is the exotic offerings of a Singapore street market or an overcooked Sunday roast on a duty visit to parents.

  If you are going for a domestic setting, close your eyes and imagine your own home. What do you see? The easy chair in front of the television? The worn spot on the carpet where the dog lies? The comfort of your own bed after a hard day? These are just the sorts of details that will create a home for your characters too.

  Creating the Backdrop

  A setting is your novel’s backdrop and you create it much as you would create a tapestry – by weaving together all kinds of details that fit into place to produce a larger picture. As you pull all your threads – your characters, dialogue and setting – together, ask yourself if they blend well or if anything clashes. If anything seems out of place, change it.

  Even when you have all your information together, writing the whole thing may not be straightforward. Sometimes, even if you’ve asked all the questions and have all the answers, it won’t all fit together. If you ever do jigsaw puzzles, you’ll understand. Some pieces look as if they are exactly the right fit, yet when you try to put them into the slot they simply won’t go. Other pieces don’t look right but they fit anyway. Or, going back to the tapestry metaphor, you can see the whole picture in your mind’s eye, yet somehow, when you start pulling the strings, everything falls apart.

  When this happens to you, don’t be afraid to let go of whatever doesn’t work. It may be something large like how the murder is committed or how your hero happens to have amnesia. It may be something small like a side plot that was supposed to add humour but falls flat. Whatever it is, it can be rewritten, reworked, revised.

  It’s hard to be sure that everything is going to work before you start writing. Once you get going there is always a chance that your story will take on a life of its own and head off in a direction you hadn’t planned. This could make one of your characters superfluous, or require you to create another. But
the more time you spend thinking about the pieces and trying to put them together before you start, the better the chances that they will come out the way you want them to.

  GETTING CHARACTERS TO TALK

  Tricks for Writing Dialogue

  One of the novel writer’s most important resources is dialogue. You will need to use speech patterns to create impressions – to tell readers something about the character who is doing the talking.

  Creating Realistic Dialogue

  Start by listening to your character’s voice in your head. What does he or she sound like? If you find this difficult, think about how you recognize the voices of friends and family on the phone. What makes one person’s voice different from another’s? What makes you like one voice more than another? Whatever the traits you identify, use them to make your character’s speech memorable for your readers.

  Next time you’re at a party, listen to the people around you. Notice how you can hear Gloria’s voice above any noisy crowd. She’s an investment banker and she’s always talking about what’s happening in the City and whether interest rates are going to go up or down. Kevin talks like a caricature Irishman, using ‘youse’ as the plural of ‘you’ and asking ‘if you would like a drink at all’. Mary never speaks above a whisper. She’s a trauma nurse who frets over any injury, however small, and remembers to ask if you’ve had your flu jab. And Arthur whines when he speaks. His whining voice centres on how to tell one illness from another and how many rare diseases he’s had this year.