Creative Writing – How to Set Your Story in Time and Place

I'm just starting to work on a new writing project, so the setting of the story is very much on my mind. As a huge fan of Thomas Hardy's Wessex novels, as well as classics like Wuthering Heights, I'm conscious of the powerful role that location can play in a book. Handled well, it can carry as much weight as the central characters. It can inspire feelings of longing, revulsion, alienation; it can enhance the emotional arc of your narrative by contributing to the atmosphere, or alternatively it can provide a useful counterpoint.

You can be businesslike about it and provide just enough information to anchor the events you're describing and the people who are involved in them and in a plot driven novel, where action is all, this may be the right way to go about things. However, I'm inclined to think that any writing opportunity which presents itself should be exploited to the full and that if you don't give due attention to the location of your narrative – where it exists in time and place – you may be selling yourself short.

If you want a brilliant example of how to tackle setting, check out Dart, Deborah Harvey's new book just published by Indigo Dreams. It's a young adult's novel set in 14th century Devon, and Harvey meticulously brings to life this remote mediaeval period (without her extensive research ever intruding), but the irresistible pull of the story lies in its setting on Dartmoor, which works upon the lives of her protagonists almost as powerfully as the scourge of the Black Death - the bubonic plague which overwhelmed the county and decimated its population. Even if you don't want to learn useful lessons about location, read it anyway: Deborah writes with a poet's lyricism, combining it with authenticity and accuracy to produce an epic tale that is still haunting me, even though I finished it a while ago.

National Poetry Day

In a recent question and answer session promoting the Cheltenham Literary Festival, Carol Ann Duffy said,

"For me, poetry is the music of being human. And also a time machine by which we can travel to who we were and to who we will become"

 *Collective sigh of wonderment* The music of being human is the most perfect description of what poetry is, and because it is National Poetry Day I thought I'd offer up a  list of some of my favourite musicians. In no particular order,

W B Yeats
Paul Celan
Hugo Williams
Simon Armitage
John Masefield
Sylvia Plath
Wendy Cope
Paul Muldoon
Rupert Brooke
James Fenton
and the emerging talent of West Country poet Deborah Harvey...

I shall have The White Birds by W B Yeats going round in my head all day now – the first chords of poetry that I remember hearing...
Which poets will you be celebrating on National Poetry Day?

Be Controversial

I've had a line from one of James Fenton's poems kicking around in my head for ages now: Every victim is an accomplice.  It's such a chilling thought - that in a way we collude in our own misfortunes, and I am sure that some who have been subject to domestic violence might take issue with what Fenton is saying. 

However, in creative writing terms, I think it has mileage. It is an intriguing and unsettling notion, and if your reader is intrigued and unsettled, then they are engaging intensely with what you are writing. If it makes them (and you) look at something in a different way, then in a sense your work as an author is done.  I'm not suggesting that you should be controversial for controversy's sake, as you would end up telling a story that is merely gratuitous, but what I am saying is that you shouldn't be afraid of dark and tricky themes, as working  at the outer reaches of your comfort zone is probably where you will write best. 

As if to prove this point,  Deborah Harvey, in her new collection of poems Communion, (from the sequence Iago) sums up the whole difficult dynamic...

I shall dismantle you and smile

You will not notice how. 

I’ll only hurt you 

as much as you allow.

Perhaps it could be another writing door for you to open?