An interesting exercise in setting you might try is to take a photo of an unknown person from a newspaper and juxtapose it with a photo of a room from a magazine or brochure. Write them into that setting. How will they react? Do they feel at home?
Introduction
If I think about my Little Nanna Mason she’s in the back parlour of her house in South Shields. It’s the 1970s and the room hasn’t been redecorated for forty years. She’s chewing Parma violets, sitting in a tiny chair by the old iron range. There’s a faded portrait of her mother, Honoria, on the wall behind her. When she stands up to fetch a cake tin from the scullery, she’s four feet tall. It’s like being in a doll’s house.
If I think about Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, then he’s standing by a poolful of crazy reflections outside his ridiculous, ice-cream-coloured mansion. He’s watching the green light over the bay that to him signifies the proximity of his lost love, Daisy. Daisy who will one day visit and go through his cupboards and break down in tears at the sight of all his beautiful shirts.
If I think of anyone – from life or from a book – it’s always in a context. They always come with a setting; a certain place and time; a whole set of circumstances and accoutrements clustered around them. Jay Gatsby created an opulent fantasy life for himself in order to show what a success he had made of his life. He threw weekly parties to flaunt himself in a fantastic light. My Little Nanna Mason in South Shields had a house crammed with generations’ worth of family hand-me-downs; thick white linen and old silver stashed away in the dark, heavy furniture. Then she died and the whole street was pulled down, all of that was dismantled; the impedimenta of her life broken up and squirrelled away by relatives.
When you present any kind of character in fiction they need some kind of backdrop. They need something to anchor them firmly and believably in their moment and their milieu.
There must be some novels, somewhere, in which no setting at all is apparent. Perhaps they are set somewhere timeless and dehistoricized and belong to no single place. In them, voices are simply heard, talking away to each other, probably about philosophical matters. If we were to read such a book, I imagine that even then we would, as readers, start to invent the setting for ourselves. As the disembodied voices rambled on, we would be wanting to know what the room looked like; what pictures were on the walls; what kind of curtains were hanging at the window.
The reader is endlessly curious about the circumstances of the characters they are engaging with. Not only do we want to know about the ins and outs of their personalities – the twists and turns of their psychology, the low-down on their love lives – we also want to know how and where they live. We want to know what it looks like and what it smells like. We want to find out what’s in their kitchen cupboards and their bedroom drawers.
Fiction allows the reader to become the most discreet and the most untraceable of house-breakers. We get to look inside the homes of others without their ever finding out that we have been there.
Setting is one of the most useful means of getting your characters to give themselves away. Rather than having some ghastly self-revelation in the form of an interior monologue or in an exchange of dialogue, it’s always more effective simply to slip in some telling detail about the place in which the characters find themselves. Much better to show them interacting with their environment.
Film, of course, is very good at this. Film is the medium in which so much about a character and their context can be explained with hardly a word being uttered. Think of the musty house where Norman Bates lives alone with his mother; those loving close-ups that dwell on the stuffed birds and the terrifying staircase. I’m also thinking of the overly neat, painfully chintzed-up house where the photographer and his wife live in Mike Leigh’s film Secrets and Lies. Its very chintziness betrays the sterility of their lives.
This used to be called, in English literature, the pathetic fallacy, which was never a very good name for it. How everything that surrounded a character was a clue to, or an expression of, everything inside them. Cathy galloping pell-mell across the tempestuous moors in Wuthering Heights. That was always a good example; her spirit animates her setting.
It doesn’t have to be as dramatic as that, of course.
In a stage play it is the stage manager who selects and places the props that will be needed. It is they who are entrusted with finding just the right accoutrements to help the characters behave convincingly in their environment. Writing fiction, you have to be your own stage manager and set designer too (not to mention actors and director . . . ).
It’s not like writing a play, though, and you need more than a few notes to tell the reader where we are and what it’s like. As the story goes on, the reader needs to be reminded of the setting. They need to gather up more and more detail, all of it sensually and vividly recreated. The effect must be cumulative so that, by the end of the scene, the reader has a full, three-dimensional image of the place. It must be as rich and full as possible in order to convince them that they, too, have been in that place.
Whenever you create a character and a setting, make sure you have lists of objects, descriptions of furniture, seemingly irrelevant details about their setting to hand. Some of this material you will never use in your final version of the piece of work. But you will know what is in their room, what they are surrounded by, and this gives you confidence to bring that place to life. Try collecting pictures from magazines, newspapers; put them together with old photographs. Keep scrapbooks of pictures of rooms in which your characters might live.
An interesting exercise in setting you might try is to take a photo of an unknown person from a newspaper and juxtapose it with a photo of a room from a magazine or brochure. Write them into that setting. How will they react? Do they feel at home?
Setting is a confidence trick, of course. You haven’t transported your reader anywhere at all. They’re still sitting in the same place. But as the action and dialogue of your scene has gone on, you’ve been skilfully dropping in precisely rendered snippets – smells and sounds and glimpses – of the world around your characters. The reader is always apt to be hoodwinked by these small, vibrant signs of a solid world around them.
We’re always wanting to be transported elsewhere. It’s why we read fiction.
The hardest part is dropping in these clues about setting in a subtle enough manner. Too many writers do the lazy thing and begin with an announcement in shorthand:
‘Times Square. June 1927 . . .’
‘It was a drizzly November night in Manchester . . .’
Then they forget to give us anything else. Maybe one or two reminders later on – a glimpse of skyscraper, pigeons, a hot dog vendor, a shopfront quickly and sketchily described; bland, inexact images.
The whole setting needs creating from the ground up. It has to be full and economic at the same time.
I like the setting to be immediately vivid and often the best way to achieve this is to begin with very small details. Choose aspects of the setting that would seem most pressing to the characters in the scene; then build outwards as they notice more and more out of the corner of their eye. Writers often make the mistake of trying to go for the big picture first; get it all into one grand, bland gesture. Best to stick to the small idiosyncratically chosen details of a setting and let them do their cumulative work.
To bring a place to life effectively you have to draw upon all your resources. Every place has its own distinct atmosphere and this changes minutely over time. Everyone knows this, and that is why readers cannot be fobbed off with a weakly drawn setting. They can always sniff out something inexpertly drawn; it doesn’t ring true. It reads as if the writer has no experience of this place. It doesn’t anchor them in a precise, historical, geographical location. It’s so indistinct it could be anywhere, at any time. Readers really hate that.
One of the reasons I love the fiction of Katherine Mansfield so much is that, in each of her stories, she immerses us in a particular flavour or atmosphere. The light is different in every single one of them – whether we are on a train in France or in an immaculate, festive drawing room before a dinner party. A bristling sensitivity is at work in her writing and she weaves these evocative phrases through the main action. Whatever row or epiphany her characters are having, Mansfield always grounds us back into her present scene. We are anchored to the immediacy of the present moment and, when flashbacks come, we are enticed into the past by the smells and sights of earlier settings.
What I have always done to work at getting this effect is to put myself in a variety of locations, all over the place – each distinct from the other, each drenched in its particular ambience. A Yorkshire tea room in late-afternoon thundery gloom. Lost in a Venetian alleyway of blood-red brick, the place reeking of damp wool at night. A Perthshire glen glazed with frost, and Darlington town centre as the shops close and the pubs open on Christmas Eve. In each of these places I would take down reams of notes. I’d make each of my senses work overtime – work as hard as Katherine Mansfield’s – and I’d take down every single thing that occurred to me or impressed itself upon me.
I would note them down any old how at first, not even trying to make sense or sentences. I’d want, at this stage, lopped-off and vivid phrases that, upon rereading, home again, would re-evoke the whole scene for me as richly as possible. And if characters had strayed upon that scene (the woman with shopping bags in Venice who looked curiously like an Italian Dusty Springfield), then so much the better. They can make a cameo appearance in the fiction that eventually comes from the field notes.
It’s very like being a painter making on-the-spot sketches. The point is to get the details right and exact. It’s like being a film-maker, shooting the footage for the cutaway shots that can later be spliced into the main shots, building up flavour and mood. But it’s better than both these things; these are a writer’s notes about setting. They are not just visual, like a film-maker’s. We can also have smells and exaggerations and thoughts and distortions. And, unlike a painter or a photographer, we aren’t static. Our observations exist in time. With a couple of lines we can describe the light glancing off the bank’s windows as the sun sinks behind the precinct, or the way that a gondolier takes his stately time negotiating bridges and the old lady sprawled at his feet on blue satin cushions is entranced by the shifting reflections in the bottle-green of the canal.
We can take these details and slant them for our own purposes, as we reread them. Each of them tells us their own stories. Each detail sticks in our minds and our notebooks like burrs. When we go back to these notes on setting, each of them tries to snag us back, wanting to be used. We can hone them down, make them as precise as possible and use them, integrally, in the stories we tell about those places. At that point they become things that your characters are noticing or things that are thrown into sharp and telling relief by the presence of your characters.
Take your notebook somewhere. Find a spot where you can observe from. Start making these kinds of notes, slowly building up the bigger picture by noticing the tiny details. If you are thinking of a certain character, try to see the setting through their eyes. What would leap out at them as the most interesting point of focus? What would fascinate them? What would annoy them? Don’t try to pull your observations into a coherent whole yet. Try to get as many impressions down as possible. Later, at home, you can choose what to use or discard.
Think of yourself as a Renaissance portraitist. Everything you painstakingly pop into the background – every little bauble and accoutrement – all of it is there for a reason. You want your reader to look long and hard and to be soaked in the accumulation of all this detail. You want them to come out of the scene understanding the whole, concerted picture you have put together around your principal figures.
People talk about virtual reality as if it were a new thing. Placing people into a fully rendered, recreated environment. Fictive settings were always about being virtually real.
All lives can seem ordinary to those who live them. All places can seem dull to those who inhabit them. It is easy to be tempted by the thought that the exotic or the exciting can only occur in other lives, in other far-flung places. It’s easy to imagine that the material and setting for our fiction can only be discovered far from home. And perhaps we’re all wary of the label ‘local author’. As Flannery O’Connor said, ‘The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious . . . writer that he will become one of them.’
When I began, I wanted to be seen as anything but ‘Northern’. I turned away from home. I wrote stories set in the garden suburbs of Surrey, on the surface of Mars, in the Australian outback, in totally imaginary worlds. I abstracted myself, perhaps wanting somehow to remake myself, to become something like the writers I loved: like Márquez, perhaps, like Borges. My settings and characters would be as strange as theirs. Then I turned and looked again, and saw that my true imaginary world, the source of my joys, fears and obsessions, was the small place in which I’d grown and which had surrounded me for most of my life. Despite myself, my writing had begun to focus more and more on that place.
I started deliberately to explore the place and to make it my fictional territory. I stuck its maps on my study wall. I pinned up photographs. I explored library archives. I sifted through our family files and photographs. I read history and geography. I made journey after journey back to the place, simply wandering through it and allowing it into myself. I smelled it and touched it. I copied down names of streets and shops and the names fading on gable walls. I brought souvenirs to my study: chestnuts from a graveyard tree, fragments of coal from beneath thin turf, a broken blue eggshell. Exploring the place as if I were a foreigner, I was flooded with memories and dreams. I filled notebooks with scribbled speculations, doodles, images, drawings, conversations, names, dates, maps, characters. I mingled factual details of the place with invented, imaginary details. I merged reality and dream, truth and lies. In the blending of the real and the imagined, possible stories started to emerge. This was a place where particular things happened, where things were in a particular place, but in the search for fictional truth things didn’t need to stay that way. Some of the people I’d known need never have been born. The dead need not have died. Names could be changed, chronology could be changed. Imagined people could live in real houses, real people in imagined houses. Geography could be reassembled. The maps could change. I wrote a series of stories set in that tiny area of Tyneside. They were about the events of my childhood: insignificant events in an insignificant town. The stories were based on real events, but they were shaped as fiction, and contained sufficient inventions to be described as fiction. I wrote them for a tiny audience, my sisters and brother, who had experienced those events along with me. Once the stories had been accepted by this first audience, I sent them out into the wider world and, paradoxically, I began to reach my widest readership yet.
There is, of course, no real paradox. The local can contain the universal. The part can stand for the whole. Some of our greatest books – Wuthering Heights, Ulysses, Sons and Lovers – are ‘local’ books, whose authors and characters have a passionate and dynamic relationship with their local landscape. Márquez’s characters and settings, even at their most apparently magical and exotic, would be quickly recognized by the people that Márquez had grown up with, by his relatives, his friends, his neighbours. But this isn’t a simple restatement of the advice to ‘write what you know’, which can just lead to thin and undernourished fiction, flimsy sketches of a superficially observed world, quaint tales touched with local colour. Maybe the best way to ‘know’ a place properly is to move purposefully away from it, then to turn to look again. The journey away is as crucial as the coming home. We can then look at our local setting as both an intimate and a stranger, and our work can have that sense of risk, exploration and discovery that all good fiction needs. As soon as we begin to write about a place, the place starts to change. It is recreated and becomes an imaginary place, a place fit for fiction. Reality is the starting point, that’s all. Think of Hardy’s Wessex, Dickens’s London, Kafka’s Prague, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. We can reshape our world to make it live up to the opportunities and demands of our stories.
All writing is a form of play. As soon as a child comes to know something he/she begins to play with it. The walk turns into a leap and a dance, the word turns into a gabble and a song. As humans, we test what we know and try to see what is possible, what our knowledge might lead us to. Writers organize those possibilities into stories. Those stories have to be set somewhere. Perhaps the best setting can be found in the author’s home, where the deepest knowledge might release the most creative play.
To begin this kind of play, visit the place that you think of as home. Travel through it. On foot is probably best. Make notes as if you were a stranger. Be objective: record the tiniest details, the scents and sounds and textures. Record historical and geographical fact. Write down the names that you see and hear around you. Gather little souvenirs. Be imaginative: speculate on the lives that might have been lived in this place. Redraw the maps: a new spring, perhaps, a new street of houses. Throughout your travels, allow your memories to be stirred. Write them down. Don’t separate observation, speculation and memory. Record them on the same pages. Allow them to stimulate each other, to interfere with each other. Don’t try to force stories into life. Allow yourself to be absorbed into your recreated world – in which even you and those who are closest to you are becoming fictions – and watch for the glimmerings of new stories that begin to come to life of their own accord.
‘All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality.’
ANSELL ADAMS
‘Everybody has to be somewhere!’ muttered Spike Milligan in one of the early Goon Shows. His existential bon mot hits a fundamental note and is more various than it seems. Like it or not, we have to be as long as we are alive and sentient and we have to be somewhere. Places are where we depart from, move through, arrive in. Places are where we sleep and dream of other places, until we can no longer differentiate between remembering a dream and remembering what once was. This perceptual oscillation is peculiar to human consciousness, its meltdown of actuality and imagination – and most of the world is imaginary because we only touch against a tiny part of it with our physical senses. In this context, imagination has a very practical function: it keeps the rest of the world in place whilst we get on with being where we are.
Part of the fascination of landscapes is their flux of constancy and change. They alter with each moment of passing light, with each day of each season, yet they remain recognizable over centuries. Their geological clocks tick infinitesimally slowly compared to their biological ones – and we are all biology. Landscapes act as reference points in literature, mediating between the living reader and the dead writer. The landscapes of the Norse sagas are still recognizable today as are the New Mexican mesas that D. H. Lawrence described in the 1920s. Matrices of geological and biological time, landscapes – by which I mean urban, suburban and rural terrain – act as catalytic converters for human experience and memory, their concrete realities melting to release the ghosts of time.
The dictionary definition of landscape implies artifice, the laying out or deliberate construction of aesthetic space. This meaning of the word connects us to the shaping force of human activity; land itself emerges through seismic upheaval but landscapes are conceived, discovered, designed, perceived, communicated. In this sense they share their origins with literature. Our experience of landscape mediated through time – seconds, minutes, hours, years – finds a literary correlative: haiku, lyric poem, short story, heroic poem, novel. Landscapes are not mere present-tense actuality, they are a translation through the senses, through the energy of dreams and desire, through the conjugations of language and the fusions of literature into what was, what is, what could be. Landscapes are the past and the future, as well as the eye through which each present moment slips. And so literature becomes its own reality – witness the literary sleuths who walk the moors at Haworth each year to match a physical landscape to an imaginative one.
Landscapes have been shaped by, and shape, human imagination. This shaping brings a spiritual and political dimension – Arcadia, the Wasteland, Tir na N’Óg, No Man’s Land, Narnia, the Promised Land, Homeland, Fatherland. From here it’s a short, heart-stopping step to lebensraum. Beyond the notion of terra firma (with all its connotations of safety, stability, irreducibility) lies the notion of land and landscape – what is seen and what is desired. Land and language are central to the search for human identity, the extension of self and society through conquest. So, from the thought of land to the thought of empire – that idealized landscape, that vision of social, political and economic unity, with its own lingua franca.
Cities, those stony metaphors of empire, are also landscapes embodying what is constant and what is quickly changing in their quarried-out geology, their architectural conquest. Buildings succeed each other in archaeological layers, skyline succumbs to skyline, but within all cities there are natural constants. Most major cities have rivers and every river has its own songs – the Tyne, Thames, Mersey, the Severn, Tweed, Solway. Each country and each nation is a poem of rivers, a psalm of waters. Cities, too, have their tarmac rivers, their roads to elsewhere and otherness; wormholes through space and time that have accelerated unimaginably from their medieval origins. Routes out of there to imagined counterparts, other countries, cities, ways of speaking and being; and it is in terms of such otherness that our own identities consolidate and dissolve.
All literature is made up of stories, and the centrality of landscapes to storytelling is fundamental. The first dances, then the first songs, narratives and seductions must have emanated from journeys. Hunters left the tribal shelter and returned. Now there was something new to say, a place that was not here, a time that was not now, a people that was not us. And here is the effort of language bringing them to mind. Those first storytellers inflamed listeners with the fear and desire of elsewhere – places as imaginary as they were real took on mythical dimensions, dwarfed mundane realities, became parallel spirit worlds inhabited by the demons of the subconscious. With the effort of maintaining and extending imaginative worlds came sophistications of language, which could hold them in the mind’s eye, make them resonant with meaning, significance, psychic energy.
Our human capacity for reflection – literally immersing ourselves in a world that is not here, but reflected through the prisms of thought – is maintained by our naming and energizing of the world through words. We are able to be in many places at once and in many ways. The intricate language of bees is often marvelled at, its complex interaction of pheromones and physical movement that describes the location of flowers in relation to the sun’s angle over the land. But it does nothing that a half-dozen words in any human language can’t achieve in seconds, through nouns that identify the world, verbs that energize it, adjectives that colour it, adverbs that say how it is, conjugations of tense that place it in the slipstream of time and thought itself.
Historically, landscapes are the earth from which generations of human beings have won or persuaded sustenance. Land is transformed in song and legend into human form, its hills and valleys representing undulations of a mother’s, father’s or lover’s body. This resonates through the Australian Aboriginal notion that land shapes and landscapes were sung into existence by totemic ancestors who remain embedded in the Dreamtime, in a mythological land that became real. The same association of song and land is made in Christian culture where the land and its abundance are pronounced by the godhead. These places where we are or have to be are places that exist because we ask them to, because we are there to talk about them.
Despite an awesome accumulation of cultural baggage, we walk across landscapes carelessly, build shopping precincts on pagan burial grounds, plough up Saxon field boundaries, and dig out fragments of Roman tiles with our dahlias. Landscapes are ineffably extraordinary and at the same time hardly worth attention. Dorothea Lange once remarked that she used a camera so that others could see without a camera. Writers, too, reclaim experience for others to hold through words more intensely than they can in reality, where a thousand exigencies detain us. If we know a place that we love, our instinct is to share that place with others, to lead them there by the hand or with the tongue, or, since we are human, with both.
A landscape poem or descriptive prose passage is always more than pure description; even if unpeopled it projects and embodies the sensibility and spirit of the writer. Landscapes in this respect are psyche-scapes, metaphors representing the yearnings and aspirations, hope, betrayal, anger and bitterness that we see in them. Paradoxically, all art that figures a landscape is both more and less than the things it represents. Language, because of its complexity of associations, can never be transparent; it represents a complex array of choices, which are driven both by impulse and conscious selection.
Our litany of words for water flowing through the land – valley, river, canyon, sewer, gutter, stream, beck, rill, waterfall, gill, trickle – shows a vast range of association, each word bringing its own energy, coloration and atmospheric. Artistic truth is selective and is achieved through invention, artifice – and lies. Human language that can bring pin-sharp images of the real can bring about equally accurate images of the patently non-existent, creating fantastic illusions of unity by rearranging the components of reality into an imaginative whole.
Orientation is the key feature of a human being’s relationship to the land. When we wish to replicate our journey for others, we resort to maps that both symbolize and name. Place names supply plentiful evidence of the concrete nature of that fixing of topographical features through language. The first maps were songs, and in this respect a landscape is language. Words shape landscapes into portable, memorizable journeys, and in turn landscape shapes language into tongue, dialect, idiolect. Just as each place is voiced, so it gives voice.
In the context of teaching creative writing, landscapes present rich opportunities. Each new place, whether it be a service station on the M6, with its complexities of architecture, reflective surfaces and human activity, or a mountain in Wales, with its rock, thorn trees and circling kites, offers new experience and puts pressure on language to map and express it. The ancient war between urban and rural cultures has shifted its locus many times. Now all that is contemporary seems urban, cool and hip. Yet the countryside is still there, still lived in; not the wilderness that city kids imagine, but a place subtly sculpted by human activity. It is the writer’s job to see through surfaces, to approach the existential truth of a place. As we have seen, that truth is both experienced and invented, is both actual and beyond actuality.
Everywhere in a landscape we are faced with human presence or absence. A depopulated landscape is unbearably sad to us, as if human activity gives the landscape meaning and definition. To stand on the beach at Dun Chaoin in County Kerry, Western Ireland, is to be in one of the saddest, most beautiful and abandoned places in the British Isles. Ironically, you are a step away from a stone commemorating the filming of Ryan’s Daughter, which made the place legendary; and the deserted houses on Great Blasket seem so close that you could lift them off by hand. The physical reality of the place is underlain by a mass of cultural paradoxes that complicate each moment of being there.
A writer tries to be a stranger in each place they inhabit, deliberately defamiliarizing it, imbuing it with their curiosity, shedding assumptions. Naming the world with our transferable vocabulary recognizes the recurrence of similar artefacts, flora and fauna in different places. Lacking the big picture, we might not fully grasp that crows are crow-like wherever they occur. Species and genus with their precise Latinate labelling system are great shortcuts to orientation and identification. Generation by generation we put together that big picture, the world map, the tree of life. But knowledge can be lost within a generation, and with every cataclysm that has overtaken human settlement the process of naming the world and its life forms and places has begun afresh, just as language has been lost and begun again. We are both humbled and inspired by this gift of tongues. Some sense of the complications of how we are alive as sentient and articulate human beings is an essential starting point for trying out those gifts.
The first stages of writing may arrive in elegant sentences, quatrains or rhythmical lines of free verse. But it’s almost a truism of the creative writing process that they are more likely to arrive as an inchoate mass of vocabulary, which tries to grab at experience without at first shaping it into literary form. Set out with a literary template for experience and you are likely to suffer from ‘thinking on purpose’, from contrivance that lacks vitality and freedom of association. The strategies used by creative writing tutors might not necessarily conform to their own, often less strategic, working practice, but the process of experience, response, shaping, finishing does correlate to the internal mental processes of the writer, the way in which personal experience is shaped and surrendered to the reader. In order to make a piece of writing we need verbal raw material, and writing workshops need to offer a way into the process – a model of development which the student writer can make their own.
So we turn our students loose with notebooks to absorb, explore and express in words and metaphors. We implore them to be alive in a landscape; to be alive above all through the liberties and constraints of language. After this initial, impulsive response comes the process of selection. How to make language ductile, to make it work for us? How to make it say what we mean and allow it to say whatever else it has to say, too? In shaping language we shape our experience retrospectively – and when a moment moves into the past it passes into its own fictional possibilities.
My own writing workshops try to grab at the ways in which we are alive. The simultaneous nature of experience apprehended by all five senses, by the imagination and the intellect firing together. To be alive is to act and to think, to do and to reflect, to remember and to anticipate. To be alive is to dilate and contract, to close down much of our experience in order to open up what seems essential. Otherwise the overwhelming richness of experience stuns us with sensory madness.
The impact of experience on vocabulary begins with the noun. What are these things around me? It extends to the verb. What are they doing? And how? And why? Each successive question puts pressure on the drafting process. The writer has to take a landscape and by describing it introduces the element of time. Just as language spills from our mouths, so time slips over the land. The simplest sentence demonstrates this:
The big black bird went slowly over lots of green trees.
We have some specialized vocabulary here – ‘birds’ and ‘trees’ and ‘green’ indicate the application of generic principles to the scene the writer is confronting. We have a sense of place, and the bird moving through it introduces temporal action. With more knowledge of nature and its vocabulary the sentence can be energized to create a more detailed visual image:
The raven went slowly over the forest.
Now the sentence appeals to a more specialized reader, one who appreciates the specific noun for a particular large black bird and the collective noun for trees. Its content is more precisely visual. But the verb is weak, supported by an adverb, and the forest unspecified. So more specialization is called for in the drafting process:
The raven spiralled over the larch wood.
or
The raven drifted over the beech copse.
We might employ a nautical metaphor:
The raven sailed over scrub pines.
Or pluralize the noun and hint at the mating display of ravens:
The ravens tumbled over stunted thorns.
Now assonance and alliteration give the line a rhythm section, a poetic tendency.
We have played with a basic unit of description, but we have also worked carefully within a geographical and ornithological system of knowledge. When we select the word ‘raven’, a remote northerly location is suggested and a cultural referent invoked – the association of ravens with death and war. Once we have our basic unit of allegorical sense we might decide to intensify it, sacrificing the idea of flight to take account of plumage and light, suggesting a more sinister aspect to the already portentous bird:
The raven glittered over the copse.
‘Copse’ echoes ‘corpse’ and we might choose it for that associative reason alone, but the isolated stand of trees also reinforces the singleness of the bird. We might go for a more deliberately compressed and Gothic effect:
The raven ghosted the copse.
A blackbird or a little dipper or a ptarmigan would have led us down an entirely different developmental road and another step in this process is to alter the noun itself for an alternative. By transforming the initial noun on which sense is predicated, action and location also alter and the experience is fictionalized:
The condor flapped over the jungle.
This still presents a big black bird flying slowly over green trees, but our location is shifted towards South America and the verb has to accommodate the hugeness of the bird by slowing itself in the chain reaction initiated by the new noun. To go a step further and change noun, verb and tense is to launch ourselves on a new and urgent imaginative trajectory:
The parrot explodes over the forest.
Or to introduce the now exotic bird into a northern European location:
The parrot hovers above the tundra.
Or with a touch of the surreal:
The macaw swoops on Big Ben.
Now we have moved from location to dislocation. We have introduced an optical illusion, an imaginative space between the bird and its environment, disturbing the reader’s expectations. We have invited the reader to fill that gap so that a story can spark across it. We have created, in the words of Susan Sontag, writing about photography, an ‘invitation to speculation’.
This simple example shows some of the pressures and possibilities of language, some of the ways in which actors, activity and location must be brought together, but then can be made to diverge. In an urban context it might easily have begun: ‘The long black vehicle went through the streets’, and opened a different range of possibilities. Our initial impulse is shaped by what is, but refinement is shaped by what could, might or ought to be. This not only changes language, but changes the imaginative landscape. As each moment of our experience passes and is assimilated, it extends our liberty as writers to use invention, lies, fabrication, half-truths and dissimulation to get at that other truth: the vision beyond the illusion of reality.
A guideline that usually works well for writing in workshops is: ‘Describe a room so that we can gauge who lives there.’ At one time apprentice writers tended to begin their prose fiction with an image of an alarm clock ringing and a sleepy arm reaching out to turn it off. (I rather think the film of Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning began with this classic item.) Presently, it became even commoner to come across the image of the ring left by a coffee mug on a table, which could represent almost anything from the atmosphere in bedsit-land to loneliness, meaninglessness, and general angst.
The beauty of the lived-in room idea is that it is both open and specific. The room can be anywhere on a gamut from the lighthouse in Fay Weldon’s Life and Loves of a She Devil to the stark prison cell in Robert Bresson’s film Le Condamné à Mort. It could have the eerie mixture of the sparsely symbolic and the physically specific that worked powerfully in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. It’s probably no accident that my examples so far have come more from cinema than from literature. To ease writers away from the unduly self-centred, I’ve had the habit of using terms from film in discussing their work. ‘How do you see this character?’ I might ask, if the dramatis persona was remaining hazy (psychologically as well as physically, since people’s characters inhere so much in their physique). Or again: ‘Who would you cast for this character if your piece was filmed [or staged]?’ Or again: ‘Some passages of your piece are rather general, rather summarized. Can you conceive of them on camera? Can you write them as scenes?’
Like any approach whatsoever, it is no good taking this as a rule or all-purpose, guaranteed formula. What is the ‘setting’ for Molly Bloom’s stream of thoughts at the end of Ulysses? How long would it take to specify the setting for Krapp’s Last Tape? Nevertheless we do, most of us, live in a space that teems with things, as well as with smells and memories. When I go into someone’s home for the first time, I have to restrain myself from treating it as a gallery and walking round the room peering in fascination at each picture and chair, each book and flower, which perhaps shows how specialized an animal a writer tends to become.
‘Setting’ is quite like ‘set’. We live out our lives in the little theatres of our homes, a notion taken to a sickening extreme a few years ago by the producer of the BBC programme Changing Rooms. He described our homes as ‘the stages we design in order to present ourselves to our friends’. Only the most self-conscious of us would go that far. The literary case is different, it lies in the medium of art – an art that partakes of poetry, storytelling, theatre, cinema, radio, painting and dance. This means that what the writer must do is not so much to catalogue the contents of a room as to select from the dozens (hundreds, thousands) of physical items it is made up of and use them to suggest the time of day, the time in history, the light (or lighting), the habits of the occupants. After all, this setting (or set) is not a sealed box. It opens out into ‘the world out there’ or is shuttered against it (as in Ibsen’s Ghosts). Say it is smoky-blue; a thick atmosphere is steadily pressing down from the ceiling to the floor, and the window square is stuffed with sacking: we’re in a Highland crofter’s house in 1853. The same interior is windowed, with panes of glass in a fixed frame, and one of the occupants is coughing: it is the same house in 1912, and tuberculosis has become more prevalent with the introduction of glazed, immovable windows. The same interior is empty of people, the grate is empty of fire; all we can see, in the way of human traces, is a cup stuck to its saucer by dried-up tea and, on the mantelpiece, beside the stopped clock, a tinted postcard of an Empire Exhibition in Toronto before the Great War: it is the present and nobody has been back to this deserted house for seventy years. (This is an actual cottage I explored near Mulroy Bay in Donegal in the early seventies.)
Time is in the room, history is in it, and character, and grief and elation, and the grind of work. All this inheres in and flows from the visible, tangible things. Technically speaking, plot flows from them. (Is the writer making events start to happen at this point? Or have we dropped in on a sequence that may stretch away in both directions, in flashback and in ongoing narrative or even flash-forward, à la Vonnegut, as the work unfolds?) Unless the setting is sufficiently specific, not enough will be able to flow from it, and the writer may lurch into melodrama to kick-start the action. (I well remember Kazuo Ishiguro wincing when one of my students started a piece with the character snatching up the phone as soon as it rang. This struck him as altogether too coarse and hackneyed a grab at the reader’s interest.)
A writer asked to ‘Describe a room, etc.’ will almost always come up with something quite characterful and atmospheric. It may not be distinct or vivid enough. ‘Magazines lying about’ – which ones? ‘Gloomy wallpaper’ – the colour? The pattern? How old or how fresh? In making some such suggestions to the writer you are able to work with something specific and also to explore the culture you share with her or him as you lead from the less to the more sharply focused. Here is where the conversation, of which each writers’ workshop must consist, may either run into the sand or give rise to green shoots – the apprentice writers can feel bullied or respected, forced or helped, constrained to imitate some model or other or inspired to create something of their own.
The room you are imagining is really as wide as the world and as high as the sky. The room could be the gestalt of a person who had been blind and deaf from birth. It could have no foundations because it was the control cabin of a spaceship. It could lose its solid walls – the ‘leaves of day’ could grow over everything, the ‘hard towers of apartment buildings’ could loom up and dominate, as in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The degree of the actual or lifelike should never be prescribed in a guideline, since it is not a blueprint, it is a stimulus, a pang of smell or touch or sight sent into the imaginations of all those in the workshop (including the ‘teacher’), and not a sort of inventory or timetable of what the writers are about to make.
It is true that in an age still under the influence of the realistic novel, from Jane Austen through George Eliot to early Lawrence and David Storey, apprentice writers are liable to feel that if they are to keep a grasp of their work as it unfolds and branches out in many directions, they had better anchor it in this or that suburb, or office, or holiday resort, and in a time quite near the present. (Think of the research you need as soon as you stray from your own time, all those different sorts of slang, all those different cars and jackets and brands of beer!) This is surely as much something to free ourselves from as to found ourselves on. We must be limber and fanciful as well as clear-eyed observers of what is there. We may want to make our moor as symbolic as the heath in Lear, where the audience can be persuaded with Gloucester that the ground ends in a chalk cliff teeming with crows and choughs, although there is nothing there but boards. We may wish to make it as knowledgeably detailed as Hardy’s Egdon Heath, with its paths of quartzite sand and its turf-cutters with their heart-shaped spades (although when I looked back into The Return of the Native just now I was surprised that the Heath was more of an emotional atmosphere and less of a physical place than I’d remembered).
Writers will find their own level of the lifelike, according to the point they belong to on some gamut that stretches from the ‘poetic’, where the focus is more on perceptions caught on the wing, to the ‘prosaic’, where the focus is more on a known environment thoroughly specified. And ‘the point they belong to’ is anything but fixed. This month we may want to make the most of some store of material we happen to have on the rock scene in Manchester in the eighties or Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812. Next month we may want to write a nightmare fable as little tied to a place and time as Kafka’s Metamorphosis. One of the most pregnant discussions of writing I ever heard was between David Storey and David Mercer on television in 1970 or so. Storey was twitting Mercer ruefully about the playwright’s happy freedom from the demands of the lifelike: if he wanted to put a bishop on stage, he didn’t have to find out all about the internal management of the Church of England, whereas the novelist had to have, at least on tap, an exhaustive knowledge of the subject. Actually, it’s not so much the form that counts as the particular aim of the writer using it. If we think of the setting for a work as the ‘world’ that stretches away in all directions from that bright-lit area in the foreground that we are mainly contemplating, it can be as strongly or as faintly drawn as the writer wishes. The ‘vividness’ of the work need not be a matter of specifying every feature of the environment supposedly surrounding this room or that house, and it does not have to be ‘true to’ a known, real place. The dust heaps, the dreary monstrous Mounds, in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend may have their ‘originals’ in Shoreditch or Houndsditch or any other ditch or none at all for all I care. They work in the novel because their gritty meanness is shaped to embody the hard-handed skinflints who own them and who behave as though they own their daughters. If Dickens had not known his ‘setting’ – that is, the entirety of London – with a physical intimacy and a great journalist’s eye for a society, from its sewers to its law courts, he could not have selected from it with such fiery symbolism. What he did not have to do was ‘put it all in’.
Suppose a couple are walking along the front in Skegness at half past three on a hot summer afternoon not long ago, picking their way between the heaps of plastic glasses which a barman is sweeping up into some kind of order, thinking of nothing but the enjoyment of each other they hope to have somewhere along the beach. The ‘scene’ is ‘set’ in ‘an east coast holiday town. Summertime, early in the twenty-first century’. The writer may well not have felt that he/she was describing that place in Lincolnshire so much as evoking the unreal glare, the sweat between two hands, the expectancy ripening like a fruit between two people, their sense of being cut off by special feelings from the stickiness and the chatter and the throb that press in at the edges of their vision. A journalist might well write a piece with this same setting for the sake of its social actuality – this piece of holiday trade, this sample of the English at this time. The writer of the story (or the script, or the poem) is more likely to be focused on the emotional peak in the people’s lives. The prom, the pub, the heatwave, the sand dunes and the sun-struck waves function in the passage, and have appeared on the screen of the writer’s mind, as facets of the characters’ experience. They are not mere backdrop or something to screen the embarrassing blank blacknesses behind the actors.
By the same token it will be best if the room described in our opening guideline is alive: the pint on the table half drunk, the music centre playing, the poster on the wall a little torn, the book on the arm of the chair open face down, the door half open. Since this room is really not a setting, it is not a small collection of typical late twentieth-century artefacts; it is a moment in an experience, and it arouses our expectations about what may come of it, so that we read on.
We are all, in one way or another, a product of the landscape in which we live, but often the view from the window becomes so familiar that we stop noticing it any more. I find that when I have been away from my house for a while, especially if I’ve been abroad, things look very different, almost unfamiliar, on my return. As if the picture of my house that I’ve been keeping in my imagination is different from the real, visceral one I see every day. The dimensions of my space seem different, and it usually takes me a few hours to readjust to my surroundings again.
It’s the idea that Barthes is referring to in Camera Lucida again. The topography that impacts upon the memory when the view is out of sight is an impressionistic memory of a landscape. The mind plays tricks, remembers bits and pieces, not the whole picture, and as a result the landscapes we keep in our imaginations are often only partial. I remember the big rectory that I grew up in in west Wales as moments, like snapshots. The cheap green carpet tiles that scratched our feet, the panes of frosted glass in the bathroom that made the light seem watery, vitreous, the velvety petals of the snapdragons in the front garden that I could squeeze to make look exactly like snapping dragons, the cawing of the rooks who built their messy nests high up in the chestnut trees every year, and then the big pats of twigs and feathers that would land on the lawn after a storm. On a recent visit to Wales I went back there and walked around the house, looking at it from the road. There is a new family living there now, a satellite dish on the wall, different curtains in the windows, no snapdragons in the front garden. The house seemed smaller than I remembered. The lawns weren’t so expansive, the windows narrower, the exterior painting a different colour. It wasn’t the same house as the one that I keep in my imagination.
I’m sure if I wrote down all the things I could remember about that house I would come up with pages and pages of description. I would be able to recreate that house on the page, but it wouldn’t be an image of a real house. It would be a fictionalization of the house, because it would be drawn from my recollections. It would be based on the real world, but at the same time unreal because it is the product of a singular, magpie memory.
Try this: write about somewhere you used to live. Describe the house in detail. Everything that you can remember from the colour of the bathroom to the plants in the front garden. Now use it as a setting for a story. Take some characters that you have created and let them live there.
Our landscapes are a part of our fictional voice. As has been said elsewhere in this book, a writer’s imagination and imaginative associations are unique to them. A part of their fictional fingerprints. In writing it is best to use landscapes you know well. A writer writing about London when they’ve only been there once on holiday is likely to come up with a rehash of all the images of London they’ve ever seen in guidebooks, films on the TV. Write the landscapes that are close to home. The places you are familiar with. Don’t be afraid to set your story in Caithness or Cumbria or Carmarthen or Cambridge. Write about where you know, where you live.
Recently I edited a book of stories from Birmingham for Tindal Street Press with the writer Jackie Gay. The idea of the book was to give the young writers who lived and worked in Birmingham some exposure, and initially we had asked for stories on the theme of ‘transgression’. What came back to us in the post, however, was a picture of the city. Most of the writers seemed entranced by the details of the world around them, the roads, the towerblocks, the parks, the trees, the bikers, the estates, the nightclubs. Our idea of the book changed and we decided to present the anthology as a collection of stories that portrayed the topography of Birmingham, hence the title, Hard Shoulder.
The book has proved quite important because it depicted a place that previously had very little representation in the world of fiction. Birmingham is not somewhere we would immediately put alongside London or Grasmere or the Yorkshire moors in our collective fictional consciousness.
Recent trends in fiction have tended to favour writing from all over the world, almost anywhere but home, it seems. We don’t want to know about the world around us, rather we would prefer to read stories sent from the fringes of a post-colonial world, as if these landscapes have more power to tell us who we are than the ones which we inhabit on a day-to-day basis.
Perhaps it’s because we’ve become immune to our surroundings. We’ve stopped looking at the details around us. The flatlands of north Norfolk are just as strange and uncompromising and unfamiliar as anywhere in the Midwest of America, if a little smaller. Also, perhaps, there is a feeling that our landscape isn’t as exciting as the rest of the world. As if our small, scruffy, mongrel country has nothing that could match the otherness or the size of the Indian subcontinent or the African deserts.
But I want to read about where I live; I want the returning traveller’s frisson of culture shock. To look at home and find that I don’t recognize it any more. I want the world, but especially my immediate surroundings, to be defamiliarized through language and story-telling.
Try this: describe the view from your house. What is outside your front door? Make notes, describing everything in minute detail. It’s not enough to write: trees, a park, a row of houses, a shop. What kind of trees? What type of shop? What apparatus do they have in the park?
Now try to describe your town or village, or community. What makes it what it is? To me, Norwich is defined by its topographical juxtapositions: it is a city where you can, in certain winds, smell the fertilizer being spread on the surrounding fields, and there are only A roads linking us to the rest of the country. It is a landlocked county town. Full of history – a castle, medieval buildings, meandering town streets – and yet impractical, dependent on history as much as modernity for its survival.
Writers are a product of the landscape in which they live, and as such they are to some extent social historians. Our vision of Victorian London would be poorer without Dickens; the social milieu of the 1800s uncharted without the minute description of Jane Austen; sixties England indigent without the fictions of Nell Dunn or John Braine or Alan Sillitoe. Without writers who tell us about the world in which we live, we have little chance of figuring out what it’s really like to live there.