A SENSE OF PLACE.
It comes with the germ of an idea like seed must be planted into soil, into a real setting, town or country. The mystery is that somehow I know just where that place is going to be before I even know what the story is about. A sense of place can't be added on at a later date with a frosting of little details.
So here are some of my strategies. • THE STORK WALK. No, not a trip round the local maternity unit but a leisurely stroll around the chosen location with camera, pen and paper and lots of time to follow hunches up and down alleyways, to the top of the highest building or peak. A trip to local museum, get them on board with helpful suggestions.
Find a café and sit just watching life walk by and write a pen sketch of smells and colours and feelings. If the setting is one you know just drink it in it, the colour of earth and local stone the bricks, the roofs, all the details that make it distinctive. Sometimes I can write better about a place I've left because when I come back I notice more. • READ ALL ABOUT IT. There are many local experts, poets, historians and raconteurs only to happy to meet you and chat about their love of the landscape.
They tell tales and point you in directions you never might have guessed before. My writing career started because I talked to a 90 year old artist who told me tales about how the Americans landed on the golf course for D day and how the local Whittington barracks was a U. S. notorious military prison.
Another local expert filled me in with places to look and see wartime memorabilia for myself. We can get blasé about our own locale. Don't forget the collections of old photos that show how a setting has changed.
Then it's up to our imaginations to supply the rest. • THE ART IS IN THE DETAIL. It is the authentic little details that show we know our sense of place. To write about the Scottish island in “Song of the Heart” I had to see it in all weathers, feel the wind and see how the houses fitted into the landscape as well as smell the smells and sense the atmosphere of the seashore, the colour of the rocks and the skyscapes.
Skimping on detail is short changing the reader. They may know the setting better than I do. It has to be as right as I can make it. Travel books can only supply so much. • WHEN IN DOUBT ASK… If you can't visit your chosen location, find someone who knows it well, remember the senses, touch and sight, sound and smell and taste, dialect words and odd customs. Don't rush this stage. • THE SPIRIT OF THE PLACE. Can be elusive, it lists where it wills. Sometimes when you expect to find it in a building or a location it eludes us and then you turn a corner and you know it's there in the way the buildings huddle or the trees bend, you get a shiver up your spine because you can see your characters in that setting acting out their dramas in front of you.
In “Trouble on the Wind” my story was set around the navvies who built the Settle Carlisle Railway in the 1870s who were encamped in shanty towns 12 miles from my home and I spent days roaming the fells just seeing what was left in the ground of that time. I knew every nook and cranny of that area but in the end I chose to create a village made up of many villages but the weather was the real Yorkshire weather, wind, rain and snow that was part of the action of that story. My current challenge is to get myself into 17 century Delaware and New Jersey somehow with only memories of brief visits there! Thank goodness for the libraries and cheap flights to the USA !
Good Luck with your writing.