Writing: A User Manual by David Hewson

Author:David Hewson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: 2012-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

Descriptions

Books are made from words. Those twenty-six letters of the alphabet and a few punctuation marks are all we have. That’s one reason we have to learn to milk them for all they’re worth. If there’s one abiding mistake that novice writers make about location it’s in the way they create that essential canvas, the living background against which their story will take place. All too often it’s approached in a very one-dimensional way, through nothing more than visual description. What the place looks like, precious little more.

There’s plenty of opportunity in the case of Charlie’s town: the beach, the colour of the sea and sky, the lines of dilapidated buildings, the closed, boarded-up pier and those blackened stanchions, like petrified crane’s legs, sticking into the water. All this will be needed but it’s only one part of a larger whole. Human beings don’t come to know their environment through their eyes alone. We use all our senses: smell and hearing and touch. Fictional worlds need to be a rich brew of sights, sounds, aromas and physical sensations, just like the environment that surrounds us in life. Description, however beautifully executed, is rarely sufficient on its own.

A seaside town offers so much when you move beyond the visual. The salt smell of the sea, the rank stink of seaweed at the foot of the pier legs. Candy floss and hot dogs, bad drains and fetid rubbish waiting to be collected. I want to hear the sound of the waves on the shingle, and I know it will be different depending on whether the tide is coming in or going out. There’ll be the jingle of the fruit machines and tinny music from the last working arcade on the promenade, the cries of the seagulls, the shouts of the bingo-callers, the drone of the engines from the fishing boats pulling out of the harbour day and night.

Seasons matter. When I set a story in Rome the time of year is one of the first things I think about. In summer the city is desperately hot and languid, in winter freezing cold and inward-looking. Romans respond to those changes in their moods, the way they live, the clothes they wear.

In Charlie’s town it’s summer and at times baking hot, the way seaside resorts can be. But I get the impression this town is on the east coast somewhere, perhaps Lincolnshire or Yorkshire. That cruel North Sea wind is going to blow at times and that will leave you shivering if you’re wearing too little. There could be morning sea mists, ‘frets’ we used to call them, which make a hot day gloomy and bone-chilling. Charlie likes to swim. He doesn’t mind the cold or the goosebumps on his flesh from time to time. The town is a part of him, and vice versa. Its icy, bleak character infects his. You could state that plainly, and perhaps will.

Charlie liked this town, admired the way the buildings on the promenade seemed to lean into the blustery wind off the sea as if to say, ‘Not with me you won’t.

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