How to Write Killer Prose (4)

Place

Everything in a novel happens somewhere. Whether it happens in a physical location or in a character's mind, it's your job to take your reader there.

Think of a typical movie or TV series opening:

Exterior - New York skyline, morning

cut to 

Exterior - Office block

cut to 

Interior - Boardroom. Anxious execs checking watches, a conspicuously empty chair

cut to

Interior - bedroom. Close-up on a sleeping face. The eyes open. Shot widens to reveal a second head on the pillow, a trail of discarded underwear...

We're led from wide shot to narrow, from our world into that of the movie. This process is one which we read instinctively, and it was happening in fiction long before there were movies. Of course there are infinite variations on this format, but one way or another where? has to become here. A story must be located, if our readers' imaginations are to move into gear.

Film, by its nature, establishes place easily. A novel must be highly selective about the words it uses to accomplish the same thing. We need to know where we are, but also what that place is like, because your characters must exist in a physical (if imaginary) world. If this world is to be real for your reader, place and your character's physical experience must constantly reinforce each other.

How do we do this?

Here's a chapter opening from my latest novel, #Panic. We haven't encountered this character or this place before, so both have to be established.

            The sun's shining as Jaleesa Williams closes the front door and steps down onto the cracked asphalt of Shelburn Avenue. Jaleesa's wearing a hoodie and track pants, but May means rain in the Canadian prairie country, and there's a waterproof jacket rolled up in her backpack.

            Sure enough, as she turns onto Moosomin Road, a bank of cloud slides across the sun. The shadow overtakes her, lifting the glare from the edge-of-town storefronts before creeping up the coulee and across the fields of speargrass. Jaleesa's twenty-one years old, and she's lived in the province of Saskatchewan all her life. In in two months time, when the warm winds blow in from the Rockies, she'll be twenty-two, and nothing will have changed.

There's a lot of information here. The light and the weather are specific to this place and time, and they are defined by Jaleesa's physical experience, which becomes ours. We sense the sun on her face, the changeable conditions (hoodie weather), and anticipate, with her, the feel of the warm July winds. We see, through her eyes, the slow slide of the shadow which parallels the frustrating pace of her life.

All of this fixes Jaleesa in place. Place has been established not by description (the only detail I've given you is that cracked asphalt) but by its effect on the protagonist. So here's the thing. Place becomes real when your character experiences it, and your character becomes real when she experiences place.

I could have written:

            Jaleesa is twenty-one years old. She lives in a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada. It often rains here in May. The local weather system is dictated by the proximity of the Rockies.

Same info, but dead. What's missing is Jaleesa's body, her senses. We always need to know where we are (everything happens somewhere), but if that place isn't located in a character's body or mind, it's a lot less intense. Show place, don't tell it, in other words.

Porosity again. I write that she 'turns onto Moosomin Road,' not that she 'turns left onto Moosomin Road, and walks past the bungalows, and the garage, and the convenience store'. All those details don't matter. I want you to be invested in Jaleesa and her story, so I'm leaving you to create your own Moosomin Road.

There's something else happening. Jaleesa lives here, on Shelburn Avenue, so the place is familiar to her. She knows Moosomin Road, and what a coulee is, and what speargrass looks like. She's internalised the local weather. So to increase your identification with Jaleesa, I'm writing as if you know all this too.

            The shadow overtakes her, lifting the glare from the edge-of-town storefronts before creeping up the coulee and across the fields of speargrass.

Jaleesa's foreknowledge, and by extension yours, is there in all those definite articles.

Here's another passage from #Panic. Dani, on the run, has taken refuge with a small touring circus. They're in a small country town in Texas.

            Despite the over-tight outfit that Merrilee's lent her - satin shorts and a sequined bodice with sweat stains at the arm-holes - Dani enjoys the drum-up. Tom leads the way down Main Street, sporting a striped waistcoat and juggling a wicked-looking set of knives, and Merrilee follows in a basque top and frilly bloomers, beating a drum. Dani, meanwhile, darts from sidewalk to sidewalk, pressing coupons on anyone who will take them. 'Circus Mystique! For one night only! Half price for families!'

            The sun beats down relentlessly. After Main Street they tour the back roads, past gas stations, car lots, and loan and bail bond offices. There's no shade, and as Tom's knives flash and Merrilee's drum booms, Dani feels her head pounding and the soft tar on the roads dragging at the soles of her boots. By the time an hour has passed she's handed out most of the flyers, and her thighs, which haven't seen the sun in months, have turned an angry pink.

            Lowering her drum to the sidewalk Merrilee picks up a discarded paper plate. 'Reckon we sucked this town dry,' she says, fanning her armpits.

Once again, we establish place not by description (there's almost none) but by Dani's and Merrilee's physical experience of it. While place is rarely insistent, it is never absent. Never not acting on our protagonists' senses.

A final example from #Panic. Ilya is travelling to Moscow.

The train pulls out. Ilya’s bunk is adequately comfortable, if too short for his lanky frame. The countryside is unspectacular. Endless plains, distant treelines, fleeting villages, thin sunlight. With almost fifty people in close proximity the noise level is high. The compartment smells of body odour, beer, and instant chicken noodle soup. There’s low-key excitement as the train pulls in to the larger cities on the route. Ekaterinburg, Perm, Nizhny Novgorod. Each is announced by the sudden, flickering appearance of factories, smokestacks and weather stained housing blocks.

Here I haven't described the compartment at all. But I have described what Ilya sees, hears, smells and physically undergoes. These sensory impressions combine to locate him (and us) in the compartment. The lists of nouns mimic the images flashing past the train windows. The reader's imagination does the rest.

Sometimes you have to tell place as well as show it.

            Beyond it is a formal garden overwhelmed by a billowing profusion of roses. Dense clusters of white, peach and pink, heavy with the morning's rain, cascade from arbors and pergolas. Thorny tangles, bowed down with magenta and blood-dark blooms, overspill the long beds.

            'Move, you're blocking the path,' Balice says, as Villanelle stands with closed eyes, breathing in the moist air.

This is quite a luscious visual and tactile description. But see how it only fully comes alive when we overlay Villanelle's sensory experience. We know that she has an acute sense of smell (Eve's skin, the stairwell in the St Petersburg apartment, the patchouli scent at Harrods), and this, in turn, tells us something about her as a physical, sensual being - and about Balice's failure to quite 'get' her.

To précis:

Everything happens somewhere. Place is never not there.

Place becomes real when your character experiences it, and your character becomes real when she experiences place.

Your character has a body and multiple senses. What is he seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and feeling at any given time? What does this sensory input tell us? How does it enable us to establish place?

Happy writing! Until next time - Luke