Inspired by a sense of place

[John Dean]

As a writer, I am always inspired by a sense of place. Whether it be a gloomy city or a stunning hillside, a glass-strewn council estate or a majestic waterfall, something about my surroundings repeatedly triggers ideas.

Before I explain where I think sense of place fits into the creative process, let me take you back three years to a hillside in the North Pennines in an attempt to show you what I mean.

I was on a family holiday and we were staying in a village on the Durham/Cumbrian border. There was a play area in the middle of the village and every evening my two children would go for a swing and I would wander out to keep an eye on them - they had gone past the ‘Dad, give me a push’ stage but had not quite reached the stage where they could be left alone.

In such circumstances a person has a lot of time to think and as they swung, so I found myself staring at the hillside opposite. And as with all writers, ideas started to swirl around in my mind.

Something about the hill’s slopes and its late evening shadows, the way the buzzards hunted across the ridge, the sound of the sheep bleating and the distant barking of a farm dog, worked their magic on me and by the end of the week, an idea was born, eventually turning into The Dead Hill, my seventh crime novel published by Hale in 2008.

My experience as a journalist meant that I knew a lot about wildlife crime and the more I looked at the buzzards on the hillside, the more the place and the idea came together as a good theme for the book. But place came first.

Character arrived third when striding into my mind came Detective Chief Inspector Jack Harris, a disillusioned officer working in the rural area in which he grew up, dragged back by the pull of the hills despite his attempts to stay away.

Mix in a bit of gangland intrigue, a few friends with secrets to protect, the DCI's re-awakening as a detective and the ever-changing northern landscape and The Dead Hill assumed a life of its own.

The story itself told about the discovery of a dead gangland figure in a quarry that brought back dark memories for Harris and the hilltop community in which he works. As the detective investigated the murder, not only was he forced to deal with hostile villains, frightened townsfolk and colleagues who doubt his capacity to bring the killer to justice, he also has to confront part of his past that he had hoped would be forgotten. And in doing so, he was forced to re-evaluate the loyalties of those closest to him. And all from that hillside!

I do a lot of creative writing teaching and I always contend that despite the many elements of fiction, it comes down to a triangle, three things that come together to make the story work right from the off - story, character and place. Get them right and pace, economy of words, themes, emotions, the lot, fall into line.

Different writers would put a different thing at the top of the triangle, identifying it as most important. I know writers who would say it all starts with the story, a strong idea which drives the narrative and everything else follows. Get the idea then search round for somewhere to set it.

Others would put characters at the top. I have worked with writers who contend that their stories begin with a person, a character from whom everything flows, whose experiences and views shape the narrative.

Me? I start with the place, always the place. Another example. We went on another family trip to an old wartime POW camp not far from where I live. Standing in the huts, looking at graffiti left by the Germans and Italians, their scrawled pictures of home, seeing the dust of ages flying, feeling the spirit of long gone men, I was gripped by the emotion of the moment and within 15 minutes the plot for what became The Long Dead came to me, set in a wartime camp where secrets abounded even fifty years after it was abandoned. Never had a plot come together so rapidly and it hardly changed during the writing.

That story was the fifth in the John Blizzard series and they are mostly set in a fictional northern city, based on cities in which I have lived and worked. For me, I was fascinated not by their ‘nice’ areas but by neighbourhoods in decline, the peeling paint, the shadowy tower blocks, the converted Victorian houses turned into seedy bedsits. For me, the sense of place overwhelms in such locations and characters and storylines emerge from the surroundings.

So how do you go about creating a sense of place? Well, I think there are three things you need to do, the first of which is to give the reader enough visual information to create a picture of the place.

There’s a lot of debate among writers about how much description you should use and I can see the argument for being sparing on the details although having said that, I do agree that done well, longer description can make for compelling reading.

My best advice would be to keep it relatively tight because too much description can slow your pace. However, do you need to provide at least some clues. Take a leaf out of flash fiction’s book, identify what you think the most important things are about a place and describe them. Even if you do that sparingly, the reader will build up the place for themselves in their mind because good writing is about triggering a response in the reader, bringing out memories.

For instance, you could spend three paragraphs describing the differing colours and hues of the forest - and it might be wonderful writing to book -but it might be enough just to say that the conifer woodland stretched away into the distance until it gave way to moorland. We all know what a forest looks like and we can all visualise a moor. If my instinct is correct, in my giving you those two facts you will already have thought of a place you know. So what if you see a different forest than I did when I typed those words? As long as you see a forest what does it matter?

Apart from visual clues a writer needs to go further and use the senses - take the forest, again; one of the most striking sensations is the smell, of the dead and dying brown undergrowth beneath the canopy perhaps, or maybe of the sound of a stream somewhere through the trees, unseen but heard. Again, two or three fragments of description but I bet you have conjured up a forest you know. And if you haven’t but want to create one - pull on your boots and head out on the forest path with a notebook.

But for me there has to be a third aspect to this and that is what does it feel like to be there? I know that many writers, myself included, would say that the narrator should never impinge on the story directly because he or she can get the message over through their characters. If a normally brave character becomes scared in the forest, you have told the reader how the place feels and you have triggered off all sorts of reactions in your reader - the time they got lost in a forest, the time the kids vanished in among the trees, the time the sky turned black and a sun-dappled scene turned to one of darkness and menace. You will have made them feel.

Back to how sense of place inspires and the continuance of the story which started when my kids went swinging in that North Pennines village.

Later this year my novel To Die Alone will be published by Hale, the second featuring Jack Harris and his North Pennines beat.

The idea came when we went on a family holiday (funny how often that happens, must be something about having time to think). This time we were in the Isle of Man and went for a walk on a wet and windy morning. Our attempts to follow the path along the river valley were repeatedly thwarted by trees brought down by the ferocious winds the night before and now strewn across the hillside.

Standing there, my connection with the place took over and a storyline unrolled itself there and then, a man alone and fleeing for his life on a tree-strewn hillside.

Knowing that such a landscape would slot beautifully into the North Pennines, I picked up that Isle of Man hillside and moved it over to the world inhabited by Jack Harris.

So for me, sense of places goes on top of the triangle - it inspires, it enthuses, it moves, it evokes - and by God, it doesn’t half make me write!