Location, Location, Location

Picture two people having a conversation.  In this theoretical situation, you can see their lips move, but not hear what they are saying.  What are they talking about?  Is their mood upbeat, sombre, reflective?  How do you know?


Picture them at the top of a penthouse suite above a vast metropolis.  Not just anyone can afford to travel to big cities, and access to penthouse suites is generally reserved for those with the deepest pockets.  So, we immediately know something about our characters before we have heard them speak a word - possibly they are relatively wealthy, are here by accident, or are here as a result of nefarious design.


Now picture them walking through a tribal village on the fringes of a desert.  How are their mannerisms, their appearance, different in your mind from those in the first example?  Immediately we can see that the topic of their conversation is likely to be different from the characters in the first example, even though we can't hear what they are saying.

This example teaches us that setting in stories can be a powerful tool for a skilled author.  Want to write a romance?  You need a setting where romance is feasible to your readers.  There's a reason why Mills and Boon tend not to set their stories in dank catacombs or sewer systems.  If you are writing a noir detective novel, your gumshoe's office had better be a dingy office with heavy blinds (intense sunlight doesn't help capture the mood.)

So in much the same way that the first impression of a character can be defined by their appearance, their name or their actions (often all three), the first impression of the mood of your story is defined by the setting.  This gives you the chance to employ the reader's senses to pull them into your narrative.  A good writer can capture the autumnal shades of New England, stand besides you as you listen to the bond traders calling to one another on Wall Street, or make you wrinkle your nose at the smell of Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market.

Of course, many authors embrace their setting, creating entirely new worlds from scratch with a quick shift in their imagination.  Many readers will be familiar with the geography of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, or know that Rivendell is an Elven outpost in Tolkien's legendarium.  My friend Lesley Smith is set to shortly release the first book in a new fantasy series, 'The Changing of the Sun'.  The new worlds from her imagination feature their own unique calendar system complementary to Earth's, and necessitate a small band of heroes setting out across a desert in order to secure their survival from a forthcoming cataclysm.  In her novella, 'The Whispers in the Desert', the rawness of the desert bursts forth into lush cities built around water, and the characters feel natural in their environments.

Just setting an alien story on a alien world isn't enough to guarantee a devoted reader base.  The worlds we create must have their own logical consistency to be believable - unless the intention is to make them deliberately nonsensical, as is done to great effect in Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'.  Assuming that we wish readers to believe our setup, we must understand a few of the basic tenets of world building.  People unite into countries and develop their own shared sense of values.  Cities form for reasons - those of necessity, trade, religion or geopolitics.  This isn't to say that new authors should be afraid to create, but readers will be more inclined towards places that are logically consistent.  World building is a topic that deserves a longer post in its own right, and I may decide to explore this in more depth in future.

Writers who prefer to focus on characters may find it easier to use existing locations, and with good reason.  Modern romantic fiction (particularly that within the 'chick-lit' subgenre) tends to focus on character, and for that reason it makes sense to use an existing location that readers know or aspire to visit.  Popular locations for such books include Paris, city of light and love, London, with its long cultural history and New York, with the perpetual glitz and glamour that comes with being a regular fixture in Hollywood movies.  One need only mention the names of these cities and shopping, cocktails, high fashion and classy debauchery all spring instantly to mind.  For readers looking for a path less wandered, there are many exotic joys in writing set in Asia, Africa or South America.

You may not be from exotic locales or well-known places but you may still wish to set your story in a location that you know and love.  Literature has many examples of books that have made otherwise anonymous locations into world-famous destinations - probably the most famous is Victor Hugo's 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame', which turned the humble cathedral on Île de la Cité into one of the most famous religious buildings in the world.  One of the central themes of the novel is that way that mankind passes ideas down the centuries through art and architecture, and in doing so, Hugo makes Notre Dame a character within the novel.

Setting, as the Hunchback makes clear to us, is about far more than the building, country or world your novel is set in.  Setting also gives us our sense of time, and can be used as a lens through which to view societal and cultural norms.  Much of the conflict in classic novels comes from characters with minority backgrounds who generate conflict simply by existing within these spaces - think Tom Robinson from 'To Kill a Mockingbird'.

We've seen ways to use locations to drive your stories, and even how you can you can use your stories to make somewhere close to your heart known to your readers.  We've also seen that setting isn't just a backdrop, it's a powerful tool for anchoring your characters in a particular place and time, simultaneously allowing us to explore their motivations and create the conflicts that drive the narrative.

Where will your next story be set?

Secret Cinema, Digital Revolution, City of Stories and much more...

I hope those of you who've been used to getting regular updates recently will forgive me for taking a couple of weeks to update.  It's been a busy time and I've taken the chance to get some R & R in while I've been away from work.

So what have I been up to?  For starters, I've been spending time in London, and I've been to see both the Secret Cinema's live action screening of 'Back to the Future' and the Digital Revolution exhibition at the Barbican.

Digital Revolution was something of a box of tricks - it began with a trip through the history of gaming, the exploration of electronics and electronic interaction as art and an organ keyboard hooked up to play the relevant note from any one of dozens of live-streaming radio stations. A specially recorded Will.i.Am track was captured in a visual medium as programmed instruments played the track.  There were also games you could control with your mind and even a sneak peek at Lady Gaga's levitating dress.

It's tremendous fun, and good value compared to many similar London exhibits.  There's still a fortnight left, so go and see it if you can.

The Secret Cinema event turned out to be good fun too, given that the lead up to it was something of a fiasco for a variety of reasons.  The venue turned out to very close to the Olympic Park at Stratford, a part of the city I know well.  Hill Valley was faithfully and attractively reproduced , the live action parts of the event were well presented and even the rain held off as the night progressed.  Sadly, organisers did miss out on a bit of a trick with merchandising, and the comic book shop, record store and clothes store were all small and understocked.  Next time, they would d better to form partnerships with specialist stockists to the benefit of all parties.

One of the success stories of the night was the synth band 'Avec Sans', who were playing in one of the bars attached to the event.  Their video 'Hold On' is below - I can recommend them as great artists and visual entertainers.




I also had the chance to attend the first of twelve weekly 'Norwich - City of Stories' events entitled 'Through the Eye of the Beholder'.  Part sponsored by Norwich Writer's Centre, this was an evening of music, fine food, poetry readings and stories from noted local writers, including several alumni of the University of East Anglia's illustrious creative writing program.  Best of all, my partner Melissa Brown performed a reading of her poem, 'The Library.'

In other news, my Twitter buddies Wordnerd, Melindrea82 and I will be working to complete Steampunk submissions for 'The Lost Worlds', a forthcoming anthology for Eldritch Press.  We've given ourselves until October 1, and I'll provide an update on our progress ahead of news about Nanowrimo 2014, as well as a forthcoming review of the Hugo and Nebula Award winning novel, 'The Doomsday Book' by Connie Willis.

Four Thousand Words reviews 'Strange Weather in Tokyo', by Hiromi Kawakami

'Strange Weather in Tokyo' is billed as a gentle love story about two lost souls who discover one another against a backdrop of sake bars and walks through the countryside around Tokyo.  One of Norwich Writers Centre's 2014 Summer Reads, it shares a place with such illustrious company as Ivan Vladislavic's 'Double Negative'.

Young office worker Tsukiko has little spare time and no close relationships with friends or family.  What time she does have is spent in the bars and restaurants of her home city, indulging her gourmet desires and drinking alone.  Over a period of weeks, she finds herself sharing space at the bar with her old high school Japanese teacher, and the pair strike up a bond that surprises them both.

Over the next few months, the pair go mushroom picking, market shopping and island hiking, and we follow their understated conversations that often tail off into comfortable silence.  It wouldn't be overstating the truth to say that this is a story that sneaks up on you.  So unassuming are the opening chapters that when affection builds for the relationship, you are genuinely surprised.

I'm quite specific in that my affection was for the relationship rather than for the characters directly.  The two central characters are the only ones of any direct consequence, and I found myself appreciating them as well-constructed without particularly identifying with either of them.  The protagonist, Tsukiko, comes across as far less warm than her love interest, the seventy-something teacher she still calls Sensei.  She is for the most part skittish and withdrawn, only really coming into her own in the moments she allows herself to feel genuine emotion.  Sensei is perpetually calm and reserved, a man with a twinkle in his eye who despite being in his golden years still enjoys the things that bring him pleasure.

The pared-down twilight world in which they live is almost entirely self-contained.  There is no social commenatary, with none of the passage of time evident in Ishiguro's 'An Artist of the Floating World'.  Nor is this a story about a place, with the muted Tokyo they share clearly one well-walked and known; there is none of the vibrant colour and raw beauty, say, that is captured on film in 'Lost in Translation'.  While Sofia Coppola's story is about two people who find commonality in an alien world, Kawakami's work is by contrast about two people who have embraced the world in which they live so fully that they are in danger of being absorbed by it to their own detriment.

At one point, when referencing the river by which she walks, Tsukiko observes, 'Occasionally people would throw themselves into it.  Most of the time, instead of drowning, they would be carried downstream and then rescued, to their dismay.'  The parallel with the journey she herself is undertaking is clear to the reader without necessarily being apparent to the character.  She follows a clearly defined path that is only really brought under examination when faced with an outcome that she doesn't expect.

Short but nonetheless packing an emotional punch, understated but still engaging, 'Strange Weather in Tokyo' is recommended to those who will enjoy a slow-burning tale of a relationship that rises and falls with the seasons.  For me, it is a success of sorts, but less a true love story than an elegantly simplistic character study of loneliness.

Writing Process Blog Tour

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.  Well...actually, it was a fine summer's morning, and YA reader and author Kathy Palm asked me to share a few thoughts about my writing process.  Kathy can be found on Twitter: @KathleenPalm, or via her blog, Finding Fairies.

So what am I currently working on?  Anyone who is interested in my novel can find a brief synopsis here, and an extract here.  In addition to this, I've written a number of short stories, including 'The Long Walk', which was recently published by 'Shadows at the Door'.  In addition to those, I'm dabbling in historical fiction set in East Anglia in the dying days of the Heptarchy, while somewhere, up a mountain in India, four characters in another world entirely are besieged by lethal psychic snakes.  And in the glittering, rebuilt coastal city of Nuevo London, a young man at a party has no idea about the chance meeting which will change his world forever...

How does my work differ from other writers within my genre?  You'd have to tell me.  I'm not sure that anyone else is writing books about South African miners (in fact, if anyone else is, please tell me because I'd love to share notes with you.  The book has become terribly personal to me and I'm terrified that I'm not doing justice to my subject matter.)

My historical fiction is like a poor man's Bernard Cornwell.  My fantastical stories are based around exotic and crazy worlds, and I build those in painstaking detail in my mind (the characters, by extension, just live in them.)  I aspire to recreate some of the wonder I felt when reading Jeff Noon's 'Vurt', which remains the pinnacle of humanity's achievement in speculative fiction (Jeff can be found on Twitter too: @jeffnoon).

Why do I write what I write?  Because no-one else does (though that isn't to say that there aren't fantastic professional writers doing similar things all the time with much more aplomb.)  Quite simply, I'm writing the books I want to read.  The ideas are legion, constantly growing new limbs and spawning all over the place.  There's pushing and shoving, and frankly it might get a bit ugly unless I let some of them out into the light.


How does my writing process work?  There are only two times of the day, for starters: weekend mornings and when I'm burning the midnight oil midweek.  To some degree, this is a necessity thing - I have to fit around a day job, professional study, a demanding girlfriend and a persistent cat with attention deficit disorder.  The process itself is relatively straightforward - I start by crafting a handful of immaculate vivid scenes, write the filler that goes into the gaps, tie it all together with dubious threads and then sigh and start again.



I am definitely inspired by the successes of others.  Fortunately, the market for writing has never been healthier, and the author community on social media is tremendously supportive.  There are writers like Neil Gaiman who I admire tremendously for their consistency and their wit.  Some people are wordsmiths.  By comparison, I'm a journeyman, a grinder, someone who only progresses by crushing the narrative into submission.  If I were a sportsman, I would be a low-order batsman in a second XI county cricket side with an awful technique who should, by rights, hole out on my first ball and go home.  Where talent doesn't cut it, I have to settle for ugly persistence. 

I don't have a finished final draft yet.  You'll all know when I do.

'All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath' - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Four Thousand Words reviews 'Metro 2033', by Dmitry Glukhovsky

It is hard to know where to begin reviewing a novel like Metro 2033, as it is stylistically asymmetrical from anything that I have previously read, while at the same time being a novel of outstanding ambition and scale that nonetheless does not quite manage to reach the heights that it sets itself.

The novel follows the story of Artyom, an unremarkable young man who is one of a clutch of just a few thousand survivors of the human race.  Born after a cataclysmic event that has rendered the surface world uninhabitable for humans, he, his step-father and his friends make their home in VDNKh, the northernmost occupied station in the Moscow Metro.

Warned by a wanderer of a terrible looming danger, Artyom accepts the task of travelling deep into the metro to the legendary city of Polis to warn the residents and ask for assistance.  On the way, he encounters all manner of ghoulish horrors, political refugees and larger-than-life characters.


Dystopian fiction has become rather passe of late, with the last couple of years seeing a huge influx of self-published works set in worlds gone wrong.  However, I have never before encountered a world as genuinely confusing and terrifying as Glukhovsky's metro.  He immediately sets out a sense of foreboding and threat.  'The metro consisted of numerous passages and corridors, spreading into the depths of a gigantic cobweb.'  When describing a tunnel in the new, nightmarish low-light world, he manages to make the world itself seem like something alive.  'As porous as a sponge, it greedily swallowed the rays of their flashlight, which was hardly sufficient to illuminate even a foot ahead.'  The action takes place across a version of the real Metro network, and my paper copy of the book has a much-needed map that is very helpful to reference.  E-book readers may be resigned to visualising the network instead.
 
For those like myself who have never known the joys of Moscow's staggeringly-beautiful real-life system, the fall from grace is captured perfectly.  As well as the threat of natural disasters like floods and cave-ins, the metro is inhabited with all manner of mutants, psychic assaults and other unholy ways to die.  And die people do.  'He stopped and turned his head to the left so sharply that Artyom could hear how his vertebrae cracked.  "I've died.  There is no more me." And, straight as a cross-tie, he fell face down.'

Glukhovsky cleverly avoids the preferred dystopian device of one-government control.  Instead, his Metro has a chaotic tribal system based around beliefs in which communists battle fascists, religious groups fight with savages and the Kremlin is both possessed by demons and used as a repository for biological weapons.  The single underlying currency that unites everyone is bullets, but even they are no protection if you cannot guard your mind.

So massive is the scope of this tale that it is hardly surprising that there are loose ends and unresolved dilemmas.  I'm hopeful that some of these may end up being resolved in the follow-up, 'Metro 2034' but there are so many abandoned threads and so much background information that it is sometimes difficult to see what as a reader you are supposed to be following.  Characters appear, are built up and then discarded in so many short paragraphs.  The feeling is akin to browsing through an otherworldly junk shop containing memorabilia from Alice in Wonderland, the Communist Manifesto and the story of the Tower of Babel, but with nothing quite taking your fancy enough for you to want to take home with you.

The other element of the story that suffers as a result of the scope is the rhythm, which is horribly disjointed in places and goes from fast-moving to snail-crawling and back again without warning.  It is worth noting that the book was serialised for free on the internet prior to release as a novel, so this may go some way towards explaining the ebb and flow of the narrative.

A little side note about characters is worthy too.  Artyom is a simple everyman with limited ability to defend himself from the psychic assaults that crush other people.  His character is largely unexamined until close to the end of the book when his survival against the odds up to that point lends him the feeling that he is invulnerable.  Other characters, such as the irrepressible Khan, are woefully underused.  There are no prominent female characters at all.  While I recognise that Russia currently (and in the context of the future world presented here) may be a patriarchal society, it is good to note that this oversight is rectified in 'Metro 2034'.

If you can get past the frustrating gear-changes that threaten to derail the narrative, there is a lot to experience and enjoy in Metro 2033.  It goes without saying that this book will not be for everyone, but fans of horror, politics, science-fiction and dark humour will all find something here.  Even if this doesn't look like the sort of book you would expect to enjoy, I would urge that you try it anyhow.  The Metro is just too captivating...