Ian Rankin in conversation with Gillian Hamer

This November sees the release of the nineteenth novel featuring the curmudgeonly Scottish detective, Detective Inspector John Rebus.

Yes … the nineteenth.

Ian Rankin OBE is the author behind this phenomenon.

A writer who needs no introduction to his legions of fans, crime readers around the globe, not to mention writers like myself who admire his work ethic, talent and longevity with a degree of disbelief.  Never before at Words with Jam Towers has the announcement of our next cover slot caused so many ripples of admiration and coos of delight from other contributors, all of whom seem to admire an author who does little to court publicity away from his writing.

Ian Rankin has been a major contributor to the trend of ‘Tartan Noir’ that has swept through the literary world over the past two decades. And tying in nicely with our theme of ‘Home’ this issue, he has never ventured far from his roots when choosing the perfect location for his work. Since the first Rebus novel ‘Knots & Crosses’ in 1987, he has gone on to achieve worldwide success, with awards, accolades, numerous best sellers – not to mention the occasional television series - to his name. Surely this is a writer who has by now ticked just about every box on his to-do list?

When Ian kindly agreed to give me an interview, I was inundated with questions and ideas. Here, I hope to have narrowed it down to some the most appropriate - and trust you get an insight into the mind of one of the most popular authors of a generation.

So, just how difficult is it to write about the same character for over a quarter of a century, and does the writing get easier as the author matures with age? What books would he like to have written and which writers inspired him in his developing years? Plus, do you want to know a secret …

Read on for our EXCLUSIVE interview:

On Character …

 I’ve recently read and enjoyed ‘Standing in Another Man’s Grave’ and for me there’s a sense of security whenever I meet  John Rebus again. When you think of Rebus, how do you see him? He’s been part of your life for over a quarter of a century, does a character you’ve known so long get easier or harder to write?

·         When I invented Rebus, I never thought of him having a life beyond that first book.  But he got under my skin, and I began to sense that a cop would allow me to write the books I wanted to write  -  books about Edinburgh and about contemporary society.  So I brought him back for a second book and a third... and a seventeenth and an eighteenth.  His longevity is testament to his complexity and tenacity.  Each time I write about him, I learn a bit more about what makes him tick.

You’ve written several books since Rebus retired. What made you go back to him again after a break?

Although Rebus retired from the police, I was aware of a real-life Cold Case unit in Edinburgh and I was sure that's where he would be working  -  as a civilian, alongside other retired cops.  So he lived on in my imagination even after I'd ceased to write about him.  Then one day I got the idea for a story that involved an old unsolved crime.  It made sense that I give it to Rebus.  The first few pages were nerve-wracking though, as I couldn't be sure his voice would still be there.  I needn't have worried.  He seemed thrilled to be back.

With the publication of Rebus’s 19^th novel, ‘Saints of the Shadow Bible’ later this year, how do you keep the storyline consistently up to date and fresh. Does it get easier or harder with longevity?

What keeps any series fresh is... well... complicated.  If I ever felt jaded writing about my characters, I think it would show in the writing.  So far that hasn't happened.  Edinburgh remains an interesting place for me to explore, and of course intriguing crimes appear in the media all the time, providing me with inspiration.  The likes of Rebus, Siobhan and Fox are altered by the cases they work on, so they evolve from book to book.  They are not quite the same in any two books.  Disappointingly (for me) books don't get easier to write - they get harder.  When I was young, I seemed to be full of plots, storylines, ideas.  Now I'm lucky if I get one or two a year.  Maybe the well of stories isn't bottomless after all.

On Location …

 Location seems to play a strong central role in your books, you once described Edinburgh as a ‘crime scene waiting to happen?’ Why? And what does Edinburgh add to your novels?
It wasn't me who called Edinburgh a series of crime scenes waiting to happen - it was Rebus!  That's what the city has become for him.  Me, I love the place.  It is small, compact, but complex.  It has its fair share of social problems, plus political intrigues and the like.  Visitors get to know one side of it, but my task has always been to expand their knowledge - as well as my own.  Larger cities can become confusing or amorphous - but that's not true of Edinburgh.  To me it is the perfect Jekyll and Hyde setting: civilised on the surface but seething beneath.  Just what any crime writer should be looking for in a setting.

On television …

You have been lucky to see many of your books adapted for television. What was your involvement with the adaptations and would you have liked more or preferred less?
The saga of Rebus on TV is long and often tedious.  Fans felt John Hannah too young for the part and were happier with Ken Stott.  I never had any involvement - I've never watched it or looked at a script.  But I grew frustrated that each book/storyline was being given only 45 minutes of screen time, so that nuance, characterisation, underlying theme, and sense of place were lost.  I now have the rights back and am waiting for a TV company brave enough to try Rebus out at a more suitable length - 3 hours plus per book would suit me (and him).  I did really like the Doors Open adaptation that was on TV on Boxing Day last year, even though my cameo ended up on the floor of the edit suite!

On writing …

You name your love of Robert Louis Stevenson, and his creation, Jekyll & Hyde - and the search for good v evil, as a major influence behind Rebus. Can you explain more?

When I started writing novels, I was a PhD student.  My thesis was on Muriel Spark, and I was fascinated by her book The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  Brodie is descended from William Brodie, a real-life Edinburgh character who was gentleman by day, gang-leader by night.  He was a carpenter, and the young Robert Louis Stevenson had a wardrobe in his bedroom made by Brodie.  This may have given him the idea for Jekyll and Hyde.  He was also influenced by James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, an early serial-killer novel.  There has always been this dark gothic interest in evil in Scottish Literature, and I began to sense that Edinburgh was still a Jekyll and Hyde city, a city suited to contemporary crime fiction.  No one was writing it, so I started.  It seems to me that the central question in crime fiction is: Why do we continue to do bad things to each other?  What sets us on a certain path in our lives?  Stevenson was one of the first novelists to tackle that.

What crime novel would you have liked to have written, and why?

There are so many crime novels I wish I'd written.  They include Elmore Leonard's Glitz and James Ellroy's White Jazz, and Silence of the Lambs and (more recently) Gone Girl.  I did learn a lot from Ellroy, and the style, structure and language of my novel Black and Blue is testament to this.

You must have learnt a great deal about writing and publishing over your career. What words of wisdom would you impart to the next generation of writers?

I'm not sure I have any words of wisdom to impart to the next generation of crime writers.  Best if they find their own voice and their own way of doing things.  The worlds of publishing and reading are changing so rapidly, I'm not sure any of us know where we'll be in 5 years.  I do sometimes tell aspiring writers that they have to read a lot, and have to become self-critical.  They have to be ready for rejection but have confidence in their abilities.  They need to write lots.  And they need to get lucky.

And finally …

You’ve obviously won so many awards, honours and accolades throughout your career. What, as a writer, have been your proudest moments and achievements?
The CWA Gold Dagger for Black and Blue stands out for me.  I was a mid-list author.  I'd published a dozen books and none had bothered the bestseller lists.  That just made me more stubborn, but I knew the omens were not good.  If my career didn't pick up, I might have no career at all.  Winning gave me confidence,  and it gave my publisher confidence.  Black and Blue sold four times as many copies as my previous books, and a couple of titles after that I was having my first UK number 1.  So I remember that night with great fondness.  One little secret I'll let you in on: I was presented with the Silver Dagger by mistake that night.  Never having seen the award before, I'd no idea.  But a few months later the error was rectified.  The Gold Dagger was altogether chunkier and more splendid!

Finally, what are your plans for the future and what next do you have in the pipeline?
Well, I have one more book coming out in November, plus my first stage play  -  a thriller  - opening in Edinburgh in September.  But I plan to take next year off.  No new book, no significant new projects.  Maybe even no interviews.

Standing in Another Man’s Grave is now available in paperback (as well as Kindle & hardback) … 

Catherine Called Birdy by Karen Cushman

Reviewed by Liza Perrat

5/5 stars

I thoroughly enjoyed The Midwife’s Apprentice, by Karen Cushman, and was equally enthralled by Catherine Called Birdy, another of her historical fiction novels.

Set in 1290, Catherine Called Birdy is written for the age range 9 and up. The story is told through 14-year old Catherine’s quirky diary entries. The daughter of a minor nobleman, Catherine would prefer to play outdoors with the wild peasants, rather than pursuing the usual occupations of a noble girl, such as embroidering and sewing. She yearns for her independence, and truly wishes she’d been born a boy.

But Catherine is approaching the age of marriage, and her hateful father invites one suitor after another, all of whom the girl finds repulsive. She wants none of this marriage lark, and makes a game of turning away each potential husband. That is, until she meets her match – the ugliest of all the men, who seems determined to make Catherine his wife. She plans and schemes, trying to find a way out of her predicament, learning and growing along the way.

Written in diary form, I think the reader gains a more personal understanding of Catherine’s life, and although hers is starkly different from that of a modern child, Catherine’s responses and actions are strikingly familiar.

A wonderful experience for a young person of our electronic era to meet a child from a long-gone age, I would highly recommend this moving and entertaining tale, but not only for children. Adults too, could not fail to find Catherine Called Birdy amusing and thought-provoking.

No Place Like It by Anne Stormont

‘No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home’ – L. FRANK BAUM, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

However far we wander, wherever we roam, be it ever so humble there’s no place like home – so goes the saying. In order to return to Kansas, Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz , had to click her heels together and chant ‘there’s no place like home’. The notion that home is both unique in itself, and uniquely suited to its incumbents seems universal. From the relatively light-hearted world of popular culture, where television series as diverse as Buffy, Lost and Dr Who have all had episodes entitled ‘No Place Like Home’, to real world locations where war, famine and poverty force its abandonment,  home is central to human existence.

Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a home, but it’s what we all yearn for. ‘All exiles carry a map within them that points the way homeward’ –JACQUELINE CAREY, Kushiel’s Dart. And that yearning is not just on a physical level although of course, along with food and water, a home is vital to our very survival. A home provides for us in other ways. It neatly reverses what we do for it – it furnishes and maintains us. We humans invest not only our money, but also our hearts and souls in our homes. ‘Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life's undress rehearsal, its back-room, its dressing-room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much débris of cast-off and everyday clothing’ – HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, Little Foxes. Our homes sustain us.

So, for writers, this central core of human existence is a rich source of inspiration. From Bilbo’s hobbit house to Christian Grey’s penthouse, all of life, real and imagined can be found in a home.

The concept of home can encompass a house or other dwelling place, a region, a nation or a world. As such it can serve literary and genre fiction well. Works of fiction are often driven by the quest to find a new home or regain a former one.  As well as fuelling the plot, a home can provide a setting. It can be where the main character thinks, acts and interacts ‘I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society’ – HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden; or it can even be a character in its own right, for example Manderley in Daphne Du Mauriers’s Rebecca or Tara in  Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.

Children’s fiction also often relies on the idea of home. It can be depicted as a refuge and place of companionship as in the dwarves' house in Snow White, or the bear’s cave in Jane Chapman and Karma Wilson’s Bear Snores On. It can be a place to dare to explore as in Goldilocks and The Three Bears, or a place full of love and nurture as in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. Then there are the surrogate homes such as the boarding schools of Enid Blyton and JK Rowling’s Hogwarts.

But fictional homes, as in real life, can also be places of discomfort and even danger.  They won’t always be desirable or safe. For example, in children’s fiction, there’s the witch’s confectionery cottage in Hansel and Gretel, there’s Harry Potter’s aunt and uncle’s house, or the house in Neil Gaiman’s Wolves in the Walls. And in adult fiction, there is the menace of the high rise flats in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, the isolated house in Stephen King’s Misery or of Jack and Ma’s eponymous room in Emma Donoghue’s book.

So, for a writer, the theme of home can hardly fail to inspire.

And what of writers' homes? By that I mean what of the places where they do their writing. Some will have old-fashioned book-lined studies, with solid, dark wooden furniture, a mahogany desk and high backed wing chair. Some will have a workroom furnished with light, Scandinavian, self assembly desk and bookshelves, and an adjustable office chair. Some will have a chip board shelf filling the width of the space under the stairs, a corner of the kitchen table, or simply their own lap. Some will write in a special notebook with a favourite pen, some will write on scrap paper with a free-give-away biro, some will have a shared laptop, or their own dedicated desktop pc complete with wide screen. It may be a chaotic family thoroughfare, or a calm, door-closed space. It may be completely quiet, have music playing or be invaded by the noise of children, dogs and neighbours.

But wherever a writer's home is located in physical space, the home of their creativity will always be that place of safety and danger, of routine and surprise, of comfort and fear, of rationality and insanity, of infinite possibility – yes, there’s no place like the writer's imagination.

Anne Stormont is a writer and teacher. She can be a subversive old bat but maintains a kind heart. As well as writing for this fine organ, she writes fiction for adults – mainly of the female-of-a-certain-age persuasion – and for children. She blogs at http://annestormont.wordpress.com  – where you can find out lots more about her.

Criers, Criers Everywhere, but Not a Drop to Drink – How to deal with those pesky one star reviews by Derek Duggan

You’ve spent the last year writing your novel. You went on to peer review sites and discussed it with other writers. They pointed out some minor flaws so you’ve fixed them. They gave you support when your manuscript was rejected by all the major publishing houses and they even went as far to say that it was their [the publishing houses] loss and that they would rue the day they rejected you and your masterpiece. You have been equally supportive to those writers and you’re beginning to suspect that commissioning editors must spend the vast majority of their time ruing all the rejections they send out when they see self-published novel after self-published novel top the Amazon charts and make millions for their authors. You think that they [the commissioning editors] must all be double jointed at both the hip and the knee because such a large part of their job is kicking themselves.

And so, with the full support of your online writers’ community, you decide to go for it and publish the fantastic book yourself. Everything goes well – the cover looks great – or, if you’re a Frosties fan, it looks grrrrrreat. You pause only to wonder what happened to Tony the Tiger’s television career and then you publish.

All your mates from the site are quick to stick up reviews saying how wonderful your book is and as the five star review count hits seven you can almost hear those commissioning editors lacing up their extra heavy boots. A couple of people you know from real life also buy the book and you’ve asked them, if they wouldn’t mind terribly, to post a review (if they’ve enjoyed it – ha-ha). These people, who have to look you in the eye every day, do so and your five star review count reaches double figures.

And then it happens. Someone you don’t know has put up a one star. You go back to your peer group and everyone agrees – this reviewer is either a troll or just plain rude. Apart from anything else they haven’t even given a detailed analysis of the book saying where they thought it fell down. They’ve said things like – ‘All those five star reviews must be from the author’s family…’ How bloody dare he/she say something like that? Everyone knows that if you review a book on a site you must spend at least a week writing and rewriting it so that you can explain in detail what you thought. And, to point out just how stupid the person is that wrote this review, there are two spelling mistakes in their thirty word critique, and they’ve left out some commas (the calling card of the ignorant wanker).

You feel victimised and annoyed and everyone agrees with you.

But hang on – here’s the thing. This person is not a writer. They are simply a customer. They have just bought the book to read. They don’t care that you spent a year writing it and going on to peer review sites etc. They just know that they spent their money on something they didn’t enjoy and they feel like telling people about it. That’s fair enough, right? But, you cry, they shouldn’t be rude. They should explain in beautiful prose what exactly it was that upset them and take some time through close reference and indeed cross reference with other works to explain how the author would have been able to please them. They really should, shouldn’t they? (Boo-hoo).

Uhmmmm, no. They can if they want, but they’re under no obligation to do so. As for being rude, well, that’s just the way people are. People double park, throw litter in the street, answer their mobile phones while talking to you, eat with their mouths open – I mean, the list is endless. These are the same people that buy things.

Think of it like this – your boiler packs in. You call a plumber out. You’re not very impressed with him and although he does the job you’re not satisfied. You decide to leave a review of his services on a plumber review website.  Compare these two -

1.       Piping Plumbers Ltd

Our boiler ceased to function correctly recently so I looked online for a good plumber to come in and fix it for us. I found Piping Plumbers. They had twelve five star reviews so I thought I’d give them a go.

Unfortunately I was not as impressed with the service as the other reviewers. I have long been an admirer of good pipe work, as in the masterful work in the local Garden Centre where the exposed section of the copper piping has been beautifully soldered and aligned perfectly to give a sense of confidence in the functionality of the system. Piping Plumbers soldering left a lot to be desired as the globules of solder were clearly visible on the joints and this drew my attention away from the hot water that I needed to do the washing-up. I always feel, that to truly lose yourself in the hot water coming from the tap you have to make sure that your attention isn’t continually drawn to those small globes of silver, beaded around the joint. His pipe alignment was also slightly off so as the intake pipe and the outflow pipe were not exactly parallel, (out by three full millimetres according to my tape measure) meaning that the sense of continuity was disrupted throughout and I could never truly relax into the water usage.

There was also a lot of detritus left region of the boiler after he vacated the premises which I felt could have been tidied up somewhat as this made me feel like he hadn’t really thought about how the hot water user would respond to this.

The tune he whistled relentlessly while doing the job seemed out of place and, far from sounding cheerful, actually put me on edge the entire time he was there. He was streets away from the tuneful whistlings of the forest workers of Norway who have spent a long time honing their craft before whistling on the job.

I understand that this is the plumber’s first attempt at boiler instillation on his own and so I suggest he might like to take a look at the pipes in the public toilets in Cheswick or the public swimming baths in Ealing and I think he’ll find some useful pointers.

-versus-

2.       Piping Plumbers Ltd

Rough as fuck. Left the place in a mess. Never stopped fucking whistling. All those five star reviews must be from family. Don’t waste your money.

Which one seems more likely?

So, if you get a one star, suck it up.

Glad I could help.

SCRIPTS: Home Box Office by Ola Zaltin

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Question Corner with Lorraine Mace

Points of View and How to Avoid Head Hopping

Katherine sent in this heartfelt plea for help on the subject of point of view perspective: I just can’t seem to get my head round this issue of point of view and head-hopping. I understand about first person and third person and that side of it, but when I ask for feedback on my writing it seems I always get the same comments – that I’m head-hopping. I just don’t understand where I’m going wrong. Writers in my online group keep trying to explain it to me and I’ve also looked on the internet for help, but it all seems so complicated. Do you have an easy way to demonstrate it, so that I can finally understand what everyone else seems to find so easy to grasp?

First of all, Katherine, you are not alone. Many writers find it difficult to get to grips with staying in point of view. Before I give you my tips on keeping within one character’s thoughts, feelings and observations, I would just like to explain (for those who aren’t sure) the viewpoints available.

First person – this is where we remain in the narrator’s head at all times, observing all others from that one perspective. (I went to the cliff and wanted to jump, but I was pulled back by Sarah).

Second person – this is where the narrator is talking to a person throughout the story about that second person’s actions (you went to the cliff and wanted to jump, but you were pulled back by Sarah).

Third person – this is where the story is told from the perspective of the character or characters.

Third person can be broken down into three groups

Limited: readers are only privy to the thoughts of one character. Everyone else in the scene is shown through that character’s eyes, thoughts and feelings. (He went to the cliff and wanted to jump, but he was pulled back by Sarah.)

Limited is the most popular and easiest to master.

Objective: there are no inner thoughts or feelings. Readers only see what happens and what is said. (He went to the cliff to jump. Sarah pulled him back.)

Objective can leave readers without any emotional involvement in what is going on.

Omniscient: here the readers are privy to everyone’s thoughts, feelings and observations – head-hopping from one character to another within a scene. (He went to the cliff and wanted to jump. Sarah wanted to save him and pulled him back).

Omniscient is hard to pull off unless the writer is extremely experienced and a master storyteller.

From your email it seems to me that you are using the omniscient point of view, but it isn’t working for you because you haven’t quite mastered it. For many writers, it is impossible to get right because (unless you are very careful) the reader loses track of who is speaking, whose thoughts we are sharing, whose eyes we are looking through and so on. It becomes tedious to and leaves the reader confused and unwilling to continue.

Regardless of which point of view you choose, you need to know how to deal with writing from that perspective. There is a simple exercise you can carry out to help with this.

Imagine someone in a restaurant. He’s there because he’s had a massive fight with his wife. He observes a couple at another table. He can hear the dialogue, but he doesn’t know the people. He has no other background knowledge outside of what they look like. This means he can only judge them on how they look, what they do and what they say. He is our point of view character and it’s his life we are involved with. The other couple are not important to the story. They are simply there to bring out the point of view character’s thoughts and emotions. We are looking at this scene through his eyes. We’ll call him Jake.

Jake put down his newspaper, eyes drawn to the next table where a middle-aged couple were studying menus. He noted they were both wearing wedding rings, but by the way they avoided eye contact, he didn’t think this was a celebration. Picking up his own menu, he was about to decide on a starter when a whispered exchange drew his attention back to the couple.

“You know how I feel about this, Carol.”

“Yes, John, I do. You’ve never made any secret of it.”

From the above dialogue it is impossible for the reader to know whether the dialogue is friendly, unfriendly, intimate, angry, or any other emotion. Because we can only know what Jake is thinking and feeling, we have to discover the emotions of the couple – and how it impacts on Jake’s own situation – through his eyes and ears.

Let’s see the dialogue again, this time with Jake’s observations included.

Jake glanced across in time to see the man reach out to touch the woman’s hand.

“You know how I feel about this, Carol.”

“Yes, John, I do,” she said, snatching her hand away. “You’ve never made any secret of it.”

Jake wondered what the man had done to make the woman so angry. He sighed. His wife always seemed to look at him like that these days. If they were still together when they reached the couple’s age, he’d be amazed. He imagined reaching out to touch Sarah’s hand and … no, better not to think of Sarah and the fight he’d walked out on.

It’s tempting at this point to slip into the woman’s or the man’s point of view and let the reader know what thoughts and emotions are being felt, but this is where staying in point of view comes into play – we are only interested in Jake’s life – what he thinks and feels. What if Jake had seen something different? What would Jake think?

Jake glanced across in time to see the man reach out to touch the woman’s hand.

“You know how I feel about this, Carol.”

“Yes, John, I do,” she said, taking his hand in hers. “You’ve never made any secret of it.”

Jake sighed. His wife never looked at him like that these days. If they were still together when they reached the couple’s age, he’d be amazed. He imagined reaching out to touch Sarah’s hand and … no, better not to think of Sarah and the fight he’d walked out on.

As you can see from the above, because we are in Jake’s point of view, we can only experience the event from his perspective. Using Jake as a first person point of view would be the same.

I glanced across in time to see the man reach out to touch the woman’s hand.

“You know how I feel about this, Carol.”

“Yes, John, I do,” she said, taking his hand in hers. “You’ve never made any secret of it.”

I sighed. My wife never looked at me like that these days. If we’re still together when we reached that couple’s age, I’ll be amazed. I imagined reaching out to touch Sarah’s hand and … no, better not to think of Sarah and the fight I’d walked out on.

And here is the same scene, this time head-hopping to use the perspective of all three characters.

Jake put down his newspaper, eyes drawn to the next table where a middle-aged couple were studying menus. He noted they were both wearing wedding rings, but by the way they avoided eye contact, he didn’t think this was a celebration. Picking up his own menu, he was about to decide on a starter when a whispered exchange drew his attention back to the couple.

Jake glanced across in time to see the man reach out to touch the woman’s hand.

“You know how I feel about this, Carol,” the man said, wishing she would be more understanding.

“Yes, John, I do,” she said, snatching her hand away. He was so selfish, thinking that a nice dinner made up for all the rest. “You’ve never made any secret of it.”

Jake wondered what the man had done to make the woman so angry. He sighed. His wife always seemed to look at him like that these days. If they were still together when they reached the couple’s age, he’d be amazed. He imagined reaching out to touch Sarah’s hand and … no, better not to think of Sarah and the fight he’d walked out on.

From a reader’s perspective, we have lost touch with Jake. There is no reason for us to know what John or Carol are thinking and the scene is weakened as a result of having their thoughts intrude.

Lorraine Mace is the humour columnist for Writing Magazine and a competition judge for Writers’ Forum. She is a tutor for the Writers Bureau, and is the author of the Writers Bureau course, Marketing Your Book. She is also co-author, with Maureen Vincent-Northam of The Writer's ABC Checklist (Accent Press). Lorraine runs a private critique service for writers (link below). She is the founder of the Flash 500 competitions covering flash fiction, humour verse and novel openings.

Writing as Frances di Plino, she is the author of crime/thriller, Bad Moon Rising, featuring Detective Inspector Paolo Storey. The second in the series, Someday Never Comes, was released on 16^th August 2013.

Writing Critique Service

www.lorrainemace.com

www.flash500.com

Frances di Plino

Writing Home by Dan Holloway

I spent four years of a doctorate studying Eros and the erotic. Not in the narrow sense in which it is sometimes used in a 50 Shades-ish context, but in the fullest sense of the inexplicable, urgent sense of longing that connects two people or things. I’ll never forget a question my supervisor put in one of our reading groups. “How is it,” he asked, “that we can be on a train, and turn a corner on the track, and on entering a particular valley or terrain we have never visited before we can just know that we are home?”

It’s a question we might initially dismiss as a bit of sentimental tosh, or a misunderstanding of the fact that “home is where those you love are.” But if we think about it a little more, it starts to eat away at us. Most people I know have had this kind of experience, this kind of moment of realisation, an anagnorisis or gestalt when, just for a second, every single detail falls into place. And for many of us, that has happened most frequently with places.

This happens so commonly that it’s even become a trope in books – people pull up somewhere they’ve never been before and know they *have* to live there. Interestingly for every Mr Blandings loveliness, there seem to be far more Amityville Horrors – the perfect house that is actually a nightmare, often because what makes it seem perfect is some kind of déja vu that relates back to some past happening (which, in itself, is fascinating because what makes somewhere feel “right” pulls on so many parts of our past).

The notion of “home”, however, is more than a suspense-driving or saccharine trope in books. The intense, almost physical, umbilicus that attaches certain people to certain places is the true emotional core of much great literature. It is more than a question of evoking a sense of place, though it can be a glorious elaboration on that – just think of the cuttings and countryside of The Railway Children. It is about a relationship. Sometimes, and to brilliant effect, it can be not only the key relationship in a book (think Tara in Gone With the Wind) but a key engine in the plot.

At this point, I should advise everyone to go away and come back (or, indeed, not come back because you won’t need anything from me afterwards) once you’ve finished reading pretty much everything ever written by Daphne Du Maurier. Or at the very least Rebecca, which is the locus classicus for “home as plot device.”

Now that you’re back, let’s take a look both at the ways in which the notion of “home” can be used to deepen and layer your writing, and some practical tips for how to accomplish that.

Home as a part, or an embodiment, of the soul

This is most familiar to many readers not through the notion of “home” at all but Philip Pullman’s wonderful depiction of people’s daemons, physical manifestations of their soul. And the power of the construct is nowhere more perfectly illustrated than in the terrifying severances of people from their daemons. Home can perform exactly the same task, and to the same effect. The connection between a character and their home can be so strong that when the home is under threat it is a direct assault on everything that makes the character who they are.

At its extreme, and with the home serving as both the embodiment of and a gigantic metaphor for the person’s soul we have the glorious guignol of Edgar Allan Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher. Less extreme, but no less powerful, are works such as the films Local Hero and The Field, or Conor McPherson’s award-winning play The Weir. These are works in which the home, often a piece of land, is the soil that nurtures a person’s being, and the notion of the person having their roots there is almost physical.

This can be an immensely rich emotional core for a story. When a person’s home is threatened, it is a threat to the person themselves. And it spans genres – from the unquiet spirits whose graves are tampered with in Stephen King’s works through Richard Harris’ craggy man of the land in The Field all the way to Meg Ryan’s bookstore owner in You’ve Got Mail.

The key to making this work – and thus making the reader feel the urgency and desperation of a threat that doesn’t actually physically threaten your protagonist – is making readers believe in the connection. Do it well and the character and their home, and all associated emotions, become transferable in the reader’s mind. One of the most effective ways of doing this is to make the home a peg on which to hang a character’s key emotional ties. That formative teenage summer when they first kissed under the branches of a tree that’s now going to be bulldozed, for example. Maybe they returned to it in times of deepest sorrow and it reminded them of innocence and happiness and lost love with a vividness that is achievable no other way. And with the tree gone, that link to a single place of safety in a painful world is gone.

Home as the place you can’t escape

The connection needn’t be a positive one. Just a real one. Home can be a trap as much as it can be an inspiration. It can be the one thing that keeps you from your dreams. This is a perfect core for an emotionally-centred saga (see under Jonathan Franzen). Often, as in Elfriede Jelinek’s devastating The Piano Teacher or Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, the link comes from the association between home and an overbearing parent whose clutches one spends the course of the book trying, but failing, to escape. Even when the parent dies, the association between them and home cannot be broken – the domineering parent lives on through the home. This can happen to terrifying effect as in Psycho or take the form of high melodrama as in The Godfather.

In such stories, the tension of the story comes from the character’s attempt to fly the roost. It’s a high risk strategy because even if you get it right, the reader will scream at the page “For goodness’ sake just leave!” And if you get it wrong the reader will instantly lose faith – “Why didn’t s/he just walk out of the door?”

What you need to do as a writer is make the shadow a home casts sufficient to make it believable that even though your protagonist could very easily physically leave, psychologically they can’t. The cheap shot way of doing this is to show a time in earlier life when they tried, and failed, and the home welcomed them back with, as it were, a sinister smile. A subtler but much harder way of doing it is to make their home stand for one half of their being in a war between two sides of them – the side we root for that stands for freedom and escape and the side that holds them back that stands for the sadness of the past.

Home as the place you want to end up

Just as fecund as the notion that home is the place you start out at is the notion of home as the place you want to end up at. The standout example of this, of course, is Homer’s Odyssey, which makes a whole glorious epic essentially out of what happens once the action’s finished.

The driving idea here is the conflict between restlessness and rest. Home, which may be a real place (The Odyssey) or some kind of ideal (Don Quixote, or any other “grail quest”), offers the promise of peace, of an end to troubles that stem from the feeling of not belonging.

This is the ideal heart for any kind of picaresque, anything where you want to send your protagonist on a series of external or internal quests, fighting internal or external obstacles in order to end up at an internal or external home. Often highly symbolic, this is a narrative framework in which pretty much every event is a metaphor for “coming to terms with who you are.”

To make this work, you need to make the reader believe that your protagonist really is in dire straits at the start of the book, and really would be better off if they arrived at the end safely “home.” Do that successfully and you give genuine drama and tension to the battle against the obstacles that stand in their way because you have raised the stakes. There are three ways you can do this. The first is the dual setting narrative. This is effectively what Homer does, switching between Odysseus on his travels and his wife, Penelope, and her travails at home in Ithaca. It’s also done to great effect in the movie The Truman Show, which makes us empathise with Truman’s desperate attempt to free himself from the artificial world that has been his life by showing us the outside world that’s looking in on him.

The second method is the ideal. This is employed by the grail legends, stories about El Dorado, and, by and large, by The Matrix. Home in these narratives is almost mythical, both in its significance for the protagonist and in the fact that no one knows whether it is real or symbolic. This is almost always used as a contrast to a present day that is unbearable – from the ravaged lands of the grail legends to the numbness of life in the matrix. This creates real disadvantages for you as a writer – you don’t get to tell the reader if “home” exists or not till the final page, so you’d better do an incredible job at making the stakes both high and the goal seem winnable (this is done best when readers know that even if the physical aim of the quest doesn’t exist, the inward transformation the character undergoes makes the journey worth their while).

Finally, and my personal favourite (because it lacks the “stagedness” of the first option and the credibility issues of the second, and plain appeals to my sentimentality) is the use of nostalgia. Home, here, is a place we distantly remember but the imprint of which has become indelible to the extent we spend our lives looking for a way back (again, symbolism figures high and the external and internal journeys mirror each other – this is done to wonderful effect, for example, in the film Citizen Kane). What adds extra poignancy is the way our memories fix events and places. Whilst sometimes returning to one’s home (as in the beautiful film The Straight Story) can give one a final peace, often we arrive to find that everything has changed and the bubble is pierced. In a great work of literature, this piercing of the dream doesn’t matter, because your protagonist has come to learn along the way that the physical trappings of the “home” they sought are of far less worth than the significance of the memory.

There are many other ways in which the notion of “home” can enrich, and clarify, your writing – home can be a motivating force for the protagonist who will do anything for it, or rather than be the place you can’t escape it can be the place you long to stay. But the key to all of these is to make the connection between character and home believable and important. Get it right, and it can give your readers a whole extra level of emotional investment in your story.

Dan Holloway is a poet and novelist and regular contributor to the Guardian Books Blog. He is also the host of the touring spoken word troupe The New Libertines, who will next be performing at Woodstock Poetry Festival on November 16th. Dan will also be a panelist at the Self Publishing Summit in London on November 9th.