Writing blog: get creative

Part 1 – Place

Most of you will know something about me, even if it is only my name or the name of one of my books, but can I introduce myself more personably with this little short film Penguin made for me.

As you see from it, I live in a pretty inspiring place in Australia, but in fact that is only half my life.

The other half is in Prague in Eastern Europe. It is this incredible ancient stone city, which sometimes looks like a scene from a traditional fairy story, complete with twisty cobbled streets that looks amazing when snow sifts down over them. There is even a on a hill that shines above the city like a beacon at night and which you reach by traveling along The King’s Road. One of the Kings that inhabited it was, if not mad, then very eccentric. He kept a whole tiny street of houses within the castle grounds which were called the Golden Road, because his pet alchemists lived in the houses there, working away at trying to figure out how to transform lead into gold for him! A black serpentine river flows through the centre of the city and one of the many bridges that crosses it is a fabulous stone bridge with watch towers at either end and great dark looming statues either side that watch you pass.

It is a pretty inspiring place to live, not just because it looks like a fairy tale, but also because it is not a fairy tale city. It is a city where thousands of people live ordinary mundane lives. There are Benetton ads and band posters and bus stop graffiti that sometimes makes the city look like the setting for a punk fairy tale.  I think that is what I love most about it.  That feeling of contrast. Seeing a girl with Goth black fingernails and lips, intent on reading a kindle on the steps of a church that is hundreds and hundreds of years old, unaware that stone gargoyle’s are leering down at her.

I have always been really inspired by contrast- that is to say things that are together which seem not to belong together. The contrast exaggerates the differences between the two things. In Prague it might be the combination of ancient buildings with crumbling stone statues holding up the doorways, daubed with graffiti or Church with a fence where one of the iron spikes has been absorbed by a tree, or it might be that bridge near my home in Apollo bay where if you stand under it and look one way, you see only a sliver of stony grey sand flecked with sea wrack and wild silver sea running away to the horizon but if you look the other way, you see a deep dark, heavily forested fold running away between two steep hills.

The other thing about place is how weather can change it. For instance I often pass through the grounds of Castle Prague at night- you can actually do that here and there is a tram stop on the other side of it that I can reach more quickly walking through the castle grounds than by going around. Sometimes at night in summer when I cut through the grounds, passing the guards in powder blue uniforms at the front gate, whose eyes do no more than flicker to note my passing, I will see a door flung open and get a glimpse of a ball where women in lavish full length gowns dance with men in suits. Another night, I might cut through the cobbled alley alongside the immense and wonderfully gothic St Vitas Cathedral, also within the grounds, and it will be raining hard so I have to duck around narrow torrents of water pouring down from the gaping mouths of the gargoyles (which are actually decorations on the end of the drain pipes). Another night it will be snowing hard and the cobbles are buried under a soft thick pelt of white that swallows all sound while above me the watching gargoyle’s have developed tusks and fangs of ice.

You see how the place is the same and yet simply because the time or the weather change, the mood of the place is very different.

One exercise I love is to write a story about someone doing something, usually thinking about something that just happened or about something he has to do that scares him or makes him angry or happy- in the same place, but at four different times of the year, day of the week, time of day and season.  To be more specific and clear, let’s say you decide your place is going to be the bus stop near your house, and you are going to write about a boy who has had an argument with his mum or dad. All that will happen is that he will sit there thinking about the argument, re running it in his mind, the way you do. First you have it happen on a hot summer Saturday night, then again on a freezing cold winter Sunday morning, another time during a wild spring storm in the middle of the morning and finally at four in the afternoon on a Friday afternoon in Autumn.  You can see that everything the boy would notice around him would be very different and you would have to weave his feelings and thoughts about his surroundings into your story. Try it and see how the different time and season affects the matter in tour story.  Certainly our boy sitting at the bus stop will think different thoughts at midnight. Might he not feel scared or insecure or unhappy to be away from home, or even regret the fight because the lateness and darkness remind him that he is not fully grown? And again, getting wet in a storm, with lightning flashing might make him unhappy about the fight, but he is a lot less likely to feel regret or fear for himself if it is a Saturday morning when he is sitting there, with people all around.

Try it.

Choose a place and a situation where someone is thinking about something they have done or seen, and write four little pieces. There does not have to be a story. Just make it an evocative piece where you try to make the reader feel the place as vividly as you can, and the mood of your character- try making the character a first person narrator. That is, you write from his or her point of view, saying I did this and I did that. This usually makes it a lot easier to get inside your character.

Before you start writing, try imagining how the place might change by thinking about your five senses. What do I see here, what do I smell here, what do I taste etc. Start out by writing a list of those things your senses would take in, to get yourself in the mood. A list is a lot easier than a story. One step is the beginning of a journey, and who knows how far it will take you…