TAKE ME THERE
Margaret James looks at the way certain locations become associated with books set there
For advice on writing setting in your fiction from Ian Ayris, turn to Creative Writing Building Blocks on p22
When we’re writing fiction, do our chosen physical settings matter?
Sometimes, yes, because if a reader is already familiar with – for example – Cornwall, Yorkshire or Shetland, grounding a novel in a specific place might be a helpful strategy when offering it to a publisher, who could then utilise the setting for marketing and publicity.
Brontë Country, Cookson Country, Hardy Country – these alternative versions of England were superimposed on actual geographical landscapes, which were then reimagined to suit the authors’ storylines, while still remaining accessible to readers making pilgrimages to the places where Cathy and Heathcliff lived out their doomed affair, or to the Wessex where Tess met Alec D’Urberville. They’re distillations of their creators’ imaginations, however, and they don’t really exist.
Crime novelists tend to rely on settings to take their readers there. Multi-million-selling crime writer Joy Ellis’s DI Nikki Galena series is set in the Lincolnshire Fens, where ‘the great open skies brood over marshes, farms and nature reserves, and there are still villages where the oldest residents have never set foot outside their own farmland.’