Make it Real
How do you immerse readers in your fiction? Psychological drama author Suellen Dainty shows how she gets under readers’ skin in her new novel The Housekeeper
Suellen Dainty
This business of novel writing is full of pitfalls and problems and the solutions offered are many. Some make more sense than others.
The only one that ever made sense to me came from the acclaimed writer, Richard Kerridge, who was one of my teachers at Bath Spa University. He called it embodiment. We had to feel the dust on our characters’ feet, the sun on their head and the fear in their bellies. This was the solution to most of our writing problems; how to create atmosphere, how to avoid the cardinal sin of show not tell, and how to strike a balance between plot and character.
He did warn us that there was no simple template for this. A writer could dive straight in, and sink or swim in the first few pages, or proceed with caution. In The Housekeeper, I chose the latter route, with at least six or seven drafts, in my attempt to create an immersive atmosphere that would become gradually more malignant.
The downside was that I’d chosen first person narration and, for reasons known only to my sub-conscious, had decided to stick with it, even though it carried with it so many well catalogued problems – the danger of too much introspection and too many sentences beginning with ‘I’, the narrowness of vision, the tendency towards bias, and the difficulties of finding a credible narrative voice.
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May 2017
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