Sensory detail

On 31^st August 2010 I visited one of my management students at the care home where she works. It’s a lovely old building overlooking the bay at Grange-over-Sands in Cumbria. It reminded me that I need to make notes of details for when Judith goes to visit her mother at Mill View. I have been to lots of care homes in the course of my work and I haven’t found that they vary much in terms of their general ambience, even between old buildings and brand new ones.

The next day I read an article about research and some of the points I took from it were to visit the places you are writing about, talk to experts and try to incorporate all the senses to give a sense of the places.

Some features which I can include for the care home:

·         What you have to do to get in and out  - getting through the security systems. As my story moves on, I will make more of this as Judith is kept waiting in the large porch area unable to get through to reception until a member of staff comes to let her in.

·         The look of the place – clean reception area, and corridors off it like hotels with rooms opening off them on both sides.  The doors are often open so anyone walking down can look in which never seems very private and dignity-maintaining to me. The living rooms tend to be large with big windows and big straight-backed arm chairs and rich dark-coloured carpets. The care home where Judith’s mother is also has gardens which can be seen from the lounge and some of the rooms.

·         The sounds – bells, buzzers and intercom before you get inside, then the hush of the reception area. Sometimes there is the sound of a television in a lounge or resident’s room.

·         The smell – usually a very clean and clinical smell. Staff are always cleaning something.

This is a good reminder for me to go back over other locations to add different types of sensory detail. I haven’t included taste in the example above as I have never eaten in a care home and Judith won’t either.  There will be other opportunities for that in the Cafe-Bar and in the meals that Judith shares with other people.

The Writers’ Group

As year one at University finished I didn’t want to be left without the support of fellow writers for long periods of time so I joined Mungrisdale Writers in the beautiful Lake District. It is a well-established group led by the author Angela Locke (www.angelalocke.co.uk) for most of the year and by other authors and lecturers during the summer.

I thought at first that it would not have any direct relevance to my book, it being quite structured, very much tutor-led and quite focused on poetry. I decided, however that I would try to take one thing away from each session that I attended. Here are a few examples of how I have done that, although it hasn’t happened with every session.

Angela asked us to imagine we were writing the opening scene for a film called The Antique Shop. We had to give stage directions referring to the shop from outside, inside, in relation to anyone who was there, or anything else that came to mind.  Our homework (oh yes, we get homework as well) was to think about the back-story for the shop and its characters. I immediately knew that Phoenix Antiques would be the opening scene in the Hexham part of the story.

Nick Pemberton, a guest tutor in the summer of 2010, asked us to write a series of statements that were not related to each other. This is not as easy as it sounds, but one of them jumped out at me as an angle to the story that I hadn’t considered. It led to other trains of thought.

Jannie Howker, another guest tutor, suggested we write some dialogue around a process being performed. I have taken that idea and have set conversations that happen over the course of a meal, while feeding the ducks, and of course during tasks being carried out in the cash office.

Finally Mike Smith talked about starting the story by establishing the time and place early on and giving a clue as to the ambience and the theme. He also talked about endings and it gave me a chance to make sure that all the strands and loose ends would tie up together.

Writing this today I realise that I have not reflected on the last few sessions. That’s a job for tonight while I catch up with an episode of Gray’s Anatomy and have a glass of wine.

Now, there’s a bit of time, place ambience and setting!

Getting to know some of the others

Having finished Short Form Biogs for two of the main characters that Judith meets in Carlisle, it was a lovely surprise to find that I liked them more than I thought I would.

Mr. (call me Ken) Wilson, one of the store managers started off as being a show-off and a flirt with no real substance. Fleshing out his character enabled me to find good reasons for why he is back living with his parents aged 36 and never having worked anywhere other than the supermarket since he was a school boy.  I think he will turn out to be quite a sweetheart.

The other person is Maureen, the cash office supervisor.  Judith resents her for no reason other than that of status. She was her own boss in Hexham and doesn’t like being told what to do. She knows she has a vastly superior intellect to Maureen but is concealing that fact from everyone so as not to draw attention to herself. Another reason they don’t get along is that they have some similar characteristics such as being perfectionists in their work. In contrast to Judith, though, Maureen has grown up in the area and has many friends, a busy social life and is a pillar of the community in the village where she lives.

As they spend most days cooped in the claustrophobic atmosphere that is the cash office, it is only a matter of time before Judith takes action to put Maureen where she thinks she deserves to be and begins to set her up and make her look careless.

A note in my journal for 17^th August 2010 says,

‘The way my diary is looking for autumn I need to crack on and write a best-seller LOL. I need to look at the storyline regularly and build in plenty of tension and drama. I must decide who the reader is going to like and side with – but it mustn’t be Judith.’

Happily, my diary filled up with work, although they say the best writing happens when the author is hungry. The cash office is just one area of drama and tension.

A little aside

Just to leap into the present day, I had a meeting with my tutor this afternoon. She has given me lots of tips for the next edit BUT said that she has 'no doubt that this novel will be published one day' and that it is 'compelling'.  How's that for motivation? I am so motivated. Bring on the next edit.

I also asked her how she would categorise it in terms of genre (we talk like that) and she said literary fiction with psychological undertones. Love it.

The voices

There is something I haven’t told you yet. It relates back to the second blog entry called ‘How the story began’ and to the different voices that you can use in writing.

The Carlisle section of the story is written in the first person. We are in Judith’s head the whole time. We know what she is thinking and hear the conversations she has with other people and with herself. We only see what she sees; no-one does anything that we don’t know about at the same time as her. By the same token, we don’t know what anyone else is really thinking; we only have Judith’s perceptions.

Because she spends a lot of time alone and too much time thinking, she starts to call Joanna ‘you’ and talk to her directly in her mind. This starts right at the beginning of the book:

Monday 14^th September 2009

So it’s come to this; redeeming a free cup of coffee after work in a café bar in Carlisle. God help me! I must stop thinking like this. It’s not going to change anything.

    I study the back of your head instead. Head-instead. Redhead-instead. Hurry up and get off the phone, Redhead. You dial another number.

It is quite intensive and sometimes exhausting writing like that and I find myself thinking like Judith for hours afterwards. I wonder what it’s like to read it.

I decided that the Hexham part would have to be written in the more ‘normal’ third person. It will add breadth to story because we will be able to get to know other people better and get to know what they really think about Judith.

The notes I made in my journal on 9^th August 2010 having made that decision were:

·           It will give some relief from the intensity of Judith’s mind

·           It will give an insight to the way she affects the lives of others even when she is not there to observe it

·           The past can be referred to as well as the present time

The time-line

My biggest breakthrough came when I was sitting in the car showroom waiting for my car to be serviced. In the time the job took, I transferred the information from the mind-maps of how Judith Dillon’s life in Carlisle would impact on other people’s lives to a time-line.  Taking one month at a time (down one side of the page) and the names of the key people across the top, I noted when she would meet each one, in what circumstances, and described roughly and briefly what will happen at each stage. By doing it this way I could also add in how the other characters would interact with each other at that time.

The book is a story of two periods of Judith’s life, almost exactly one year apart. The Carlisle year is the most recent one so the next thing to decide was how to present the previous year and what had happened in her home town of Hexham

Option 1 – do the whole story as a series of police interviews. In that way Judith can be asked questions about the present and the past by the same person and interlink the stories on-going.

Option 2 – present the back story first then go on to the present chronologically. I decided against that as a lot is made of ‘starting the story in the right place’, and I felt the right place was Judith starting her new life in Carlisle. Her reasons for having moved away would become apparent later.

Option 3 – and the one I went with – to alternate chapters between her new life and old. Chapter 1 is September 2009 in Carlisle and Chapter 2 is September 2008 in Hexham. Chapter 3 is October 2009 in Carlisle and Chapter 4 is October 2008 and so it goes on. In this way both stories are able to unfold together and the reader can see Judith making the same mistakes.

The next stage – to do the timeline for the back-story in Hexham and to decide how it ends.

I like this story more and more. I can make Judith Dillon into a right scheming little madam.

Do research now or press on regardless?

Having done another mind map to develop the parts of the story where Judith interacts with the other characters, I realised that some research was needed. Some people can press on with gaps and notes to remind them to go back to look things up but I can’t do that. I need to know things, maybe because I don’t like wasting time pursuing something that I will have to change later.  The notes I made on 31^st July 2010 were:

·           Find out how an accountant can swindle money from a client and not be found out for a long time

·           Find someone to talk through a scam in a supermarket cash office

·           I need a map of Carlisle to confirm road names

·           I need to visit Hexham next time I go across to the northeast and walk around with a map

·           I need to visit some cafe-bars to get clear in my mind what Cafe Bar Sierra looks like

A twitter-friend who is an accountant helped me with the first point and also gave me a list of things that might make people have doubts about the viability of the business. I don't think he likes to be known as my consultant for dodgy accountancy so he will remain anonymous until I have his permission to thank him when the book is published. (Still keeping the faith).

I worked out the cash office scam myself – I didn’t know I could be so devious.

I used the internet for road names in Carlisle.

The trip to Hexham worked out really well. A lot of questions answered and I took photographs of where Judith Dillon’s office now is, where her friend’s antique shop is, the location of the main car park and the path leading from the town to the station.

Much as I fancy the cafe-culture lifestyle, I didn’t visit enough cafe-bars to find the perfect setting so I have roughly drawn one. This means that I can add more detail about what it looks like, sounds like and smells like in the next edit.