In my seemingly endless quest for writing improvement, I return time and again to the three points of my magic triangle: Characters, Plot and Setting. This time I want to look at settings and why they influence a novel so much.

Let me give you an example: One of my favourite stories is that of Romeo and Juliet, and yet I don’t like the musical West Side Story. Why is that? In a word: Setting. Last year I saw an excellent production of this musical, but I still felt the same vague dissatisfaction I had felt as a teenager when a helpful teacher showed us the movie of West Side Story in an effort to help us understand the plot and passions of Shakespeare’s masterpiece.

The story of Romeo and Juliet – to me anyway – belongs in an historical, romantic Italian setting, and no amount of great dancing, fantastic music and memorable songs can sway it for me into the world of warring gangs whose passion and cause is probably even more poignant than those of the Capulets and Montagues. Sorry, Leonard Bernstein – I know it’s just me, but I can’t change the way I feel.  

People often ask me: “When you start a new novel, do you think of the story first and then find characters to fit, or do you think up some characters and weave a story around them?” I can’t answer that, because I have come to realise that I start with the setting: a place that moves me, and then I build both characters and plot around it.

I am a great believer in that old chestnut: Spirit of Place. I love to visit new places and soak up the atmosphere, the weather, the history, and the invisible threads that weave it together. A while back I realised that if I am going to be a writer for the rest of my life, I need to travel to exotic, faraway places and set my novels there.

Sadly, I just can’t afford to do that on my salary and with my country’s diabolical exchange rate, so I have to rely on past memories. I was lucky enough to travel when I was younger. In my wild impetuous youth I also changed jobs every three years or so and started life anew several times in a different city in my beautiful country. Some of the jobs I took involved plenty of travel and in each place I visited, I made copious notes and took loads of photos.

What shines through the most when I look back on these is the memory of how each new place made me feel on first contact, and it is this essence that a writer needs to capture in order to provoke a similar response in the reader. I can’t write about Russia or China because I haven’t been to either. Armchair travelling – books and television documentaries and staring down at Google Earth from above cannot give you that spirit of place that an actual visit can. You need to breathe its air and wonder why it feels different. For example, I have noticed that favourite foods in one place are ignored in another – for no logical reason – and that new tastes acquired along the road often lose their flavour in the next destination. Why? I don’t know but that’s how my senses respond.

A while back I dreamed up a complex plot involving a sojourn in the high remote mountains of Peru, because my best friend had been there. Six chapters into writing the first draft, I found that no amount of quizzing her and reading travel guides could make my words ring true because I had never been there. Since I couldn’t afford a trip there, I had to find another setting – one that I knew.

The answer was on my doorstep. A mere two or three hours from where I live is the magnificent Drakensberg mountain range on the western border of KwaZulu-Natal. Not only is it a world heritage site, but I have been there many times, taken numerous photographs, soaked up the atmosphere of wild beauty and dreamed countless dreams about those mountains on my return home. In fact, I even bought a plot of land up there a few years back for when I retire, because I love the place so much.

A slow process of transition began to take place in my manuscript as my characters and plot adapted to their new environment. Two weeks later I was back on track and clocking up a word count faster than I had done on any of my previous novels. Just over a month later, I wrote those magic words “The End” and my first draft was complete.

Of course, the story doesn’t end there. I have been busy on it for another year and written another six drafts since then. Hopefully all will be revealed in the next few months.

You’ve probably heard about the Rule of Three: if your characters are on a quest, they will fail the first and second time they try something, and only get it right on the third attempt. Think Goldilocks – too hot, too cold, just right; too hard too soft, just right. And so on. Think Cinderella – the prince tries the slipper on the first stepsister, then the
second, and finally hits the magic on the third, when he tries it on Cinderella.

Basic fairy tale stuff, right?

When applied to novel-writing, the Rule of Three allows the characters to have two character-building attempts at something in order to crank up the tension before the third attempt. Complications arise and the story is spun out along an extended road which leads ultimately to the climax, usually in that section of the story which scriptwriters refer to as the third act – in itself a version of the Rule of Three.
 
I have another variation on this Rule of Three. Most writers recognise the important correlation between characters and plot, but often sideline that third vital element in story-telling: setting. In my mind this is also a Rule of Three. Not a consecutive 1, 2, 3, but three points of equal importance. A sort of magic triangle, if you like.

Good fiction writing has to be a triangulation between unique characters, a particular plot, and a specific setting. If any one of these three is taken away and replaced with something else, the story cannot be the same, because its very existence depends on the mix between only those people, that specific place and a plot unique to them. The story couldn’t happen anywhere else, or to any other people, or unfold in any other way, because it is the relationship between those three that makes a story what it is.

You’ve probably realised since my last blog that I have a bit of a thing about art forgeries. I even wrote a book about it: Benicio’s Bequest. But what I want to talk about here is not my book, but my favourite TV series. 

The American TV series White Collar is about an art forger who is released on parole in order to work as a consultant to the white collar crime division of the FBI. My niece, herself a fine artist, gave me the first three seasons of this series and it is now my favourite. The writers of the series have conjured plenty of witty repartee between Neal (the forger) and Peter (his FBI boss), and of course it helps that the actor playing Neal is extremely pleasant on the eyes, but is the gorgeous Neal Caffrey the only reason I like to
watch? No, there’s more to it than that. 

The main character may be a forger, but there’s nothing fake about his hatred of guns and violence. His crime is as clean as such an activity can be, and the action comes not from the usual blood and guts that is the standard fare with most television, but from the convoluted storyline as it swings between cases that both Neal and Peter work at solving, and Neal’s rather more underhand activities with his friend Mozzie. Neal’s fast painting skills and ability to copy with the right materials have saved the day more times than even Peter realises.

When I first tried to analyse what made me enjoy the series so much, several things came to the fore. First, you need great characters that you feel an affinity with, characters that you root for. Even when Neal and Peter are working against each other, I still want both of them to win. And then there’s the quirky Mozzie who provides solutions and problems in equal quantities, sometimes working against Neal, and sometimes colluding (against his will) with Peter. In relationships, never underestimate the importance of the triangle. It doesn’t have to be a love triangle, and divided loyalties can make for great conflict in any plot. 

Second, the overall plot and premise of the series. Perhaps it’s just me, but I am fascinated by the lengths to which someone will go in order to be thought one of the great masters, albeit not publicly. The artistry and dedication required for forgery is no easy task. How gratifying it must be to stand in the background and hear the critics heap praise on a work that only you know is yours and not the work of Rembrandt or Picasso. And we, the audience, get to vicariously share this feeling with Neal the perfectionist. He’s a great artist who just happens to be on the wrong side of the law.

Third, the setting: New York in all its glory. The good and the bad: Central Park, Chinatown, the overhead cable car, millionaire apartments, the world’s most famous department stores, banks and boutiques, yellow taxi-cabs, as well as the occasional sleazy drugstore. Neal’s career started when he arrived in New York and met Mozzie in Central Park.

The more detailed settings include the FBI offices, where the transparent glass walls allow for much casual subterfuge and pretence under the watchful eye of authority – on the part of both good and bad guys – and Peter’s cosy home with his wife provides a haven away from the bustle of his work place. 

Perhaps the best setting of all is the magnificent rooftop apartment that Neal’s leases after his stint in prison. It belongs to the widow (another glorious character, by the way) of a deceased criminal who had an eye for beauty. This sky-lighted bachelor pad has its own unique view of the Chrysler building. What a perfect place for Neal to paint and plan his next work of skulduggery with Mozzie! 

Not only does the series take full advantage of the local landmarks, but part of what drives Neal is that he knows he wouldn’t be happy living anywhere other than New York, and this causes much of his inner conflict in the third series. It is the Setting which changes that solid straight line between the two points of Characters and Plot, drawing them into a wider shape before fleshing out the sides and substance of a unique triangle.

This magic triangle rings true with any good story. Try it out for yourself and see.

I love well-made movies. Some pedantic part of me gets a kick out of seeing someone else’s work properly acted and directed, lit well, cleverly filmed and edited, then overlaid with a gloriously unforgettable soundtrack. It’s like one step further than reading a well-thought-out book, built around a plot that has enough twists to keep you guessing, cliff-hangers to keep you reading and the right amount of downtime to allow you to fall in love with memorable characters you can root for.

I guess I’m not really into blockbuster sci-fi (probably because I don’t understand the scientific part of it) and I prefer the special effects to be of a more subtle persuasion. Hey, don’t get me wrong – I loved the spaceships, light-sabres, the jump into hyperspace and that amazing one-take shot of Alderaan being blown up by the Death Star in the original Star Wars movie, but all of those things appealed to me because the story itself had heart and was more fantasy than actual sci-fi. The idea of one all-powerful force controlling everything, and good triumphing over evil... Well, that’s the ultimate fantasy, isn’t it?

But what I really want to talk about here is the company that was created to do the special effects for that movie: Industrial Light and Magic. Once upon a time I had a dream to run away from high school, stow away on a ship to America, hitchhike to California and throw myself at the feet of George Lucas, show him my art portfolio and beg him to give me a job building models and creating galaxies at ILM.

I didn’t, of course, but several years later – when I had been a working girl for some years – I bought a beautiful book on the first ten years of ILM, with glossy, double-page fold out photos of some of their most memorable creations. What a feast it was! Unfortunately it turned into a feast of another kind when a colony of termites ate their way up through the floor in my subterranean cottage and gobbled up two thirds of the bottom shelf of one of my bookcases, but that’s another story...

Perhaps one of the most fascinatingly subtle things I ever saw, with regard to ILM, was a documentary on the making of Robert Zemeckis’ 1988 movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Among many other subjects touched on in the doccie were the before and after shots of the first time we see Jessica Rabbit singing in the nightclub.

Like the rest of that movie, the scene was animation mixed with live action. The first shot showed the animated Jessica in her sexy dress, as she moved about the stage, captivating her audience – in particular the Toon-hating character played by actor Bob Hoskins. That original scene was fine as it was, but what captivated me the most was the same shot after ILM had done their stuff on her. Subtle as the wave of a fairy godmother’s wand, Jessica’s skin gained the lustre of live flesh, just as her dress and hair acquired a gleam and a sparkling sheen that had been absent before. Suddenly she was a fully-rounded, fleshed-out character who dazzled the eyes of all who watched her, to the exclusion of all else.

Now that’s what I want in my writing – a dusting of light and magic!

Someone once said that it takes hard writing to create easy reading, and I am certainly finding that to be true. Like the unseen heroes of ILM, it can take a writer months of industry to build up an effect that is over in a moment, but hopefully remains forever etched in the memory.

In Stephen King’s book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft he mentions two desirable concepts that all writers should strive for in their work: page-turn-ability and resonance. The first keeps the reader involved while they’re actually reading, but the other stays in their memory after the book is finished, and encourages them to buy the next book by that author.

Not since the invention of Guttenberg’s printing press has it been this easy for just anyone to write and publish a book. In this day of easily downloadable e-books, anyone can get their first book read by someone. The real test is whether that someone comes back to buy the second one.

Ah well, back to the writing. Now where can I find that magic ILM wand?