Let’s imagine that the setting of a novel is a summer’s
garden. (OK, so whether as reader or as writer, you may actually favour books
set somewhere rather darker and more urban, but please bear with me. I’m a
novelist – it’s a metaphor, all right?)
In the author’s head is an image of the garden, perfect in
every particular.
Her
challenge is to convey that image to the reader (or one that is slightly
different, since every reader’s experience of an imagined world must
necessarily be unique). She must conjure it as clearly and vividly as she sees
it herself – but do so without describing in tedious detail each leaf and blade
of grass.
How is this magical transformation to be effected?
The first step is a detailed ground plan.
Above
all, it is vital that the writer’s fictional world should not be
under-imagined. She must be familiar with every part of it, whether visible or
invisible. The reader may never see what’s over the wall or behind the tree but
the writer must know, just the same. It enables her to write with total
assurance of this place of her invention, and her confidence will transfer
itself to the reader, even though the hidden sweep of lawn or shrubbery is
never actually revealed. The ground plan is for the author alone and does not
appear upon the page, but without this close knowledge the scene will remain
unreal: an artefact, a stage set.
Then it is time to put pen to paper. The author’s task is to
transmit an impression of the perfect whole through the revelation of selected
parts – in much the same way as a painter may convince us that we see upon her
canvas a landscape all complete, while in fact large areas outside the key
focus of the eye may be hatched in only cursorily or washed to a hazy blue.
It seems to me that there are two main techniques that the
writer, like the artist, may adopt.
The first is the broad brush approach: the application of
bold, outline strokes to sketch out the overall shape of the setting, to give a
sense of its defining features.
Given
a sufficiently suggestive skeleton, each reader’s imagination will be fired to
furnish for itself the colour and contour, the light and shade which bring the
scene to life.
Less obvious, perhaps, but equally effective in my
experience, is the opposite approach: working not from broad outline but from
small, selected details. Switch the focus away from the general view and depict
instead, at close quarters and minutely observed, some characteristic element
from which the reader can infer the nature of the whole.
How better than to evoke a rose garden than to describe in
fine, filigree detail the petals of a single rose?
Rosy Thornton writes contemporary women's fiction. She is
the author of five novels, the latest of which, 'Ninepins', won her the East
Anglian Book Awards prize for fiction in November 2012. To pay the bills, She
lectures in Law at the University of Cambridge, where she is a fellow of
Emmanuel College.
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