People vs Place

At the writing group the other evening, we’d got on to characters over the tea and biscuits. “I always write the place first,” I said to a bemused silence. Most of the group have known each other for years, and the stories I’ve heard all have a definite style: character-led, family and marriage, childhood, triumphs and tragedies. They all bubble with a Dickensian inner chorus demanding to be written down. Me, not so much.

It turned into an interesting discussion on approach because each month, we start from the same point: a prompt, and write a short story to it. To them, place was the wrapping paper around folk doing, feeling and saying interesting things. People they’d met or heard arguing behind them at a coffee shop. Family members, friends, and strangers glimpsed through the windows of a bus. Reimagined or remembered.

I’m just terrible at people; I would rather crawl over broken glass than write dialogue. Give me honeybees, a herd of llamas or a mechanical giraffe any day. It’s not for want of trying, but I have to get my feet planted before any story can happen, and that’s not an approach the group had considered. My story about the Viking ship, for instance, started out just a bleak fjord in midwinter. Then a ship, then a slave touching up the paint on the prow etc.

Here’s an example from a WIP – a #crime-noir set in late 1930s New York.:

The Mansion was a typical Midtown meet-and-scoot place. One big room with a two-story ceiling. Dominated by a wooden horseshoe bar, nine barmen holding the ramparts and polished by a thousand elbows. Busy, loud, and a constant flow of people. The ideal place to lose a tail or keep a tryst. Luckily for me, Lola was more interested in drinking: her third stiffener in hand and no sign of slowing down. So I settled in, sipped on my beer and offered myself three-to-two odds that she fell off her stool before whoever she was meeting showed up.

I can imagine that bar. Big, crowded, impersonal. Guys in white aprons pulling beer and clearing glasses. Little groups talking and smoking. Looking at their watches and the door for stragglers. All on their way someplace. Lola drinks, my PI watches and then…

Long story short. This month’s prompt is ‘Place’. I will have to up my game!