Setting your Scene

Two types of landscapes

The other day I paid a visit to Aspley Guise in Bedfordshire. It’s a fascinating place: a beautiful old village, mentioned in the Doomsday book and containing twenty-nine listed buildings. But it was also home to one of the dark secrets of World War Two: Black Propaganda. For it was from here that Sefton Delmer, a German speaking journalist who secretly worked for British intelligence, set up a clandestine radio station from his Victorian home. He broadcast programmes purporting to be from an old Prussian officer, lamenting that the war was going badly for the Germans, but in fact he was secretly sending disinformation into Germany in order to boost the Allied cause.

                  I’m busy doing some research for my next novel, partly based on Delmer, so spent some time going round the village exploring its layout and taking photos of the buildings. (And of course, my research had to extend to an excellent lunch in the Anchor pub, which would have been there in World War Two). I took precise notes of the area: the number of steps up to the front entrance of the local hotel, which was a billet for workers at nearby Bletchley; the size of the hallway, the dimensions of Delmer’s house. All of these details help to give credibility and authenticity to a novel. If your readers are to believe in your setting, you have to establish it clearly. But too much information, and overly prescriptive detail, can be off putting, reading like an estate agent’s blurb rather than a piece of fiction.

                  So whilst the external landscape is important, the inner landscape is even more so as it is that that takes us deeper inside our character, conveying their personalities and motivations. I wanted to capture Delmer’s zeal and fanaticism, and I wanted to explore the courage or fear or doubt in my other characters’ minds. Establishing a vivid inner landscape will intrigue readers, essentially changing a head story into a heart story. And if we want to keep people reading, that’s what we must aim for.