A sense of place



I never set out to write novels that were particularly known for their sense of place. I set out to write stories that rang true and that transported the reader into another place and time, drawn into authentic surroundings, experiencing what my characters were seeing and hearing, smelling and tasting.

 

As Simone de Beauvoir tells us in her autobiographical Force of Circumstance: “I do not mention the colour of the sky, the taste of a fruit, out of self-indulgence (…). Not only do [these details] allow us to apprehend a period and a person in flesh and blood, but by their non-significance they are the very touch of truth in a true story.”

 

This is the start of a guest post I wrote for Karen at My Reading Corner. If you'd like to read the rest, please hop over to her blog on this link. The photo above is of one of the lovely, yet abandoned buildings facing the marina in Faro in Portugal, setting for 300 Days of Sun.

 

A book by its cover

Cover art for books is a subject that fascinates readers, reviewers and authors alike. Getting the cover right is crucial to a book's retail success - and keeping author and readers happy. I couldn't be more delighted with the cover for 300 Days of Sun designed by Jarrod Taylor. It offers an alluring first impression that is entirely relevant to the story and it's attractive in the full sense of the word: it draws you into the setting of the story, the dramatic rocky coast of the Algarve in Portugal. Brightness, beauty and danger are implicit in the image, as is the hint of a scratched old book.

 

But how did this cover evolve from an initial idea? To celebrate publication day in the USA and Canada, I've been given permission to show the process behind the scenes as discussion progressed between editor and author, design team and sales and marketing at HarperCollins.

 

I had just arrived in France last summer when the first images came through in an email from my editor, Jennifer Barth. Which did I prefer of these two?

 

 

 

I thought about it for a few hours, and wrote back to say I liked the red one best. It was the way the letters seemed to be sinking (or rising) behind the layers of the city that appealed. As it turned out, I was in a minority, and most votes went to the second design, by Gregg Kulick. I can understand why. The image is a strong one, with a great sense of light and dark. Perhaps it was the lettering that put me off. 

 

The next stage was another email containing another four images, all by Jarrod Taylor. Which did I like best? Which would you choose?

 

 

 

 

 

I liked them all except the third one, because the yellow rock seemed to hint strangely at an Egyptian pyramid. Our first guests of the summer had arrived, and we had a group reaction to report back. Most popular were the second and the fourth (though the lettering seemed wrong on that one).

 

The team in New York played around with the second for a while, using a deeper blue and capital letters (gorgeous, rather unusual, colours for cover art - and I preferred the original):

 

 

Then the fourth was re-worked and presented to a marketing and sales meeting. Everyone agreed, including me, over in France, that we had found our ideal cover:

 

 

So there we have it. Do you agree, or would you have made a different choice? As far as I'm concerned, as soon as I saw this last version, I felt it was right, almost like a sigh of relief.

 

As the book finally goes on sale, huge thanks to everyone at Harper, especially Jarrod Taylor and Gregg Kulick, Jennifer Barth, Amy Baker, Katherine Beitner, Jonathan Burnham, Cal Morgan, Kathryn Ratcliffe-Lee, Mary Sasso, Sherry Wasserman and Erin Wicks. Also to Stephanie Cabot, as ever. 

 

"a deeply satisfying novel, a rich story with a strong feeling for time and place and the expert pacing of the best thrillers. Readers will appreciate Lawrenson’s ability to combine stunning atmosphere with a fascinating historical backstory."

                                                     — starred Booklist review

The seeds of a novel

 

                        
A question I'm asked surprisingly often is, "Where do you get the ideas for your novels?" As someone who is always noticing things and wondering whether these would make a story, I always feel it's more a question of, "How do you decide which idea would make the best story?"

 

The seeds of 300 Days of Sun were sown when I traveled to Faro with my daughter Maddy, who had booked herself a two-week Portuguese language course there. She was only seventeen at the time and I felt I couldn’t allow her to go alone, though she would have done so, quite happily. While she went to class every morning, I wandered around the town with a street map, camera and my notebook. 

I am always inspired to write by the places I visit, and Faro was no exception. I had never been there before, though I knew the name from a hundred airport departure boards, as the hub for tourists traveling to the Algarve coast. Maddy and I were charmed from the first evening, by its mosaic pavements, by the laid-back atmosphere in the August heat, by the sea and the glimpses of green salt marsh. In the afternoons, we found various ways to get to the beaches and islands – and the first time we went to Praia de Faro, we did find the sea curiously green and furry, though this is not the usual state of affairs.

 

It’s important to say here that, for all the geographical accuracy of my portrayal of Faro, the town in this book is an imaginary version: certain elements, like great storm of February 1941 and the re-opening of the Café Alianҫa during the local elections (held, in real life, in 2013), are superficially true, but the story in the book is entirely fictional. If there are similarities with real life on the Algarve, this is only in order to give my story the tang of authenticity, though as ever, I have tried to describe the places as I found them, to transport the reader to an atmospheric and intriguing place.

It has been a long time coming, but a big thank you is due to the Portuguese Tourist Board in London. In June 1985, I was lucky enough to be invited on a press trip to Lisbon, Cascais and Estoril. I was a trainee reporter on the Kentish Times, a weekly newspaper based in South London. The trip was an adventure that began with a gathering of six or seven strangers in the departure lounge at Heathrow airport; we were to be escorted by a Portuguese guide with a twinkly smile called João and, in return for writing an article extolling the beauty of this area of Portugal’s Atlantic coast, we would be treated to a week of interesting trips and lovely meals.

 

We had a wonderful time. Everyone seemed to get along, and there was lots of laughter, including a running joke about sardines, though the details of that one have got away. We visited Setúbal, Óbidos, Belém and Sintra, and the pousadas, the medieval castles and convents that had been transformed into atmospheric hotels. We had dinner one evening at the Fortaleza do Guincho at Cascais, where we drank white port with ice as an aperitif. Here I am, in a collage of old photos (I loved those pink shoes).

 

Unfortunately, when I got back to England and wrote my piece, only four sparse, dull paragraphs made it into print with no photograph. I was so embarrassed that I never went to the trip reunion in London a few months later, not daring to face João again. So if anyone at the Portuguese Tourist Board should find themselves reading this book, may I say Obrigado and apologize for making you wait so long for some words that do Lisbon and Cascais justice.

 

 

Light at the end of the tunnel

 

Phew. I made the deadline and delivered the first draft of my new novel this week. I have no idea how good, or bad, it is. That's not false modesty, or disingenuousness; I genuinely don't know. Before I send it, I always print out the first draft because hard copy reads differently from the words on the screen. I don't know why that should be, but that's how it seems to me. No matter how many times I go over and over the text on screen - and I am a constant self-editor - I want to see it in the cold, hard light of day.

 

So I print out, only single-spaced so it looks more like a finished page in a book, rather than the double-spaced manuscript that publishers and agents want to see. Then I edit again on paper, as the world's most critical reader.

 

As such, I find some parts are better than I expected - and some are far worse. It's much easier to judge the pace and the amount of attention given to various aspects of the story when it's on paper. It may be different for other people, but this is how it is for me. I thought I had wrapped up the ending quite well, but last Sunday I ended up not doing a light polish of the text as I'd hoped, but writing 2,300 additional words to expand what now seemed rushed.

 

At this stage the book has taken over all rational thought. I consider the mundane necessities of life like going to the supermarket to be outrageous intrusions. I resent leaving my desk to answer the door or the telephone. All I can think about are the loose ends: the tiny plot and character issues that need to be tied up, the small mentions that ought to be recalled for proper satisfaction. I scribble these down on bits of ripped paper, newspaper, anything and put them in a pocket for decoding later.

 

At the end of this process, I make the changes on screen. It still seems extraordinary to be able to fit an entire book in a computer document, attach to an email and press send. It took me a whole day to print out my first novel, put it in the box the computer paper had come in, parcel up and take it to the post office!

 

So now I wait. (That part hasn't changed.) My editor in New York told me immediately that she is immersed in another project for the next few weeks, so not to expect a response for a while. I couldn't be happier. That's a fortnight's relaxation and decompression at least. As regular readers know, I have had a tough time to write through but now the pressure has lifted. It feels like a long time since the story began with a new place to explore and random observations in a notebook.

The hardest deadline

When I returned from France in mid-September, I had a new book deal and a deadline. I thought it was going to be a bit tight, but there were exciting reasons why I wasn't going to argue. I would just put my head down and concentrate all my energies on writing, and I was sure that by the end of January, I would have a good first draft.

Sadly, real life intervened. I'd only been back a day when the first of several bombshells hit, and by the end of September I knew that looking after my mother was going to have to take precedence over writing. When she was in hospital, I got up early and wrote in the mornings before visiting time; when she came home for the end, I took my notes to work when she slept but usually failed to write a word.

January, new grit, I thought. I managed a week's work, still feeling terribly sad, but with time to concentrate, at least . My mother's memorial service was on January 8th. I managed to get to my feet to deliver a tribute I had written, but that very evening I came down with 'flu. Just reaction, I suppose. Last week I ploughed on with aching head and racking cough.

I put this out here not to elicit sympathy, though I know the loyal readers of this blog will be quick to offer it, both above and below the public wire, and they know how grateful I am. Actually, this is a post about writing. Sometimes it's not easy. I'm sure editors and agents would be understanding if I missed my deadline. But I won't do that because I pride myself not only in writing well enough to be published and paid for it, but on what that implies: being professional about my work.

I've written before about not having much truck with writer's block - I genuinely believe it's not much more than self-indulgence, an excuse to talk about writing without doing any. Of course there are days when I sit down at my desk with my head too full of other thoughts to find the right words for a story, or in a panic that I've literally lost the plot. But the mark of a professional is that you open the manuscript, take some deep breaths and go in. Then stick at it until the words come.

I'll let you know the state of play at the end of the month.