Today I'm honoured to welcome on to my blog my great friend and
writing buddy Miriam Drori.
Miriam and I first "met" back in
2012, when we were students in the same online romance-writing workshop.
Since then we have met in person twice, when Miriam has visited the UK.
And our novels from that workshop have now both been published by Crooked
Cat.
One thing I noticed particularly about
Miriam's novel, Neither Here Nor There
(set partly in Jerusalem and partly in London), is its wonderful sense of
place. So I asked Miriam if she might like to write a blog post about
place.
Over to you, Miriam…
Who writes about place?
This is the first of
two posts I’m doing about place. The second will probably be on Tim Taylor’s
blog (although he doesn’t know it yet).
Place is important for
us all. It defines our roots and our bases. It goes a long way to defining who
we are. It affects everything we create, whether it’s writing, pictures, music
or anything else. Off the top of my head, I came up with several song lines
about place:
Songs using the word ‘place’
·
There are places I remember – Beatles
·
I had to find the passage back to the place I
was before – Eagles (Hotel
California)
·
There’s a place for us – West Side Story
Songs about home
·
I’m coming home, I’ve done my time (Tie a
Yellow Ribbon) - Tony Orlando &
Dawn
·
The Green, Green Grass of Home – Tom
Jones
·
Homeward Bound – Simon & Garfunkel
I can think of songs
about specific places: London, Marakesh, Paris, California.
Of the songs I know in
Hebrew (my second language), there are some about Tel-Aviv, Beit She’an,
Galillee, the Dead Sea and of course Jerusalem. Also London, San Fransisco,
Cairo and other parts of the world. Other songs that invoke place are: Things you see from there, you don’t see
from here and Closed kindergarten.
So what about place in
writing? Several writers have been quoted as saying, in different ways, that
without a place there is no story. The place in question can be real or
imaginary, as small as a room or as large as the universe. Whatever it is, our
job is to make the reader see it and understand our story in terms of it. So one
answer to my question is: all writers write about place.
While that is true,
place features more strongly in some stories, even becoming an additional
character, while in others it is not so important. Writers who delve deeply
into place, it seems to me, are those who have moved countries at least once,
or those who have travelled widely.
Last year, I attended
an Arvon course in a wonderful setting in Devon. Both the course tutors, and
the guest tutor too, have travelled. Ben Faccini has
lived in three countries, giving him the right background to write The Water
Breather, a novel about a boy and his family who are constantly on the
move. Jean McNeil
moved from Canada to the UK and has travelled extensively. Her stories are
driven by settings all over the world. Anjali Joseph, who is from India, has
studied in the UK, and her novels also span countries.
One of several writing seminars I attended
this year, called “Wish you were here,” discussed writing about place. The
Israeli tutor, Ayelet Tsabari, now
lives in Canada and is very conscious of place in her writing. She gave us
plenty of good advice, and also mentioned one problem when she read out a scene
from one of her stories. She said Canadian and other audiences find the Israeli
scene exotic while for us (those attending the seminar) it would seem ordinary.
I had the same thought when I described the
setting of my novel, Neither Here Nor There, as exotic. There will be
some for whom the setting of Jerusalem is not at all exotic. However, seeing a
familiar place through strange eyes can be enlightening, too. Things you take
for granted can take on a different light.
Esty, the heroine of Neither Here Nor
There, sees familiar places from a very different perspective, now that she
has drastically changed her way of life.
Machane Yehuda Market, Jerusalem, one of many places featured in Neither Here Nor There
Miriam Drori was born
and brought up in London, and now lives in Jerusalem where her daughter has
left her to hold the female fort against three males.
Following careers as a
computer programmer and a technical writer, Miriam has been writing creatively
for the past ten years and has had short stories published online and in
anthologies. Neither Here Nor There, published on 17 June 2014, is her
first published novel.
Miriam began writing
in order to raise awareness of social anxiety. Since then the scope of her writing has widened, but she hasn’t
lost sight of her original goal.
Miriam’s website: http://miriamdrori.com/
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