Suggested by amykartzmanr. Give them a Moloko. Our new book, Britain by the Book: A Curious Tour of Our Literary Landscape, is … ... A Tale of Two Cities. A bad description will typically use boring nouns (or things) in settings, i.e. “ London and Fog! S. Eliot. Along the way, Richard Lehan gathers a rich entourage that includes Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Bram Stoker, Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Raymond Chandler. Gabriel García Márquez, opening One Hundred Years of Solitude, introduces his village like this: Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. Numerous novels and poems reflect the ways in which cities generate states of shock, exhilaration, alienation, anonymity, confusion or thrill. Like protagonist Bella, she was raised in Arizona, but explained the process of setting Twilight in an unfamiliar setting on her blog: For my setting, I knew I needed someplace ridiculously rainy. Leopold Bloom is a middle-aged Jewish advertising canvasser, who spends most of the day on which the novel is set, 16 June 1904, perambulating around his home city. Leonard's ancestors, Forster tells us, were agricultural workers, and Leonard himself belongs more authentically to a rural past than an urban present. 25 Famous Authors’ Poetic Descriptions of Paris. Ensure your characters evolve with the plot Octavia from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” As the name implies, Invisible Cities is a novel entirely about fictional cities. The photograph of her father had been turned out to face the room. This description delivers a sense of intimacy and darkness in a few words: The mesto [place] was near empty … it looked strange, too, having been painted with all red mooing cows … I took the large moloko plus to one of the little cubies that were all round … there being like curtains to shut them off from the main mesto, and there I sat down in the plushy chair and sipped and sipped. ... History’s Most Over-the-Top Sunset Descriptions Long before Instagram, sunset enthusiasts strained the English language to its limit. (More about Harry, more about his books). Just weave place and action together like this to create atmosphere, excitement, tension, foreboding. It has to grip the reader as intensely as real life – more intensely, even. In the South, the summertime heat slows down time. By Alison ... head past the jump for a few eloquent and adoring words from famous writers that celebrate the City of Light. Sure, a page or so into the scene, they may start to add details to it – but by that point it’s too late. ‘The city seemed Satanic, the narrow streets oppressing like the galleries of a mine’: Margaret and Mrs Wilcox journey through London, from a manuscript draft of Howards End, 1908–10. Make the hardest part of writing that little bit easier, Build a strong underlying story structure Please credit the copyright holder when reusing this work. [4] In Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four (1890), imperial adventure is transposed to a London that is as resistant to understanding as the faraway Empire. ‘DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN’: the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses, set in the offices of the Freeman newspaper. Something with its own mood and colour. We will now review your request and get in touch with you. As Benjamin wrote: ‘Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy...he calls this man “a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness”.[3]. —T. Travelling with Sherlock Holmes to an appointment that will set the plot in train, Dr Watson soon loses his bearings, perplexed by 'a dense drizzly fog which lay low over the great city,' the 'yellow glare from the shop-windows' and 'something eerie and ghostlike in the endless procession of faces'. If not, your highlighter pen remains unused, you probably want to edit that scene!). Already excited to see what lies ahead. They want mood. ), We edit manuscripts . Just read how Tokyo is described in Ryu Murakami’s thriller In the Miso Soup: It was still early in the evening when we emerged onto a street in Tsukiji, near the fish market. There’s authenticity, grit to this description of Tokyo, as opposed to using ‘stock’ descriptions that could apply to many modern cities. Ezra Pound: By Ezra Pound, from New Directions Pub. Get an agent in one hour, Indie marketing masterclass That means telling the reader where they are in a paragraph (or so), close to the start of any new scene. Then they talk (or argue, or fight, or kiss) some more, and then you drop in some other detail which reminds the reader, “Yep, here we still are, in this coffee shop.”. The ceiling height was pleasantly commodious. Anonymity and uniformity suggest an automatism verging on the uncanny – with resonances, too, of that other vast 'crowd' which had so recently marched to their deaths on the battlefields of the First World War. Uses surprising / exotic language to make those details blaze in our imagination. For just $5 a month, members of Electric Literature get access to the complete Recommended Reading archives of over 250 stories — and year-round open submissions. . The draft of The Waste Land reveals that Eliot trialled the phrase ‘Terrible city’ before settling on the more disquieting, ‘Unreal City’. … They bought Harry’s school books in a shop called Flourish and Blotts where the shelves were stacked to the ceiling with books as large as paving stones bound in leather; books the size of postage stamps in covers of silk. 'All the same, London's creeping,' remarks Helen to her sister Margaret in the final chapter, pointing out 'eight or nine meadows' surrounding Howards End, but menaced by 'a red rust'. [11] Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters, ed. We’ll make it easy for you to unsubscribe or cancel at any time, and we’ll never share your data with any third party. 51 Of The Most Beautiful Sentences In Literature "At the still point, there the dance is." We sense Offred counting the few things she has in the little room she calls hers, the window and chair, etc., in terse phrasing. That last is just a tiny detail, but Griet’s tears show us how mortified she is. At the end of the yellow brick road, the people of Oz live in harmony with one thing in common: they all see the city with a green tint. As for Conrad, Doyle and Stevenson, so for Eliot the city is a place of both excitement and estrangement. I hope it’s obvious that that sentence hardly transports us anywhere. a table, chair, window, floor, bar, stool, etc. so don’t buy it! And once, early in your scene, you’ve created your location, don’t forget about it. I don't think it is technically a city, but Steinbeck's description of the Salinas Valley in California in East of Eden is beautiful. For T S Eliot, such vagaries suggested an 'Unreal City': Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, Only then can you hope to transport them. Selective, intelligent, scrutinising to infer, he was a detective, reading the urban landscape for clues. Write a professional query letter, the easy way Joyce's cosmopolitan marginality may have informed the shift in his writing from a sense of the city as the 'centre of paralysis' in Dubliners, to Ulysses's meticulous, celebratory recreation. [10] In 'The Dead', Gabriel Conroy tells an anecdote about his grandfather's horse Johnny, a beast so used to walking in a circle to drive a mill that he is unable to function when harnessed to a carriage: And everything went on beautifully until Johnny came in sight of King Billy's statue: and whether he fell in love with the horse King Billy sits on or whether he thought he was back again in the mill, anyhow he began to walk round the statue (p. 162). There were a number of tall bar stools arranged to accommodate any drinker who didn’t want to be seated at one of the tables. Make the hardest part of writing that little bit easier. This sense of jubilation is felt, too, by her daughter Elizabeth, who 'most competently boarded the omnibus' as it sails down Whitehall, 'a pirate', 'reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down ruthlessly, circumventing dangerously, boldly snatching a passenger' (p. 115). That’s not the point. On the other hand, excessively barebones writing with insufficient detail may get to the action quicker but will deprive the story of originality and impact. Virginia Woolf’s connection to London is evident in this travel notebook that she kept in her twenties. The buildings, cities, places, rooms, trees, weather of your fictional world have to be convincing there. His wanderings allow him to observe urban phenomena: 'a sugarsticky girl shovelling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother' (U 8: 2–3); advertisements for 'That quack doctor for the clap' (U 8: 95); the 'Silk flash rich stockings white' (U 5: 124) of an elegant woman mounting a carriage; or the 'blind stripling ... tapping the curbstone with his slender cane' (U 8: 1075). and we’d absolutely love it if you chose to join us. [12] Virginia Woolf, 'Street Haunting' in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London: Harcourt Brace and Co, 1970), p. 20. This is just a description of a room – but we already feel powerfully impelled to read on. They’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to. In order for a story to work, it needs to feel like real life, even when it’s actually something quite different. Austin. Swift wrote A Description of a City Shower in 1710, satirizing Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Georgics. S. Eliot. Approximately 500,000 people live in Portland while the Portland metro area has a population of over 1.5 million inhabitants. [12] That exuberant sense of pleasure is also Clarissa Dalloway's, deciding to 'buy the flowers herself' and so indulging in an unfettered stroll across Westminster: 'What a lark! . Banner illustration by Matthew Richardson. 60–65. They have to have an emphatic, solid, believable presence. This is a selection of the ten best fictional lands in English literature. How to choose categories & keywords It compels, urges, exacerbates, condones. Usage terms © The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge and The Society of Authors as the E.M. Forster Estate. The bar was approximately twenty-eight feet long, by perhaps half of that wide. Note this same thing with foods: in Japan, your protagonist could well be eating miso soup, as per Ryu Murakami. Fri 23 Apr 2010 19.07 EDT. But it gets harder than that. The first book ever printed in France was published in Paris in 1470, and since then the city's literary legacy has continued to grow. Descriptions of pain, metaphor and embodied simulation1 Elena Semino Lancaster University ABSTRACT ... City of London Migraine Clinic) ... considerable attention in the cognitive linguistic literature. [10] James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. They say ’tis the best thing I ever writ, and I think so too. Ultimately though Woolf, like Baudelaire, weaves together the sense of estrangement and the sense of wonder, and shows her characters enjoying the possibilities that anonymity in the city affords. There must have been a chandelier once. In short, what makes Marquez’s description so vivid is its use of telling detail. For more classic poetry, we recommend The Oxford Book of English Verse – perhaps the best poetry anthology on the market. Alternatively, if you are setting something in the past, get your sense of place right by doing your research right, too. So your challenge becomes convincing readers that your world is real . Places and events of note: Litquake is the largest independent literary festival on the West Coast, and its Lit Crawl event has extended to at least 15 other cities. Suttree by Cormac Mccarthy is set in Knoxville in 1951, and it has some amazingly rich descriptions of the more worn down, derelict parts of the city. . Usage terms T S Eliot: © Estate of T. S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. And if that’s not enough for you, then try reading this. I pulled up maps of the area and studied them, looking for something small, out of the way, surrounded by forest. And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.[8]. Just read how J.R.R. : Derry, Maine: It: Warner Bros. Derry is a fictional town created by Stephen King to serve as a nexus of horror in books such as It, Insomnia, The Tommyknockers, and 11/22/63. In Southern literature, the heat comes to life. We run writing events. In his 1863 essay 'The Painter of Modern Life' Baudelaire offered a profile of 'The Man of the Crowd': The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. Gabriel's tale inadvertently reveals his own fate, doomed to plod in a familiar provincial circle. A Description of a City Shower. Poe's narrator is a prototype of his later detectives, and the detective became a new version of the flâneur and a widely used literary motif. It covers a piece of land 2 miles square on the bank of the Anider River, about 60 miles from the sea. A self-publishing essential, How to write a novel Paris, France. The idea of the isolated, questioning self belongs to the modern urban centre, not the provincial margins, a subject famously explored by the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire. Naturally, London means different things to different characters: it is home, to the Schlegel sisters, of culture and humanity, but, for precarious clerk Leonard Bast, it remains a place of deprivation and desperation. Workers commuted by foot into the City of London in such numbers that rush-hour street etiquette required them to travel on the right and in the same direction as other pedestrians. Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, acquires menace and mystery from a hybrid setting — a London-resembling Edinburgh — where mornings are overcast with dark fog, and the main action takes place against the 'great field of lamps of a nocturnal city'. A long mahogany bar took up about one quarter of the floor space, while eight tables each with 4 wooden chairs occupied the remaining area. Numerous novels and poems reflect the ways in which cities generate states of shock, exhilaration, alienation, anonymity, confusion or thrill. And yes, he’s started early (Chapter 1, Page 1, Line 1). There were shops selling robes, shops selling telescopes and strange silver instruments Harry had never seen before, windows stacked with barrels of bat spleens and eels’ eyes, tottering piles of spell books, quills, and rolls of parchment, potion bottles, globes of the moon. There’s something whimsical yet scary about living in the Emerald City. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The text in this article is available under the Creative Commons License. With the right nouns in place, you’ll need fewer adjectives to jazz things up – and when you do use them, they’ll feel right, not over the top. So (for example) a place that seems safe can suddenly reveal some other side, seem menacing, then almost try to harm the character. And yet they rush past one another as if they had nothing in common or were in no way associated with one another…The greater the number of people that are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and offensive becomes the brutal indifference, the unfeeling concentration of each person on his private affairs. by Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 9. We’ve made that course available, in full, to members of Jericho Writers. 20th century illustration of London’s menacing, labyrinthine streets in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. and lots of other places too. They can be prose or poetry. by Jennifer Schaffer. Stephenie Meyer, when writing Twilight, decided she needed a rainy place near a forest to fit key plot elements. New York City is known as a center of art, culture, fashion and finance with iconic sites such as Times Square, The Statue of Liberty, and The Empire State Building. The sentence works so well because Marquez has: That basic template is one you can use again and again. Even in my novel Cash Crash Jubilee, in which I set out to describe every moment of my protagonist’s experience over the course of three days, I decided to cut out and simplify many descriptions in the interest of moving the plot along. She is the author of James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Working Girls: Fiction, Sexuality and Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2016). © The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection The entire city is walled, and outside the … The plan of all of their cities is similar except for variations in topography; therefore, we can take the capital, Amaurot, as the model. For Baudelaire, the flâneur's talents were fascinatingly distilled in Edgar Allen Poe's 1840 short story 'The Man of the Crowd'. Good writers will, in overt or gently subtle ways, introduce a place-as-character. If you find some good references, then great: you’re doing fine. What a plunge!'[13]. You are doing the research, because that research may inspire and stimulate a set of ideas you might not have ecountered otherwise. Austin in Texas is an unlikely literary venue that contributes to the literary scene in the US in … There are literally thousands of villages in the world which would fit that description. In order for a story to work, it needs to feel like real life, even when it’s actually something quite different. Herman Melville, say, describes to us the chowder for the ship’s crew in Moby Dick: ‘small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits and salted pork cut up into little flakes.’ Such descriptions are deft, specific, and brilliantly atmospheric. However, in her dream-like depiction of consciousness, Woolf also represents the alienation and anxiety experienced in the modern urban space. by Mitchell Leaska (New York: Harcourt, 1977), p. 37. We’re also told just enough to give us an image of that place, enough to heighten tension, enough to tease curiosity. That doesn’t mean you should always play things the obvious way: no need for cliché;. Having your characters voice their perceptions of a place in dialogue also adds to its dramatic impact, because now the reader sees place both through the eyes of a narrator and through the eyes of the characters themselves. It’s too bland. . Please credit the copyright holder when reusing this work. There’s lots more author Anthony Burgess could tell us about that place. A boring apartment in Above Suspicion becomes scary when it seems someone’s been inside. Numerous novels and poems reflect the ways in which cities generate states of shock, exhilaration, alienation, anonymity, confusion or thrill. Your character also brings one kind of mood to the scene, and the action that unfolds will bring other sensations. [11] The city, Woolf underlines, is a very different place for women, hedged around with proprieties and dangers limiting their ability to emulate Baudelaire's detached, anonymous flâneur. Ten of the best visions of hell in literature. He could have written something like this: Macondo was a village of about twenty houses, built on a riverbank. One you could actually walk into. 39–40. I had not thought death had undone so many. A Tale of Two Cities holds a significant place in the canon of Charles Dickens’s works. In historical novel Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, set in Holland in 1664, maid Griet narrates how artist Johannes Vermeer prepares her for her secret portrait, musing, to her horror, that ‘virtuous women did not open their mouths in paintings’. by Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), p.9. Those clipped words transport us straight to Offred’s enclosed, and terrifying, space. Literary descriptions of cities (also known as urban descriptiones) form a literary genre that originated in Ancient Greek epideictic rhetoric. They’re not just houses, they’re adobe houses. “The Dust and Din and Steam of Town”: London in Victorian Literature he Victorian Era saw enormous changes in the physical and social fabric of the urban realm. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. Conrad's London is persistently amphibious or aquatic, fluid not solid – an apt location for a novel that experiments with form by jumbling the order of its chapters, so that readers encounter Stevie blown up into fragments in a chapter before he helps his mother move house. A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, Offering a full range of sensory information will enhance your descriptive writing. Mrs Dalloway may be set in a bustling city, but within this space each character is alone – and the novel sews together the inner thoughts of these isolated but intersecting individuals. It never stales. The New York Public Library His return to 'dear dirty Dublin' through his fiction initially imagines his home town as a place of 'scrupulous meanness', but later represents it with increasing affection as a place of imaginative and emotional opportunity. Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). … Wooden bait-and-tackle shops with disintegrating roofs and broken signs stood next to shiny new convenience stores, and futuristic highrise apartment complexes rose skyward on either side of narrow, retro streets lined with wholesalers of dried fish. Here a comfy, nondescript flat becomes a frightening place, just because of what else is going on. —T. He’s hit bestseller lists, had a ton of critical acclaim, and has been published in the US, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, China, Japan . These non-visual references matter so much because sight alone can feel a little distant, a little empty. We sense her tension, her dissociation, and we feel trapped with her. If the scene feels placeless at the start – like actors speaking in somee blank, white room – you won’t be able to wrestle that sense of place back later. Do find out more . Please credit the copyright holder when reusing this work. It’s informative, yes. If that character is dangerous, for example, then simply describing a place adds a layer of foreboding, foreshadowing, to the entire book. The city is a key motif in modernist literature. As head of Jericho Writers (and previously the Writers’ Workshop), Harry has helped hundreds of people find agents and get published. Too generic. Did you know we have an entire video course on How To Write? They’ve already lost the reader. . [1] Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life' in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Throughout the history of English literature, hundreds of writers have created fantastic worlds for their plots and characters to play out in. [4] Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and other stories, ed. The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr: sketches and original artwork, Sean's Red Bike by Petronella Breinburg, illustrated by Errol Lloyd, Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women's Rights, The fight for women’s rights is unfinished business, Get 3 for 2 on all British Library Fiction, Why you need to protect your intellectual property, The Condition of the Working Class in England, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, A close reading of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock': fragmentation, interruption and fog, An introduction to Katherine Mansfield's short stories, City, paralysis, epiphany: an introduction to, ‘Your Godot was our Godot’: Beckett’s global journeys, Broken mirrors: the First World War and modernist literature, Modernism, time and consciousness: the influence of Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust, Bertolt Brecht and epic theatre: V is for, Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty, '"Prufrock and other Observations": A Criticism' by May Sinclair, from the, 'Street Haunting', an essay by Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf's travel and literary notebook, 1906–09, Galleries, Reading Rooms, shop and catering opening times vary. Lynda La Plante’s crime novel Above Suspicion makes a home setting frightening after it becomes obvious a stranger has been in protagonist DS Anna Travis’ flat, and she’s just been assigned to help solve her first murder case. City/Town Film Name Distributor(s) Notes Bedford Falls It’s a Wonderful Life: Liberty Films: Bedford Falls is a fictitious town in upstate New York, named Pottersville in the timeline where George was never born. (Oh, I can’t write that, because Wikipedia tells me that the river isn’t as long / the forest isn’t as thick / or whatever else.). Between 1831 and 1925, London was the largest city in the world, and its labyrinthine geography and disorientating fogs were suited to fictions about the opacities of modern life. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. Based on over twelve years of working with agents. That’s a simple technique, bit it works every time. [7] Red rust, brown fog, a slimy aquarium: these borderline images are fascinated by apparent solidity dissolving into water or air. Where else but on board a nineteenth century American whaler would you get such a meal? . Visuals are important, but don’t neglect the other senses. Dublin is, occasionally, unwelcoming – Bloom is the target of anti-Semitic hostility while travelling to a funeral in the morning, and again while drinking in Barney Kiernan's pub. posted by daisystomper at 11:41 PM on December 31, 2013 Attempting to discover the truth behind a terrorist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, the assistant commissioner leaves his office to find 'His descent into the street was like the descent into a slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off'. Of course, this works for that first passage we looked over from Margaret Atwood.
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