Skip to main content

You can love a place and not want to go back to it (writers please note)

A while ago I read Stuart Maconie's excellent travel book on his tour around Middle England, called Adventures on the High Teas. Towards the end he reflects on the places he has been, and admits with candour that much though he loves the north of England, where he was born, he actually would prefer to live in one of these lovely southern towns.

I can't agree more. I deeply love Rochdale, the town near Manchester where I was born and brought up (now probably best known as the home of Waterloo Road, but also the birthplace of the Co-operative movement, Gracie Fields and more). It really gives me a lump in my throat when I go back. But if I'm honest I do prefer living in southern parts. It's partly the weather, but there's something else that Maconie puts across so well, a different feel, I suppose you could call it. It's not the natives are more friendly - they aren't. But there is something about the places that makes them nicer to live in.

It may be a cliché, but you really can't go back when you have changed. Not successfully. Once you've moved away and lived elsewhere it doesn't work. I really feel there's a lesson here for fiction writers. Please don't keep writing the same book, over and over again.

You may think, but hold hard there! What about highly successful series? What about well-loved characters? This misses the point. I'm still me - but I can't go back for more than a visit (or at least I shouldn't). You can still have those same significant characters - you can have a story arc that covers several books - but there is something more fundamental, the equivalent of going back to live in the old home town. As your characters develop, so should the plot lines. All too often I feel I'm reading the same book again.

Move on - there's nothing more to see here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense