{"id":152712,"date":"2025-02-07T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-07T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/?p=152712"},"modified":"2025-02-07T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-02-07T10:00:00","slug":"twinkling-in-the-half-sunlight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/twinkling-in-the-half-sunlight\/","title":{"rendered":"Twinkling in the half-sunlight"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This week saw the launch of Week #2<\/strong> of our Write with Jericho<\/a><\/strong> course. (It\u2019s free to Premium members, naturally. If you\u2019re not a member and are curious, just take a look at what membership offers here<\/strong><\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This week is officially The Best Week of the Course, because it\u2019s the one where I get to tell you about adding atmosphere to your scenes. I don\u2019t want to go over everything I talk about in the course video, but I do want to pick out one small \u2013 but tremendously powerful \u2013 technique that you can use pretty much anywhere and for pretty much anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea is to find descriptions \u2013 of people, of places, of moods, of anything \u2013 that are both literal, physical descriptions AND suggestive of something emotional or personal or even some kind of foreshadowing. Descriptions like this are acceptable to the reader because they\u2019re just literal, right? They\u2019re conveying useful information. But because they also smuggle a whole lot more into the scene, they enrich it vastly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last week, I just took one of my scenes and checked it against Becca\u2019s \u201ca scene must develop questions\u201d template. This week I\u2019ll do much the same. I\u2019ll take the exact same scene as we looked at last week and pick out any descriptive language that straddles something physical \/ literal, and something more suggestive too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bold text comes from the actual scene. Italics are my comments. If you remember, the scene last week involved Fiona meeting a dodgy ex-cop, getting a key to a suspect\u2019s home, and entering that property (illegally). Fiona finds a stack of presumably illicit cash, then gets quickly out of the house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

OK. Here goes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speed bumps in the road and cars neat in their driveways<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does this count? I think it probably does. On the one hand, this is a very literal description of a street. But also \u2013 the speed bumps are emphasising a modern safety-consciousness, and the cars stand \u2018neat\u2019 in their driveways. Both observations suggest that in this environment, people are cautious and law-abiding. They don\u2019t drive too fast and they park their cars with a rectilinear exactness.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now that clearly doesn\u2019t describe Fiona at all \u2013 the reader already knows her. So really, this description is, yes, picking out some simple physical details, but it\u2019s also telling us, \u201cFiona does not fit here.\u201d Again, we already know that Fiona isn\u2019t the backing-down type, so if she enters a cautious and law-abiding environment, whatever happens next is likely to be the exact opposite.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In effect that tiny bit of description is foreshadowing the darker material to come \u2013 like writing, \u2018it was quiet, almost too quiet\u2019, only not a terrible clich\u00e9.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s an unloved dark blue Toyota Yaris parked up<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Unloved\u2019, as applied to a car, presumably just implies rust-spots and the like. But the car\u2019s owner \u2013 dodgy ex-cop Brian Penry \u2013 hates himself enough that he stole enough cash to get himself caught and (soon) jailed. We learn shortly that Penry even used the stolen money to buy himself a piano that he never played. So it\u2019s not just Penry\u2019s car that\u2019s unloved, right? It\u2019s him.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

He gets a key out of his pocket. A brass Yale key, which he holds up twinkling in the half<\/strong>-sunlight.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why \u2018half-sunlight\u2019? I mean, yes, that\u2019s a description of a part-sunny, part-cloudy day. But this whole part of the scene is on the edge of something. Just as the key is in half-sunlight, so too Penry is preparing to unlock part, but not all, of what Fiona needs to know.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Fiona is only half-sunlit herself. The sunny part is that of a clever detective doing her job. The very-much-in-shadows part is that she\u2019s about to enter a house illegally and without her boss knowing.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A little later, Penry \u2018half-smiles\u2019 at Fiona, then \u2018half-salutes\u2019 her. This whole scene is teasing, not committed. The whole scene is teetering on the verge of something \u2013 until Fiona enters the house, and then the tone darkens decisively.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The street is empty and silent. The sunlight occupies the empty space like an invading army.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a bit more fanciful than anything we\u2019ve had so far \u2013 the first time anything feels writerly in the scene. And again, it offers a description that does dual work. The sunlight fully occupies the space (so we\u2019ve moved away from half-light to full-light. Even my pedant-brain doesn\u2019t mind that though: light conditions can change.) In literal terms. I guess we\u2019re being asked to imagine a scene sun-drenched and simple. But the \u2018invading army\u2019 is a totally extreme image suggesting foreboding and the threat of violence. So we have quite a peaceful scene (a neat suburban road in sunshine) and something almost recklessly violent alongside.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s been an \u2018is it or isn\u2019t it?\u2019 type equivocation in the scene so far, and this description merrily sits tosses fuel onto both sides of the fire. \u2018Oh, yes, it\u2019s peaceful, all right. Look at the speed bumps and the sunlight. But, yeah, this whole thing is going to blow up in a second, THERE\u2019S AN ENTIRE ****ING ARMY RIGHT HERE.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you said that thing directly, it would just seem nuts. But metaphors play by different rules; that\u2019s why they\u2019re fun.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I approach the door, insert the key, turn the lock.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I feel a kind of amazement when the lock turns. It\u2019s like turning the page in a fairy story and finding that the story continues exactly as before.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At one level, this is saying something simple about opening a door and feeling surprised. But \u2013 this is Fiona \u2013 the imagery sometimes goes way over the top. Why is this like a fairy story? I don\u2019t completely know, in all honesty, but I think it\u2019s that there\u2019s been a sense of unreality in this scene so far. The neat suburban close should not contain darkness and terror, but there is a sense of something very dark lurking close. So there\u2019s a contest between apparent reality and lurking (but imagined?) darkness. The fairy story image makes that explicit.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the living room, three fat black flies are buzzing against the windowpane. A dozen of their comrades lie dead beneath them.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the one hand, this is just a description of flies. On the other hand, this refers back to the invading army and the possibility of violence. Because we\u2019re only dealing with flies, we can suggest a lot of violence without breaking the rules of the actual place we\u2019re in.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

[After Fiona finds the illicit cash and exits the house] I\u2019m sweating and cold at the same time. I try to go back to that feeling I had on the print-room stair<\/strong>s [when she was talking happily with her new boyfriend<\/em>]. That feeling of being somewhere close to love and happiness. Living next door to the sunshine twins. I can\u2019t find them anywhere now. When I stamp my legs, I can hardly feel my feet when they hit the floor.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sunshine twins: it was sunny in the close before Fiona entered the house, but there\u2019s no reference to sunshine now that she\u2019s come out. So the \u2018sunshine twins\u2019 is a reference to love and happiness \u2013 a phrase she used when we had the scene on the stairs with her boyfriend \u2013 but it\u2019s also a reference back to how the world was before she found the dodgy cash. In effect, when Fiona says \u2018I can\u2019t find [the sunshine twins] anywhere now\u2019, she\u2019s saying that she can\u2019t go back to the past boyfriend-happiness state OR the sunny street of ten minutes ago, before she had irrevocably entered a house illegally and found the cash.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This passage strongly hints that the consequences of leaving that sunny state may well involve something quite dark and dangerous. And of course, the novel does start to tip into an ever darker mode from here on.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

REFLECTIONS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last week, I said:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018A lot of writing advice is generated because people have to generate something. They have a blogpost to write, or an email to send, or a course module to fill,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the only advice worth anything is advice that helps you solve problems in your writing. So when I read or listen to advice, I always ask: does this actually describe what I personally do when I\u2019m writing well? Does this advice actually generate insights that will help me when I get stuck?\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And honestly, I think if you took the literal-but-not-really-literal element out of my writing, you\u2019d lose a really big chunk of what makes it worthwhile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The technique is so rewardingly simple: \u2018Cars neat in their driveways\u2019? Any idiot can come up with that, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You just need two things to make this approach work for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One, you need a \u2018handbrake off\u2019 approach to your writing. A willingness to put near-nonsense images into your work. (Sunlight like an invading army? That\u2019s ridiculous. Welsh sunlight is never like that, but try it. Write it down. See if it fits.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two, you need the judgement to figure out what works and what doesn\u2019t. That\u2019s a matter of gut feel rather than the kind of analysis we\u2019ve just done here. I honestly never thought about this scene in this hyper-analytical way until just now. I did bring a kind of gut feel test to every sentence, though. That\u2019s usually enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FEEDBACK FRIDAY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Feedback Friday comes straight from the Write With Jericho<\/strong><\/a> course this week. I asked WWJ students to do this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Share 250 words from your scene.<\/strong> I\u2019m looking for:<\/p>\n\n\n\n