Janet Gogerty's Blog: Sandscript - Posts Tagged "dark-and-milk"

This week is National Short Story Week. Short stories come in and out of fashion and perhaps are regarded as the poor relations of novels - by readers and writers. Avid readers of novels might say they like to have something to 'get into'. Writers often regard short story writing as a learning experience on their way to the best selling novel they hope to write.
Of course the best short story writers make every word count, write something that stays with the reader for a long time and create something many novelists could not.
But who is to define a short story? Does the length matter? You can say something deep in 75 words. At www.paragraphplanet.com you can read a new story every day of exactly 75 words.
A longer story allows the characters to develop, the reader to become attached and perhaps infuriated if their fate is left hanging in the air. Should tales be rounded off neatly or is it the writer's privilege to cause an event and not worry about the long term consequences! My novel 'Brief Encounters of the Third Kind' evolved to find out what did happen to the heroine, but in my anthology 'Dark and Milk' there are stories with the hero literally left hanging in the air or in....but I won't tell you any more!

What’s in a name? Unless an author writes science fiction set on another planet, or fantasy in a fantasy world, he has to set his story on earth. I once read a novel by a well known writer; unlike his other books it was a tale of wanderings in vaguely European lands, in an unspecified century. I felt no attachment to the characters at all and did not enjoy reading it.
But a crime thriller or romance can be set in a village with an invented name, helpful to avoid a libel case; you only have to look at the map book or drive around Britain to know real villages and towns have names stranger than a writer could create.
I recently read ‘The Cornish Coast Murder’ by John Bude, written in the 1930’s. His pen name is derived from a real Cornish place, the name of the village in the story is invented, but Boscawen sounds genuine. You can read my review of his book here on Goodreads.
Authors are safe in big cities, they are sprawling and anonymous. London has a well know centre surrounded by an endless variety of suburbs. In ‘Brief Encounters of the Third Kind’ the story starts in the back garden of an ordinary house, in the large suburb of Ashley. You won’t find Ashley on the map, but like many other outer London suburbs it has a common popular with walkers, several underground stations, a busy bus service, a hospital, a town centre and local shops. The residents of Ashley think nothing much ever happens there, but they are wrong.
When the characters hop on ‘the tube’ to go into central London well known landmarks feature in the plot. In ‘Three Ages of Man’ the stranger who appears at the beginning of the novel is overwhelmed by sprawling Ashley and the city centre, luckily he has an author to look after him. Waterloo Station is Britain’s busiest station, characters can slip through unnoticed. Here you catch the train to an obscure part of Wiltshire; a good walk from the station, near a little known village, is Holly Tree Farm; an ideal place for people who need to keep a low profile.
Perhaps one day I will set a novel in my current home town. It is big and busy, with students and holiday makers and occasionally, bizarre real life murders; plenty of scope for a novelist. Its real name is Bournemouth, but Thomas Hardy called it Sandbourne in his Wessex novels.
In the meantime it is June at Holly Tree Farm and I am busy writing the third novel in the trilogy.
In my two anthologies ‘Dark and Milk’ and ‘Hallows and Heretics’ you will find stories set in London and the Bournemouth area. In ‘Hallows and Heretics’ you can read the Hambourne Chronicles. Google Hambourne to see if it is a real place.