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Ciaran McMenamin on finding 'a sense of place' in literature

Dublin Book Festival preview: Ciaran McMenamin writes for RTÉ Culture about one of the key questions facing any writer - does it truly matter where your book is located?

The age old question... How important is a sense of ‘place’ in a work of fiction? Is it the landscape, the people, the politics?

I guess it is all of the above.

When I sat down to write what would become my debut novel Skintown, I had some naive pig-headed notion that my mission was to erase the place from the characters. I wanted to write a narrative about Northern Irish people that proved once and for all to everywhere else people that we aren’t any different from them. We are though, as are they from us and it would have been a pretty boring coming-of-age story without the fear and tension, the craic and the absurdity of that specific place.

Within ten pages, I had found the voice of the kid that would take us on a journey through a sozzled week in a small Northern town in the mid-nineties. Within twenty pages, I was sneering at myself as I laughed at him because ‘the place’ was bleeding through us both onto the page. It was the place that would make my story unique. I had been a fool to think anything other than the obvious.

In all fledgling writers there is a war waged between the instinct that got you to pick the pen up in the first place and the voice howling at you to get a grip of your senses and shove said pen were the sun don’t shine.

This is the voice that must be defeated.

On this occasion for me, it was a strong sense of place and the people and language of that place that give me the strength to defeat the voice and trust in the story. We speak in staccato sentences, so then will my characters. Our humour involves putting each other down as a coping mechanism for what’s going on around us, so my characters will too. The next time it may be different.

For me, those are the two key components. Place and Imagination.

I am currently writing about people a hundred years ago, in a world I can only imagine. I will still ground my characters though in a sense of place. It is not hard, with the right shoes on, to leave the road and walk up a hill to find the Ireland that hasn’t changed since my grandfather was a boy. For me, those are the two key components. Place and Imagination. Find the sense of place and your imagination can create whatever the hell it likes on top. A chip shop in Enniskillen in 1994, or a space station full of mutant chickens in 2098. The possibilities are infinite.

When we sit down to write, we think of a place in a time, or we think of a character that interests us then we put them in a place and a time. After that we simply paint the pictures onto the page that we saw in the fields as we stared through the car window on all those boring journeys as kids.

Ciaran McMenamin is in conversation with authors Arja Kajermo, Bernie McGill and Billy O’Callaghan, for an event which will explore the crucial narrative element of developing a sense of place during the writing process, at this year's Dublin Book Festival, which runs from November 2-9 - more details here.

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