Diane Jeffrey on A Sense Of Place

We’ve all read novels where the setting stays with us as much as the characters once we’ve finished reading the last page. The London depicted in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, the wild Yorkshire moors in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Middle-earth in JRR Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings books; C.S. Lewis’s Narnia…

In many novels, if the place where the scene takes place is vibrantly portrayed and relevant to the plot, the setting can almost be a character in its own right. In my writing, I try to paint a vivid sense of place and to show how my characters are affected by their surroundings in order to create suspense and atmosphere.

My first psychological thriller, THOSE WHO LIE, which has a dual timeline, takes place in North Devon and Oxford. I grew up in North Devon and so it seemed the perfect location to set the past chapters for my main character, Emily. She grows up in rather an isolated village, as I did, and I was able to draw on childhood experiences and memories, for example, for the chapter at the beach in Woolacombe, where I worked several summers as a lifeguard, and the chapter in which Emily helps her friend, Will, with the lambing on his dad’s farm.

I chose Oxford as the setting for my present-day chapters. My protagonist moves here as an adult because she needs to make a completely new start, and although it’s terrifying for Emily to go to a city she doesn’t know and has never visited, it had to be somewhere I knew and could describe with a degree of authenticity. When she moves away from Devon, Emily feels like she is falling down a rabbit hole as she doesn’t know what awaits her in Oxford, and so the home of Lewis Carroll, seemed fitting.

Published on 4th August 2018, my second novel, HE WILL FIND YOU, also has two settings. The idea for the novel came to me when I was on holiday with my family in the Lake District. As Cookie, my Labrador, and I were running around Derwentwater, a large lake near the beautiful town of Keswick, I spotted a huge, forbidding house that looked a lot like a Gothic castle. It must have had stunning views of the lake and hills, but it looked very out of place with its surroundings.

In my novel, Kaitlyn, who discovers she’s pregnant after a one-night stand with Alex, leaves her job, family and friends in Somerset and moves in with Alex in his house in the Lake District to start a new life with him. Although she finds the countryside breathtaking, she hates Alex’s house, The Old Vicarage, which was inspired by the ugly house I spotted that day while I was out running. I should stress that even if Kaitlyn struggled to feel at home in the Lake District, I loved it so much that I didn’t want to come home! I can’t wait to go back there!

In both of my novels, I chose places I knew for the settings. I used online local magazines and websites such as GoogleMaps as well as guidebooks, but I wanted to be able to describe the smells, the atmosphere and the noises in those places, too. As I live in France and needed to refresh my memory, these places were an important part of my research as well as holiday destinations for my family (the summer after we went to the Lake District, we went to Somerset, where Kaitlyn in He Will Find You – and my own father in real life – grew up!)

Maybe one day, I’ll set one of my books in France, but for now, the research and field trips provide me with a good excuse to come back to England for visits!

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Category: On Writing