It's great to travel, to experience different cultures and/or take a relaxing break from the drudgery of home.  Writers especially seem to relish getting away. But how often do we recognise the impact of our holiday on the communities we visit?  This year's World Tourism Day draws attention to the importance of water in sustainable tourism.  The British charity, Tourism Concern, highlights the problem of water inequity and provides some useful guidance on using water responsibly while on holiday.  While I try to do my bit, I'm more of a dreamer than an activist, so my contribution to the day has to be a couple of stories about the ethics of rich world / poor world tourism: Silver Bangles, published by Amarillo Bay, and A House for the Wazungu, coming soon from Chuffed Buff Books.

Coming next month (hopefully) on Annecdotal:

# my tottering TBR pile

# character motivation in the debut novels featured in my author Q&A's

# the third instalment of my feature on fictional psychologists and
psychotherapists

# how the elephant god got his head: on storytelling versus story writing

And maybe more.  Do come back and enjoy!

Nutrition isn’t only a biological necessity; in life, as in novels, food symbolises care, and so fiddling around with it serves to make life harder for the protagonists. Writers sacrifice the desires of their characters in favour of the reader’s love of narrative tension.  On one level, the thwarting of even imaginary people seems harsh, yet one of the things that struck me across the five Q&A’s I’ve completed so far was the authors’ empathy for their creations.  Claire King told me she

and, over on The Literary Sofa, she highlighted one consequence of writing from a child’s point of view as the need for plenty of tissues.  Shelley Harris was so wrapped up in her character’s psyche that she chose
his career unconsciously, as he would have done himself.  The impetus for Gavin Weston’s novel was his concern about the fate of a  girl his family had sponsored; its completion has driven him to take a more
active role in relation to the practice of child marriage by becoming an ambassador for FORWARD.

While we might expect writers to empathise with their child characters and/or those who have been treated unjustly, their empathy for their more prickly protagonists was also apparent:

In the wonderfully wacky film, Being John Malkovich, a puppeteer discovers a portal into the actor’s head.  While I’d hesitate to imply I understand what such a complex story is  about, the motivation for returning to the portal seems as much about controlling another’s mind as his body.  Rather like a writer, don’t you think? 

For the movie’s female characters, there’s the frisson of gender-bending sex that makes me think of the female writer writing from the male point of view. I don’t know about other female writers, but when I’m a male narrator, unless he's having sex or going to the toilet, I tend to think of the dangly bit between his legs in symbolic, rather than  flesh and blood, terms.  

Yet at some level we need to convey our characters’ gender, age and physique through their bodies as well as their minds, and to experience those bodies from the inside out.  Does a fat person occupy a chair differently to a skinny one: the first squeezing into a confined space and the second getting bum-ache if you leave them sitting too long with insufficient padding?  Would a short person notice different things to a tall one as they walk down a street because their gaze is at a different level? 
What difference does it make to have big feet, or small?  To piss from a standing position or sitting down?

Complicated stuff?  It might be easier, in some ways, to create characters with unusual or distorted bodies, than to write from an ordinary body that is not one’s own.  But woe betide the writer who lets her attention lapse, even momentarily, and retreats into her own physique.  

I had great fun writing about Tamsin, a young woman who wakes up on the morning of her wedding to find that her neck has grown as long as her arm. But with every revision of the story I had to check on the physicals, walking about the house with my hand in the air where I reckoned her head would be to ensure I hadn’t fudged the mechanics.

How is your own writerly kinaesthesia and do you have examples of convincing and unconvincing literary bodies to share?

While published novelists will often blog about their new book covers, I get to announce the earthshattering news that I’ve changed the masthead on my website.  What do you mean, you didn’t notice?  I’ll assume that’s
because you’ve been too dazzled by my words. To be fair, all I’ve done is swap one row of novels for another. Side-by-side you might mistake it for a children’s spot-the-difference puzzle:

On the left, the random sample of my favourite novels culled from my bookshelves that made up the old header; on the right, the bones of the new one: a selection of books that have had at least a walk-on part on the blog, or will do soon.  Apart from a couple of novels I hadn’t even read when I made my first choice back in April (Harmattan; The House of Sleep; The Orphan Master’s Son – and I certainly wasn’t consciously planning to position them together slap in the middle), I’m surprised there’s so little overlap (only Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto springs up in both, although Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin also meets the criteria).  Clearly, my mind works differently when I’m picking works to illustrate a point or a theme.  But I wouldn't want to make too much of that: in all honesty what constitutes my all time favourite novels varies from one day to the next.

In fact, less than a fortnight after I launched it, the new masthead is already out of date, with significant omissions such as Claire King's The Night Rainbow, the latest addition to my interviews with debut novelists.  But if I tried to update it every time I read a new book I'd
never get any writing done.

That said, I thought it would be fun to have some dialogue around my selections, and got carried away with the idea of quiz before I noticed it’s enough of a challenge to identify some of the novels from the photos, never mind answer questions about them.  So if anyone’s still reading, here are the titles:

Now, here at last, three questions, one each on the themes of author, character and setting:

1.  How many debut novels are represented in each picture?  (Clue: not all of them have featured in my author interviews.)

2.  How many novels feature a psychological therapist as a main character?

3.  How many novels have predominantly British settings and how many don’t?

I’ll come back with my answers in a couple of weeks – and then we can argue who’s got it right.  In the meantime, do share your opinions on my selections.