Character Traits and Revisiting Favourite Places

I’ve just come back from a visit to Sydney sandwiched with a short road trip along some of the coast north of the city. If you’re a regular visitor to this blog you’ll know that Sydney is my favourite city to visit. It has the spectacular Opera House and Harbour Bridge, and is built on a beautiful harbour. A ferry trip anywhere from Circular Quay gives you stunning views. The city has some beautiful architecture in its older government and cultural buildings, as well as fabulous parks and gardens. I absolutely love visiting Sydney. One of my favourite pastimes is taking a ferry trip to Manly, not least because you have the best views of the harbour bridge and Opera House. 

We spent the last evening of the trip in Manly. It was a lovely warm evening and so we were outside on deck on the ferry trip back to the city. As we reached the promontory with the Opera House, everyone pulled out their cameras and phones to take photos. It doesn’t seem to matter how many photos you have of this amazing building, there’s always a reason to add a few more. Just as we were snapping away, there was a blaze of fireworks for about two minutes, what brilliant timing! 

When I was younger, I used to wonder why people would visit the same place year after year, I couldn’t imagine anything more boring. To be honest, I still wouldn’t want exactly the same holiday every year. I guess one of the delights of visiting Sydney is that it’s usually a long weekend visit and so doesn’t really count as a holiday!  However, there are pleasures in revisiting a favourite restaurant or café and in seeing sights and views that continue to inspire and amaze you. 

On a different note, although there is a connection, I have just about finished the first draft of my latest novel. I still have a few scenes to write, but the main story is finished. 

Editing is an interesting process, and very different from writing the first draft. Before I start to write a novel, the characters have lived in my head for several months, sometimes a year, so I already know them pretty well.

Once the first draft is finished, I know them even better. I’ve been with them during an event or two that sends their life into a crisis they never imagined, and through mounting problems and challenges that bring them to despair. 

The editing process is a little like going to a destination you’ve visited before. There are places you love and want to see again, but also new things to discover. With the main characters in a novel, there are personality traits and characteristics you already know and show in the writing, but there are also deeper qualities and attributes you need to explore or even discover to make sense of the things they do.

For a character to be well-rounded and real, there has to be understandable reasons for the things they do, otherwise they appear two-dimensional. This is especially true of the villain or nasty character. Very few people wake up in the morning and think, today I’m going to be horrible and make everyone miserable. There is a reason they act like that, or at least in a book there needs to be a reason so the character is realistic.  Think about the most memorable evil or unlikeable characters in novels you've read. Something has happened to shape them, and sometimes even make us feel sympathy for them even if we don't like them.

Currently, I'm looking at the early life of one of my less-likeable characters to figure out what made him like this. As authors, we put our characters through hell, and I wouldn't have it any other way!

One Lovely Blog Hop

I've been challenged by Amy Spahn to join in the Lovely Blog Hop. The blog hop is intended to let you in on a few of the things in my life that have helped make me the person and writer I am. 

If I haven't bored you stupid by the end, you'll find some links to blogs and writers I like. If I’ve nominated your blog, you don’t have to participate, but if you do please include a link back to this post. This is a lovely way of networking writers’ blogs as much as sharing things from our shady past.
 

So here goes with some interesting facts. Well, they’re interesting to me at least! 

First Memory 
Some people seem to have masses of memories from their early childhood. I can only remember a few things from before the age of five or six. 

Not surprisingly, given my love of books and reading, my first strong memory is of a book. I can see myself clutching this book tightly with one hand while holding onto my brother’s pushchair with the other. From that image, I guess I was about four. I can see the book clearly. It’s longer and narrower than the average book, and each page has six or eight small coloured drawings with one or two lines of text under each picture.

When my mother was in hospital a few years ago, and we had more time than usual to talk, I described the book to her and asked if she remembered it. I thought it was a long shot, but she did remember it. Like most children I had a favourite bedtime story, Mum and Dad had often talked about the 'robber foxes', and how bored they got reading that story to me. It turns out, the book I remembered so clearly was that story.

There’s only one moral to this tale, and that’s to ask your parents all the questions you have while you can. My mother died a couple of years ago and while there are loads of things I should have asked, and wish I’d asked, I’m glad I solved the mystery of this memory. 

Books 

Reading has always been my number one favourite way to spend time. As a kid, I was the stereotypical bookworm. I spent most of my pocket money on books. I’d save up until I had enough and then go to our local stationery shop, which was the only place locally I could buy books. They had one twirly stand of children’s books, most of which were Enid Blyton. Needless to say, I grew up on a diet of Famous Five, Secret Seven, the mystery books and Malory Towers. I’d read the back cover of each book on the stand carefully, sometimes twice, and after much deliberation I’d make my choice. Then I would rush home, eager to lose myself in a make-believe world of solving mysteries or life at boarding school, although I never actually fancied going to boarding school. 

Libraries 
Libraries and books shops are two of my favourite places – not surprising really. As a child, because my reading outstripped my pocket money, I was a regular visitor at the local library. Around the age of eleven or twelve, I’d long since read all the children’s books, and so I used to sneak around the corner of the children’s area and borrow books from the adjoining shelves. Those shelves housed authors whose surnames started with C, and so began my year of reading Agatha Christie. 

What’s Your Passion? 
Recently I walked past a billboard which posed the question, ‘What’s Your Passion’. I have no idea what the board was advertising, so I’m obviously not an adperson’s dream, but the question stayed with me. A few days earlier, a friend and I were discussing that very topic, although more in terms of a work-life balance. We both agreed it was important, even necessary, to have a life outside of work, and this very often touches on the passions in your life. We both have a strong passion that takes up a lot of our time outside of work. Mine is writing and hers is horse riding. I love walking either coastally or in bush and forest, but it isn’t the same as the passion I have for writing. If a few days go by where I’m not able to spend at least a short time continuing the latest work in progress, I definitely get ‘antsy’. So what’s your passion? 

New Zealand 
One of my other passions is for the country I’ve made my home. I was born in England, and I realise that growing up there has shaped a lot of who I am, but after travelling around with work and family for quite a few years, we came to New Zealand for work and made it our home.

I think New Zealand is one of the most beautiful places in the world. We are lucky in such a small country to have the diverse landscape that we enjoy; from lush rolling hills with herds of dairy cattle, to forests, beaches, cliffs, mountains, volcanoes and glaciers. Here in Auckland we enjoy a beautifully calm east coast contrasting the west coast beaches with dangerous seas of heavy surf, rocks and black volcanic sand. With all this inspiration it's little wonder that my latest work in progress is set here. 

Learning 
I love learning new things, and feel very lucky that doing so is part of my job. Some of the subjects I have to research and develop training courses for aren’t necessarily things I’d choose to learn about, but there’s generally something interesting to discover. Even if you’re writing fiction, there’s plenty of need for research and finding out new things, and in some genres it’s almost obligatory.

What interests me most is people. What makes us who we are, how experiences impact on us and change our perceptions, and how what we view as normal, is often so different for each of us, even with similar backgrounds. All very useful for writing fiction.

Writing 
I couldn’t really leave writing out of things that inspire me and have made me the person I am. I’ve always written, not always novels and short stories, but writing has played a big part in my life. My parents never had a computer, so if you add this to the mix of travelling and living overseas you can understand why letter writing was important. I’ve kept a lot of the electronic copies of letters I wrote as they’re my journal of events and places I’ve visited.

I wrote short stories as a child and young teenager and returned to that again as an adult. When I decided I wanted to take writing seriously, my learning focus came rushing centre stage. If I was going to do this thing, then I wanted to learn everything I could about the craft of writing. I attended a number of workshops and classes, and read heaps of books on writing. Ultimately, you come to a point where you know the theory. What you then need is a person you trust (or a group of people) to kindly but honestly point out the craft areas you need to work on and strengthen. I feel very fortunate to have found such a group.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll have seen from the recent posts that writing and thinking about writing appears to occupy a large part of my waking (and dreaming) time. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If you're still here, below are the links to blogs and writers you might find interesting. In the list are people I've met, while others are virtual friends. Some of the blogs are chatty and personal, and others have good writing information. Some combine both those attributes. Some are written on a regular basis and others less so, but all are great people.

Joanne Phillips

Susan Murray

Donna Joy Usher

Sue Moorcroft

Bev Robitai

Anita Chapman

Di Jones

Rob Mustard (City Noir) - not a blog but some beautiful poetry

Recipe for a Dinner Party

A short note to point you in the direction of the lovely Amy Spahn who has written an essay on the style and narration of my short story Recipe for a Dinner Party.

Amy has done an amazing job of making me sound a lot more intelligent than I feel, and for that she earns my heartfelt thanks.

Pop over and take at look at this and many other thought-provoking posts.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Writing a Novel

Where do you get your ideas? Which comes first, the characters or the plot?
These are two of the questions that people often ask writers.

I remember the moment Lexie, the main character in Still Death, came to my mind – reading a newspaper article outside a café on a road trip in New South Wales, Australia. That was four or five years and several other projects ago, but she’s hung since then, and I guess that answers the opening questions.

Originally Lexie was going to be the main character in a different genre, but as I got to know her it was obvious her flaws and character arc needed a different type story. That was where I hit my first problem.

I’d written my earlier novels in a similar way – knowing the end point and outlining the first third to half of the novel. I decided this time I'd plan the entire novel so I wouldn’t get side tracked and waste time.

Oh boy, what a headache that gave me. At heart I believe I’m an outliner/planner, BUT this book just wouldn’t move out of the starting blocks. I spent several weeks trying to force a plot and got nowhere. Eventually I decided to start writing and see where it took me. 

It was scary. There were several times I emailed or met up with a writer friend, our conversations going something like this.

‘I’ve got a scene where this artist woman turns up and has a mysterious meeting with one of the other characters.’
‘Ooh, that sounds good.’
‘But I don’t know who the hell she is, or what part she’s playing.’

Or
‘Lexie’s husband is investigating this mysterious compound, but goodness knows what happens.’
 
Or simply:
‘Another guy’s turned up dead.’
 
About halfway through the first draft, I got to a point where it felt as though I was banging my head against the wall with the plot. I knew Lexie inside out and upside down, I knew what decision she’d make in any situation and why, but I couldn’t get traction with the plot.

Then came the light bulb moment. Looking back at it, it was obvious, but often the obvious is difficult to see. One evening when I should have been writing, I read an article that covered the different processes and ways people write novels. As most writers know, there’s the planner, outliner and pantser, but the article went deeper than that – do you start with characters, with a plot or with snapshots of scenes.

My ideas always start with characters. Suddenly I knew where I’d been going wrong. From the beginning I was trying to force a plot. I’d told myself as this was a murder/mystery I HAD to have the plot sorted out, but I don’t write like that and therefore couldn’t plan that way. If my ideas start with characters and they’re character-driven novels, then I have to let the characters drive the plot. It sounds so obvious now, but this was a real breakthrough.

I knew how Lexie thought and how she’d react to situations. I knew her flaws and the things that worried her and the ways she had to grow to become the person she needed to be at the end of the novel. Now I needed to figure out what would get her to that place.

The words didn’t exactly flash out of my fingers at lightning speed, but I could see where I needed to go and what needed to happen – I had a plot! But one that made sense to the characters and their growth.

If you’re interested in reading a little of Still Death, here’s the prologue.

Late May

The woman said goodbye to her friend and left the restaurant, paying no attention to the cars parked along the road. There were always cars, and usually people, although it was quiet at the moment. The restaurants and pubs were busy, but it was too early for anyone to make the move to the clubs a few streets away.

She smiled, remembering the phone calls of the past days. He missed her, couldn’t wait to finish the research on his current story and fly back. Couldn’t wait to see her again.

She’d missed him. He would be back at his apartment by now, working on the story and waiting for her. The previously arranged dinner had been unavoidable, but at least it was over.

Her smile crinkled light lines around her eyes. She glanced at her watch, increased her pace. It only took a few minutes to walk to his flat from here. He’d be waiting for her call, but she’d surprise him.

She didn’t see the man, silent in the shadows. Didn’t hear the few words he muttered into his phone.

Further along, she slowed as she turned to cross the street. A car came around the corner. She stepped out between the parked vehicles and glanced towards the dazzling headlights. The car stopped in the road, engine idling. The same model as his. Perhaps he’d come to pick her up, not wanting to wait any longer. The headlights blinded her. She squinted, trying to make out the driver or the registration number.

The car engine revved, tyres squealed, as it hurtled towards her. No time to move or call out. The car rammed into her. Knocked the breath out of her body. Tossed her onto the road like a limp rag doll. The frown of uncertainty still creased her forehead.

A trickle of blood seeped from the corner of her mouth, dribbled down her cheek and onto the road. The car roared away. The man checked there was no one around. He approached the woman and crouched down. Watched the light fade from her eyes then made another phone call.

Still Death will be available from 8th November, but you can pre-order it from Amazon.  After the launch it will be $2.99 but at the moment you can pre-order it for 99 cents.

Getting Better All The Time

Becoming good at something interests me – you probably got that impression from the previous post.

Why does one person achieve success and another doesn’t? Why is one person excellent at a sport or occupation, while others are mediocre? What makes the difference?

I guess it begins with our individual motivation and desire to succeed at something. Like most people, I’ve watched athletes or musicians etc. and have been amazed at their skills, and wished I could do the same. The big difference is that my idle wish has never morphed into anything more than a frivolous fancy, at least not until I decided I wanted to be able to call myself a writer, and be proud of what I'd written.

It’s easy to look at a sportsperson, singer, musician or artist and think how lucky they are to have that talent; to be born good at what they do. But they weren’t.

‘If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.’ Michelangelo 

A number of years ago, I joined a badminton club. I’d always enjoyed playing and I wanted to improve. I played regularly (two or three times a week), with the purpose of improving. I played with, and against, better players and took part in the club competitions. I never became the best, but my game improved. That was my goal. We moved to a different part of the country and I wasn’t able to continue in the same way, but after a while we found some friends to play with once a week. We played mainly for fun. It was exercise and we enjoyed the evening out. I had a good time, but my game didn’t improve.

Thinking of that reminded me of years ago when I learned to type. The course involved some speed tests at the end, and so once I’d mastered the basics, I practiced hard to improve my speed. I can’t remember now what it was, maybe 90 words per minute, or even a hundred. These days  I use the computer every day, My typing speed is fast, but no faster than it was then, and possibly slightly slower.

My mother always used to tell me that ‘practice makes perfect.’ There is some truth in that, however, I don’t believe that all practice is created equal. Yes, I type every day, but my goal is writing a book, or an article or blog post, not improving my speed. When I only played badminton recreationally and not to improve, my game remained the same.

If we want to become excellent at something, or at least improve, we need to practice, but we need to practice with a purpose. That’s why goals are so useful necessary. They give us something to work towards, and results we can measure.

If we want to play a game professionally, an occasional fun practice with friends isn’t going to help us. We need more practice, lots more, and we need to practice with a purpose.

How much practice do we need to become excellent at something?

I’ve read a number of books on this subject and the consensus appears to be around 10,000 hours. That’s 10,000 hours of writing practice, or some other skill, with a purpose.

10,000 hours sounds like a lot (and it is), but let's convert it into more meaningful figures. If we use 40 hours a week as working at something fulltime, that is 250 weeks of writing, which is a little under 5 yrs.

That’s a lot of writing. And if you have a job and writing is part-time (say 20 hours a week) then it’s ten years of purposeful practice. Speechless yet?

On the plus side, improvement is an incremental process, so it’s not as if we’re beginners until we get to the 10,000 word mark, and then suddenly become amazing. We’re improving all the time.

Being excellent at something takes time, and effort.

It’s not just practice, but practice with a purpose. It should challenge us.  We should make ourselves work on the things we can’t do well, rather than paddling in the shallows of things we think we can do well.

Let's assume we're putting in our practice with a purpose! Is that all, when we've completed our 10,000 hours, will we be excellent? Is practice all we need?

All top athletes, musicians, artists need the right training. For writers, courses and books are a good start. However, once we’ve learned the basics we need more – we know about pace, point of view, tense etc. Now we need to know where we’re not applying these things in our own writing.

Athletes have coaches. I’ve never been a top athlete, but I’d guess the coach’s purpose (or one of them at least), is to give feedback. If the move or shot didn’t work, why not?  

What is the equivalent for writers? There is a point when we know the craft skills of writing, but we’re still a long way from excellence. Just as an athlete needs a coach to help them make changes or tweaks to technique or stance or training, so we need specific help. We need someone who also knows all the craft skills, and can tell us where we’re not putting them into practice in our writing. A writing group is excellent for this, they provide support, motivation and specific feedback. In addition to a writing group, once we’ve finished our novel then beta readers are invaluable. Writing groups and beta readers need to be chosen carefully. They provide different feedback and have different skill sets. Don’t forget professionals such as editors.  Mentors are popular in business groups and some organisations provide writing mentors, or subsidise programmes to link writers with mentors for a period of time. In this environment we can get feedback and support that is specific to us.

Building this knowledge can transform us and help us meet our own personal goals for success.

What is Success?

Recently I’ve been considering how my writing goals have changed over the years. Like many people, I started writing the great novel. I got to about the 20,000 word mark, and realised my idea didn’t have the legs to be a novel. Around that time, I took a couple of writing courses and read a number of writing books. Through the courses, I met a small group of other writers who also wanted to be part of a critique group, and so I had the feedback I needed.  I left the 20,000 words of my novel behind, and started writing short stories. I really recommend this as a great start. It allows you to work through all those autobiographical stories and ideas in the short form without trying to force them into a novel, and you come out of the other side with new inspiration and characters to use, as well as improved writing and editing skills.

Short stories don’t take as long as a novel. You get to practice both the first draft and editing stages far more frequently.

After writing, editing, feedback and more editing, I began to feel I was improving, and so the writing itself wasn’t a big enough goal.

That was when I really started setting writing goals. Firstly, to send stories off to competitions. There were plenty of black holes when I never heard anything, or occasionally received a list of winners (my name being absent!). Mixed with that were a few modest successes. They were the highs, and on the back of those I changed my goals and sent stories to magazines. Later, there was the goal to write a novel – mostly to prove to myself that I could.

I gave this post the title What is Success? There is no definitive answer. Success is different to each of us, and it changes over time. 

What is your definition of success? 

BUT, the big question is - how will you know when you’ve reached it?

To know when we’ve reached our goal, we have to be able to measure it.

To say, I want to entertain people, isn’t specific or measurable. What do you mean? Do you want to read out loud to an audience? How will you know if your readers have been entertained? 

I recall reading a post from a writer outlining her goals, some of them were specific sales totals per month. At that time I was speechless (doesn’t happen often!) at her targets. I’m still a significant way from her numbers, but closer than I was last year.

Your goals will be personal to you. They might include a certain word count every week, sales targets, winning a competition prize, or a specific number of good reviews from people you don’t know. We have control over some of these goals, but others are out of our personal control.

Whatever way you envisage success, I think it’s important to know what you’re aiming for, and how close you are to reaching it.

Perfection

Occasionally in a text or email from my daughter, she’ll add a #Perfectionist. It’s an in-joke between us, as I sometimes moan about by perfectionist tendencies.

I’m obviously well aware of this trait, and sometimes flaw, in my personality. I’m not a perfectionist with everything, far from it. I can live with dusty surfaces and general untidiness (to a point!). When we’re decorating, I’m definitely a ‘close enough is good enough’ worker, who manages to get plenty of paint on surrounding surfaces and myself. However, when it comes to my creative writing, it’s never good enough!

Perfection is a double-edged sword. If something is important to me, I absolutely believe in making it as good as I can, but some things just aren’t worth worrying about that much. For me, house-decorating, cleaning and a whole pile of other things definitely fall into that category. Perfection is also an impossible standard. Whether it’s trying to look as good as a model or actress, or be as fit as a professional athlete, we’ll probably never measure up, certainly not in our own eyes.

However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work at being the best we can, at things that are important to us. The hard part is knowing when we’ve done all we can, at this moment. Those last three words are important. I look at some of my early short stories and writing – the things that no one else has ever seen - and cringe when I read them. The flip side is that I’m improving.

This thing with perfection can defeat us if we take our search too far. I know I reach a point where I have to tell myself that something is as good as I can make it. Now. It’s been critiqued, edited and polished to the best of my abilities, and within that search for perfection, there is a certain pride that I’ve done my best. We have to know when we’ve reached the limit of what we can do now, and send it out into the world.

If we don’t, then we’ll never learn to be pleased with where we are now, and look at how to move beyond it.

Equally, we know when we could make something better, but we can't be bothered because we're fed up with it. It's a different feeling, and if we leave something there and don't improve it, we're selling ourselves short.

Some time ago I read the book 11/22/63 by Stephen King. In speaking about the book, he said he first had the idea as a very young writer, but knew he didn’t have the skills to pull it off at that point, so he practiced his craft and honed his skills until he felt he could write the book and do it justice.

Somewhere there is a point we have to find, where we can let go and be proud of what we've achieved, knowing there is still more of the hill to climb.

Silence, Subtext and Unreliable Narrators

As I walked into a small shop a few days ago, I overheard part of a conversation between the store owner and a person at the counter. The customer asked about someone they were thinking of employing. 

The owner hesitated for the briefest of moments before giving a pleasant, but non-committal response.

The hesitation said everything. The polite words spoken without any enthusiasm merely confirmed my initial reaction. I wouldn't employ the person they were discussing.

As I came out of the shop I thought about that exchange as a writer. 

Dialogue is vital in writing. It should do at least one of the following things:

• Advance the plot
• Deepen understanding of the character
• Create or advance conflict and suspense. 

Silence, or a pause that is slightly longer than it should, can often tell us far more than conversation. Why is the character silent? Is it because they don't have an answer, or because they don't want to tell what they know? 

Is it a comfortable silence, or does the person act awkwardly and out of character? Does another character rush to fill the silence with chatter?  What questions would go unanswered, or be answered ambiguously or untruthfully?

Silence can also heighten tension, especially when it's obvious one character knows something, but isn't telling. Does the reader know the answer, or are they being kept in the dark as well?

If used well, silence can do the same job as dialogue in expanding plot, deepening character and creating suspense or questions. 

Subtext is the content hidden under dialogue, and is a good way to show the relationship between characters. For example, Sally and Jane have had a disagreement at work. They sit at adjacent desks, but have been working silently since the disagreement. Then Jane says she is going to buy coffee and a muffin from the cafe along the road, and asks Sally if she would like anything. Neither mentions the disagreement, but the offer of coffee and a muffin is subtext for an apology, or at least a request to forget the disagreement. Subtext is often used between people who know each other well, although a group of people may use it to laugh at someone outside of their group. 

Another way that dialogue can keep the reader guessing is by using an unreliable narrator. I recently finished Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, and without giving away too much of the plot, as you read further into the book you begin to realise that what you are being told is not necessarily the whole truth. 

A narrator may be unreliable because they are deliberately misleading you, or it could be because they don't fully understand the situation. An excellent example of this is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime by Mark Haddon.  The narrator is fifteen-year old Christopher Boone, who has behavioral difficulties. Because of this and his age, there are scenes which he doesn't understand, but which the reader does. 

Christopher gets into trouble because he doesn't understand other people, or subtext. An example of the type of subtext he wouldn't get is, 'Can you open the window?' To Christopher this is a question about his abilities, but we know he is being asked to open the window.

Using an unreliable narrator isn't something you can decide to do halfway through a manuscript, at least not without a lot of rewriting, but it makes for an interesting read when used well. 

Set the Scene

In some books or films, the setting is so integral to the story that it feels like one of the characters. If the setting changed, the story would change.

As I thought about this an old Robert Redford film came to mind, (sorry but I can't remember the name). It's a cowboy film, and throughout the film the scenery is harsh desert giving a feeling of searing heat, and a decided lack of life.

In several of Daphne du Maurier's books setting plays an important role. Think of the gloomy threatening inn on Bodmin Moor (Jamaica Inn), and of the oppressive house, Manderley, in Rebecca. 

Heathcliffe is as wild as the Moors surrounding him. 

Lives Interrupted (for me) couldn't be set anywhere else but London. Kate has dreamed of living in London through her teenage years, and we see the city through her excited perspective. Whether it's the dingy arrivals area at Heathrow or the gloomy tube stations, she sees everything as new and exciting. Even having her bag stolen doesn't change her delight at living her dream. After the bombings, she views London in a very different way as she attempts to get back something of the person she was before.

My current book, Lies of the Dead, is set in a Cornish village called Poldrayth. The village is fictional, but based on a real place. The three main characters are two brothers and a sister. Tom, the older brother, is the only sibling who still lives in the village, and it has a strong influence on his character. He is steady, reliable and always there, just like the village. It has been the family home for generations, and Tom can't imagine living anywhere else. However, when his life is threatened there, it changes his view of the village.

The importance of place doesn't have to (and shouldn't) mean long paragraphs of description. The setting is seen through the characters, and affects their actions and the way they view the world. It makes them who they are. Someone who makes quick, rash decisions will view their surroundings differently to someone who is slower and methodical. A couple in love would enjoy a walk in a secluded setting, that same setting at night would have a totally different feel for a nervous person on their own.

Knowing our characters, and how they will react to their surroundings can have a huge impact on our story, indeed it can make the story. The whole basis of the film Crocodile Dundee is having the two main characters spend time in a vastly different setting to their usual one, and seeing how they react.

What is the setting of your book? If you changed the setting would if change the story? You don't have to change the setting of the entire book, but if you changed the setting of an important scene would it make a difference? It might move your story in a totally different direction.

If you're having difficulty with a scene, change the setting and see where it takes you.  I'd be interested to know if you've tried this and how it worked for you.