Set Piece

OK, the good news is that I’m feeling a bit better about the ongoing struggles with the novel I’m writing. As usual, inspiration has come when I least expected it and somehow out of nowhere. Often I find it happens when idly browsing random stuff on the internet, ordinarily I chastise myself for wasting time doing so, but sometimes it can throw up something that gives me a kernel of an idea. In this instance I needed something to kickstart the narrative and start to really highlight the conflicts between the characters. What better way to do so than a set piece?

What I was thinking of was a social event of some kind where things go horribly wrong. A sort of car crash of embarrassment and the spilling over of pent-up emotion that both pushes the story along and gives some opportunity for ripe dialogue and emotional conflict. There are many great examples in literature, but I’m thinking along of the lines of Christos Tsiolkas, who does this to incendiary effect in Barracuda, and to a lesser extent in The Slap. The kind of scene where you know something awful is going to be said or done, in front of a large group of people. The narrative has been building to the tension to this point, and the reader knows with an ever increasing feeling of discomfort that it’s all going to blow. Herman Koch is another who employs this technique with masterful precision (in fact his novel The Dinner is one big set-piece really, and the ending has formed many a book-club discussion ).

Without giving too much away, and I’m obviously not in the calibre of the two authors mentioned, but a dinner party and post-food game has formed a central part of my novel, and I’d say probably the last 10,000 words has been taken up on it. After the difficulties I’ve had bringing myself to write the last few months, this has flowed a lot better. I’m much more at home with dialogue and the party game scene has had some nice back-and-forth, and I think it has cranked up the tension quite well. I can’t think of a more enjoyable few days of writing that I’ve had in ages.

And it all came from a moment of luck when I spied a version of the game online, and it sparked the thought that it would be an excellent way to reveal some character motivation and conflict. So it has proved. It is nice when a hunch comes off for once.