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"Samuel Lightburn had been present for the birthing of many animals. He had witnessed the impossible feats of nature many times, had seen all strength from a beast draining into one part of its body, accumulating there, and using itself up. He was accustomed to intervention also, reaching inside the hot, rough canal of an animal himself with a bare greased arm, his fingers certain to find a loose ankle, a hand-hold."

That's a rough and bloody birth scene written by novelist Sarah Hall. Her novel Haweswater captured the difficult lives of a 1930's farming community in England, a setting she'd memorized during her childhood. Today, she tells us how to turn our most familiar settings into evocative novel scenes.

 
Welcome to the third installment of my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a serialized set of weekly interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog: 
You grew up near the setting of Haweswater, and it shows so vividly in  your prose. What's your advice for writers looking to write about a setting where they live? How can we write vividly about something we see every day? Continue reading...

Sarah Hall:
Sometimes I think it's good to gain a little distance first.

 
That way the principle features and principle matters of home will take priority and really come through, and they will maybe have gained, in the remembering, that sense of being one-step removed already, one step romanced already, which helps fictionalize the actual.

 
I wrote Haweswater in America and I certainly think that helped, because the novel itself has a mood of nostalgia and loss to it, and I was very homesick at the time.

 
I also think writers often have a natural tendency to be observational, so the chances are as a writer you'll be noticing all you have to anyway, all the details and colour and local flavour, that's going to ultimately re-create the vernacular world in your work.

 
But keeping a notebook handy never hurts while you are in situ. In Victorian gardens they used to have these places called Forcing-Houses, where things were grown too fast, like early strawberries. That may or may not work for writing novels.

 
I guess when the  place is ready to be written about it'll come easily and naturally or maybe you do have to encourage things to come out of season. I think it depends on how an idea gestates. Either way it's a personal way of working. And my only other advice is this: eat local honey.

 
Note: If serialized interviews drive you nuts, you can check out the whole interview archived here...