David Hewson, a judge in our ‘Sense of Place’ Creative Writing Competition, tells us about the experience

David Hewson, a judge in our “Sense of Place’ Creative Writing Competition, tells us about the experience.

Well that was a tough one. Your entries for TripFiction’s first writing contest took us all over the world, from Europe to the jungle of south east Asia, from beaches in Sydney to a shrine to death in India. And that was just the ten finalists.

It was hard picking a winner, honestly. And just to be clear that doesn’t mean those of you who didn’t get to the top this time are somehow losers. In the end writing comes down to a matter of individual taste, not some black and white choice between good and bad. A large part of writing consists of dealing with rejection. If you haven’t had that experience yet you haven’t tried hard enough.

The quality of the material we received was extremely high and wide-ranging. But the big surprise I guess for the three of us is that when we came to face the thorny problem of picking our winner we found ourselves close to home, in a rundown seaside resort in the north east of England. I’ve no idea who the author is as I write this – all judging happened anonymously, as it should. But whoever it was struck a chord with us that took him or her across the finishing line by the tiniest of margins against the stiffest of competition.

The story is called simply The Return and simplicity was at the very heart of its appeal. It recounts the experience and the memories of someone going back to a modest seaside resort of their childhood and discovering that, as with so many coastal towns today, the years have taken a terrible toll. Location isn’t just about how a place looks, as beginning writers so often think. It’s just as much about how it feels, how it smells, the responses it invokes in the point of view through which the narrative is told. The Return delivers all this in spades.

Yes, we see this decrepit resort where happy kids once played on the sand. But we can also imagine the little paper flags the placed on sandcastles, hear the screaming gulls, smell the fish and chips, see those rundown beach shops with their out-of-date calendars and fading, curling postcards. There’s a big difference between writing with candour about a place you once knew intimately and somewhere you visited on a weekend break. Whoever wrote this piece either fell into the first category or has a towering imagination. I’m pretty sure it’s the first.

For location to work well in a story there needs to be a strong connection between the teller and the place. The link here was very firm – someone is going back to somewhere they once loved only to find that it, like perhaps themselves, has suffered with age. This connection is complex, which is why it works so well. Not love, not hate, but a mix of nostalgia, disappointment, a realisation that the past is past and can never be relived. That’s a richer and more realistic approach to location than writing about a place starry-eyed because you just happen to adore its exoticism.

In the end The Return is a welcome reminder that, whether it’s somewhere you know, somewhere you’ve imagined, or a location you’re trying to rebuild from distant memory, you can’t fake place. You need to write with conviction and belief. It doesn’t matter whether it’s real or not. The worlds of Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings were conjured out of nothing but ink on the page and an author’s stubborn need to write.

Nor is it a question of perusing Google Maps and Wikipedia to try to find ‘authenticity’. Convincing location comes from connection, heart and a lively imagination broad enough to take the building blocks of reality – in this case the detritus of a failing seaside resort – and create from them a world that comes alive in the reader’s mind. There the author of The Return most certainly delivered.

Congratulations.

Now write something else. And that goes for the rest of you too.

David Hewson is the very successful British author of thrillers set across Europe – with an emphasis on Italy. He has written almost 30 books. 11 of them feature young Roman policeman, Nic Costa, who has become something of a cult figure. David also wrote the novel adaptations of the Copenhagen-based The Killing television series and the slightly quirky Amsterdam-based House of Dolls featuring local detective, Pieter Vos. David is renowned for his sense of location and the authentic writing of the place in which his stories are set.

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