The homecoming
I'm back from my Dunford Novelists' weekend, and thinking about homecomings today.
Whenever we travel we like the chance to explore somewhere new. We take in new scenery, speak to people with different lifestyles and languages to ours, and are exposed to different cultures.
Travelling is part of what creativity teacher Julia Cameron calls 'filling the well', collecting ideas and images from around us to fuel our writing. But at some time we come home from our travels, and it's the same for our characters.
Home is the base that draws us all back eventually. It's not always a pleasant experience for your characters. Going home to a controlling parent to tell them you've taken a job abroad and won't be moving back in is going to be a difficult meeting. In the UK, Christmas is the major time when families try to meet. Often they haven't seen each other since last Christmas, and are glad they haven't. Relationship counselling charities get many more new clients after Christmas after unwanted family reunions have broken relationships.
Home is a part of our and our characters' identities. They couldn't go off to war to defend their homeland if they had no sense of home. Home can be a character's refuge, a safe place from the storms in their lives. It may be a physical place they escape to, but it could also be the idea of home they carry in their heads, the place they last saw twenty years ago and have wanted to get back to ever since.
Tolkien uses the idea of home strongly in The Lord of The Rings. We're shown The Shire, the hobbits' green and pleasant land, and Gandalf appeals to Frodo to go on his difficult and dangerous quest partly by saying that even the Shire won't be safe if the ring isn't destroyed. He's already shown us how much hobbits value their comfortable lives in beautiful surroundings before he sends them off on their quest.
As so often happens, when Frodo returns to the Shire, home has changed. Tolkien had Saruman destroying things, but many commentators have said the wizard was a metaphor for the destruction of the countryside that Tolkien feared. Home can often also be the wish for continuity, a futile desire to stop the changes in our lives.
We bring depth and richness to our characters' lives if we know where they call home, and how far they will go to defend their ideal.
Whenever we travel we like the chance to explore somewhere new. We take in new scenery, speak to people with different lifestyles and languages to ours, and are exposed to different cultures.
Travelling is part of what creativity teacher Julia Cameron calls 'filling the well', collecting ideas and images from around us to fuel our writing. But at some time we come home from our travels, and it's the same for our characters.
Home is the base that draws us all back eventually. It's not always a pleasant experience for your characters. Going home to a controlling parent to tell them you've taken a job abroad and won't be moving back in is going to be a difficult meeting. In the UK, Christmas is the major time when families try to meet. Often they haven't seen each other since last Christmas, and are glad they haven't. Relationship counselling charities get many more new clients after Christmas after unwanted family reunions have broken relationships.
Home is a part of our and our characters' identities. They couldn't go off to war to defend their homeland if they had no sense of home. Home can be a character's refuge, a safe place from the storms in their lives. It may be a physical place they escape to, but it could also be the idea of home they carry in their heads, the place they last saw twenty years ago and have wanted to get back to ever since.
Tolkien uses the idea of home strongly in The Lord of The Rings. We're shown The Shire, the hobbits' green and pleasant land, and Gandalf appeals to Frodo to go on his difficult and dangerous quest partly by saying that even the Shire won't be safe if the ring isn't destroyed. He's already shown us how much hobbits value their comfortable lives in beautiful surroundings before he sends them off on their quest.
As so often happens, when Frodo returns to the Shire, home has changed. Tolkien had Saruman destroying things, but many commentators have said the wizard was a metaphor for the destruction of the countryside that Tolkien feared. Home can often also be the wish for continuity, a futile desire to stop the changes in our lives.
We bring depth and richness to our characters' lives if we know where they call home, and how far they will go to defend their ideal.
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