Dan Fesperman on foreign locales
We continue on the topic of writing with Dan Fesperman, a former Baltimore Sun foreign correspondent. His five novels, including The Amateur Spy and The Prisoner of Guantanamo, have settings in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and the Middle East. Here's Dan:
The toughest thing about writing in a foreign setting is putting yourself into the minds of all of your foreign characters. Even a tourist can get the sights, sounds and smells right, as long as he’s observant and takes good notes. Nailing the local point of view is another matter entirely.
About the only way to do this is to hire an interpreter and start talking to people, the more the better. You set up formal interviews, but you also strike up conversations in cafés and outdoor markets. You become a genial pest, insinuating yourself into homes and offices, or wrangling invitations to family dinners, rudely taking notes all the while.
The goal of this immersion is to craft characters that will feel right at home; personalities you will be able to don like disguises, speaking in their voices and seeing the world as they do. Your powers of observation are always tested. When people argue around a dinner table, for example, do they touch? Do they shout? Do they guard their language, or pour it on? Do women join in, or drift to the margins?
In some countries, where the outlook and way of life has remained virtually unchanged for centuries, this immersion can feel like time travel. Remote hill towns in Bosnia, with their ox carts and kerchiefed old women, take you back to the 19th century. In Afghanistan, particularly the lawless borderlands where Osama Bin Laden is supposedly hiding out, you drift a further 300 years into the past. It is a heady experience, full of wonders.
Just ask Skelly, a character in my third book, The Warlord’s Son. As a burned out American hack, he was an old pro at this sort of thing, and when he landed on the Pakistani frontier shortly after 9/11, he reveled in the knowledge that a great adventure in cultural discovery lay ahead:
“In the weeks to come, Skelly knew, he would enter realms of old codes and unbreakable taboos. His hosts would be men wondering one minute how they might cut his throat while in the next they’d offer tea and refreshment, breaking bread pulled from a smoking ceramic hole in the ground, just as they would have done it five hundred years earlier.”
Capture these feelings while they’re fresh, and their mood will seep unavoidably into your prose.
Once you’re home, the challenge is to re-create this mindset even as you sip coffee in a suburban office, writing scenes of exotic upheaval while a school bus passes outside your window, and a lawn mower drones next door.
The key to staying focused is in your memory, of course. But it is also in your notebooks. Certain descriptions, sometimes even a word or two, can instantly unlock the mood, the smell, the sense of an entire scene or place, or the way people were dealing with one another.
It is a distillation, like a magic potion. A mere sip and you’re transformed. The school bus might as well have disappeared into a sinkhole. The sound of the mower fades. And you are again back in that bazaar, or standing in a grimy alley, seeing another world just as the locals did.
If the charm wears off too soon, your readers will know right away, because your prose will ring false, the hollow tone of forced authority. But if you become comfortable in this second skin, they will, too.
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Fesperman’s travels as a writer have taken him to three war zones and more than 30 countries. His books have won two Dagger Awards in the UK, plus a Dashiell Hammett award in the United States. His sixth novel, The Arms Maker of Berlin, will be published in August 2009 by Knopf.
Categories: Bouchercon/Charmed to Death
While she always preferred The Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew, 
Comments
Just finished, back to back, Fesperman's-The Small Boat of Great Sorrows, Lie in the Dark, and then, The Warlord's Son. Dan has the voice and the ear, his heart is over there, wherever there is in the story. He gets it right and keeps it right there, one breath at a time. "Been there, done that," shines through in his writing, because he really has.
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Posted by: charles colley | October 25, 2008 5:08 PM