'It's like I was there'

Over the weekend, we received an entry into the Global Short Story Competition which brilliantly evoked sense of place.
As a writer, I am always inspired by a sense of place. Whether it be a gloomy city or a stunning hillside, a glass-strewn council estate or a majestic waterfall, something about my surroundings triggers ideas.
Let me take you back several years to a hillside in the North Pennines in an attempt to show you what I mean. I was on a family holiday and we were staying in a village on the Durham/Cumbrian border. There was a play area in the middle of the village and every evening my two children would go for a swing and I would wander out to keep an eye on them - they had gone past the ‘Dad, give me a push’ stage but had not quite reached the stage where they could be left alone.
In such circumstances a person has a lot of time to think and, as they swung, so I found myself staring at the hillside opposite. Something about the hill’s slopes and its late evening shadows, the way the buzzards hunted across the ridge, the sound of the sheep bleating and the distant barking of a farm dog, worked their magic on me and by the end of the week, an idea was born, eventually turning into The Dead Hill, my seventh crime novel published by Hale in 2008 and the first in the Jack Harris series.
I returned to the area for the next books in the series, in all of which the landscape is a major character. It was the same with the entry we received over the weekend.
There are now less than three days to enter the April comp at www.inscribemedia.co.uk


John Dean