I picked up Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children this weekend and, despite my hesitancy and doubts, I am relieved to report that it is not a horror story. It took a while for the story to really get rolling but once Jacob leaves the States it becomes easier to grasp how much of what he'd been told by his grandfather and father is true. The biggest thing I've noticed with this book, being 2/3s the way through, is the descriptions that Riggs uses to illustrate characters and setting alike so I'll be talking a bit about that today.
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is Riggs' break-out novel so a big part of me was already inclined to give him a chance as I think most of us aspiring writers hope others will do for us in future. The story is curiously constructed around a series of vintage photographs that Riggs found during his research. This set up provides an interesting foundation for his characters because, instead of being purely dictated by his own imagination, they were created within the construct of these images. Goodness that's a confusing sentence. What I mean to say is that Riggs, when introducing characters, pairs the written description with one of these vintage photographs in the text. In doing this, he had to build his characters in such a way that they would fit the picture. Each of these pictures are part of the book themselves as well as the narrator seems and handles them, further emphasizing the book's focus on the visual.
Aside from one thing about the way Riggs described the narrator's friend at the beginning of the book, I have been drawn in and captured by his endless depictions of people and places. I generally like to think of myself as a descriptive writer, sometimes to the detriment of a story, but I've struggled to find new ways to describe old things. In this writing challenge endeavor that Chelsea and I have embarked on, I have already received a few notes from her pointing out a act, like a foot tapping on the floor, and asking what that sounds like. In these instances I find myself staring stupidly at the screen saying "well, it...sounds like...a foot tapping the floor....WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME, WOMAN?"
As writers, we are all faced with the sometimes depressing fact that every story has been told. Take a minute and breath into a paper bag if you need to, but it's true. Some may point to those few standout stories that "broke the mold" or "revolutionized" writing [I'm thinking LotR, HP, etc.] but the fact is that those are not new stories. And that's okay. It's a reality with which we live and with which some writers fair better than others. The challenge we face is not with writing something new, but in writing something old in a new way, an approach that no one's done before, with writing good enough that even when readers recognize old story lines, they don't care.
Riggs, for me, has found a way to accomplish the above. While extraordinary things happen in this book, it is actually the normal, every-day things that have caught my attention the most because he writes them in a new way, illustrating people, weather conditions, even posture in images and sounds I'd never have thought to attribute to falling rain or a fat man standing up from a stool. Riggs also applies this "new vision" to the character of his characters. As a psychology major, I take a keen interest in explaining people, especially those things that we cannot even explain about ourselves, impulses, cravings, needs, realizations. My favorite by far comes after the narrator has had a falling out of sorts with his father: "I slammed out of the Priest Hole and started walking, heading nowhere in particular. Sometimes you just need to go through a door." [Italics added] Did anyone else read that and then go "Yeah...yeah, you do! I know what that feels like!"? Because I definitely did. Something I'd never have thought to even try putting into words and I'm sure I would never have phrased that well - something common but striking in that he was able to write it down.
There are so many examples and I'm doing a poor job of explaining them so go ahead and read it yourself, I hope you enjoy it as much as I am.
Anyway, this post has turned out to be entirely too long so I'll try to wrap up. I guess a fundamental thing I want to get at here is that if you're writing anything, but especially if you're writing fantasy or sci-fi or futuristic, etc. you need to ground your writing in reality. This isn't to say that your settings have to be real places or your people real people. What I mean is that there needs to be something for the reader to relate to, something they can say "yeah, I know what that feels like/sounds like/looks like, etc" to. LotR is a phenomenal example of the power of the human imagination to create something that doesn't exist, whole countries, races, languages, cultures but the reason it is so successful is because each are grounded at least in part in something we can all relate to or have knowledge of. I think we've all come across books where world-making and character development has been hastily and shoddily done and while the words may look nice on paper, readers are able to distinguish between a fictitious language that nevertheless could function as a real language, and a fictitious language that was slapped together just to look foreign but has no legitimate claim to the title of language. Founding our writing in reality, giving characters believable and identifiable traits, behaviors, and feelings, takes effort and time. This research is something that I know I personally often drag my feet in doing but it is essential.
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