Amelinda Bérubé: Setting a spectacular scene for your fantasy narrative
By Lydia Cutmore
This week I spoke to Amelinda Bérubé, delving into the importance of setting, developing characters and ‘dark’ fantasy!
Amelinda Bérubé’s work extends over several genres. There are strands of horror, a sprinkling of supernatural, and the Canadian novelist brands herself as a fan of SFF (Science Fiction and Fantasy). Nominated for The Bram Stoker Award for Best Young Adult Novel in 2019 – for her book Here There Are Monsters – she is also the author of The Dark Beneath the Ice. Both align with ‘dark’ fantasy, which blurs the line between fantasy and horror. The Dark Beneath the Ice follows Marianne, who is already battling with her parents’ divorce, her mother’s hospitalisation and major changes in her young adult life. It is a harrowing piece, with a strong theme of the paranormal: something has got it in for Marianne, something sinister...
Amelinda creates suspense and that pit-of-the-stomach fear by her use of an unreliable narrator. Everyone around Skye, barring the daughter of a local psychic, dismisses her wild claims. It brings into question the validity of what she is experiencing, mixing confusion into the ordeal. This form of narration links the reader with Skye, plunging them into her uncertainty and limiting what both can truly know about the evil forces.
When planning out a darker fantasy story, considering the type of narrator you want to use is important – what effect do you want to generate? Can your choice of narrator help this?
The story builds slowly initially, as good ghostly stories do. The addition of constructing detailed settings really helps convey the cold and bleak emotion behind the words, proving the importance of setting for Fantasy.
Unlike some Fantasy novels, Bérubé’s narratives take place in the ‘real’ world rather than a fictional place, which is a strand called contemporary fantasy. It is a different but still very successful approach if you are trying to consider where to base your tale.
The power of illustrating your fantasy setting is demonstrated in Bérubé’s opening extract:
‘This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time, Your memory is a row of sinking pines. — Gwendolyn MacEwen, “Dark Pines Under Water”’
‘This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.
— Gwendolyn MacEwen,
“Dark Pines Under Water”’
Using the epigraph to establish a setting already immerses your reader into the world of trepidation before the specific descriptions even begin.
“The water creeps higher, over my hips, over the banks, until there’s no more floor to the forest. The trees are a band of tangled darkness uniting rippling light above and below. I push my way through an endless curtain of whispering cattails to emerge into an open, ghostly place—a swath of shimmering water punctuated by silver-gray trunks. All dead. They’ve been whittled down to tall spikes almost bare of branches, a battalion of pale spears reaching up into the belly of the sky.”
Amelinda’s settings are laid out in exhaustive detail, immersing the reader into Skye’s fictional world. The reinforcement of shades of darkness create a deathly pallor of a forest that allows the reader to suspend the rules of the ‘real’ world, lost deep in the trees.
Amelinda has also taken the time to answer some questions about her process and offer us some insider tips!
How would you approach writing a piece of work? Do you have a strict structural plan and timeline in your head for the story to follow, or do you let it build itself partly?
My stories always start with a setting and a concept, and the characters evolve from there; I often use tarot cards to help me brainstorm. By the time I start writing, I usually have a pretty solid idea of how the first act is going to go, and most of the time I know how it’s going to end. But I’ve found I have trouble outlining any farther than that until I’m already rolling; I can only see so far ahead.
Even once I’ve made it from beginning to end, my first drafts are skeletal, and often I’m just figuring out what I’m trying to say; revision is a process of beefing things up and filling in the blanks and putting the emphasis in the right places.
You develop both your nuanced female protagonists so effectively in Here There Are Monsters – what is the process that goes into building your characters?
Initially, my characters spring from the setting and the premise. Who belongs in this space? What kind of person does this happen to? For Monsters, I knew Deirdre was dreamy and imaginative and that Skye was a protector who was pulling away from the world they’d shared.
As I moved the characters around, I started to wonder why Skye was trying so hard to escape Deirdre’s orbit, which led me to think she had a secret: something had happened... A lot of Skye’s character crystallized around her role as the Queen of Swords, which was a title I pulled out of the air at first, but the tarot archetype that goes with it turned out to be really helpful; it dovetailed so well with where I wanted to take the story that I’ve been turning to tarot cards for character inspiration ever since.
The tarot’s Queen of Swords is level-headed and unsentimental, and she does what she must, even if it’s painful – but she can also be downright cruel if you cross her.
What is the biggest challenge you have faced in your literary career so far?
After Monsters, which I wrote in a sustained fit of cackling glee, I was bewildered to find the next manuscript stubbornly opaque and difficult and slow. I couldn’t figure out where I was going with it or how to make the threads of the story come together. And I thought for sure that struggling with it so much had to be a sign that it wasn’t a good book and I was pouring all this time into it for nothing.
I took it to a workshop with Nova Ren Suma; she’s a really wonderful teacher, and that week let me unload my worry and frustration with the manuscript. It was really reassuring to hear from someone I so admire that sometimes it’s just like that. I guess writing books is kind of like having kids, in that the experience is different every time.
With the addition of some editorial insight from my agent, I’ve finally managed to turn that story into something I really love, and hopefully it’ll end up on shelves someday – fingers crossed!
In both Here There Are Monsters and The Dark Beneath the Ice you cultivate an atmosphere of suspense and fear through your language use, do you have any advice on building to the climax in a story?
I think the key is to make it as personal as you can – for your characters, but also for you as the writer. You know that saying “no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader”? The same is true of fear – or any emotional response, really. When you’re writing about something that moves you, it animates your language.
At the climax of the story, you’re seeing not just the culmination of the plot, but a point where the characters hit rock bottom, where they face the worst in themselves...and I think whatever that is, in some small roundabout way, it has to speak to the worst in you as the writer.
That’s where it gets its bite.
Within Here There Are Monsters, you break up your sections using quotes from the poet Gwendolyn MacEwen. Are these words that inspired or prompted you to write? Is intertextuality important to you as an author?
I was so delighted to be able to include those epigraphs. I first encountered that poem in high school, and I found myself thinking of it as I wrote – maybe because the poem always made me think of the spooky, swampy woods behind my family’s home, and those woods were the biggest inspiration for this story. But it was also a deliciously good fit for where I wanted to go with the characters, with the feel of the whole book. It was kind of like finding a theme song. Plus, this way I get to throw Canadian poetry at people.
Is there anything within your writing that you feel needs improvement, as all writers embark on a ‘journey’ throughout their lives and work?
It’s absolutely a journey, and while I could tell you a lot about what I’ve learned, I’m not sure I can point to what I still need to learn – you don’t know what you don’t know, right? But there’s definitely a ton of it; I’m just getting started, and if I get to keep doing this, the wrestling match will be different for every book.
I guess maybe the overarching challenge is just to stay open to that process of improvement with every project. One of the things I respect and admire most about Ursula Le Guin, who’s among my very favourite authors, is how readily she revisited and revised her thinking over the course of a very long career – she turned the whole Earthsea series on its head a couple of times, for example, and she often turned a critical eye on her own work in her essays.
The ‘take-away’:
1. If you are struggling for inspiration for characters, think about setting and the
premise of your story.
2. Make use of workshops/study groups – they help with confidence and the
process!
3. Make it personal – have an emotional response to the story you are telling.
4. Epigraphs can help build a foundation!
5. Writing is a journey. Be kind to yourself.
Amelinda’s prompt to start a killer story:
Like I said, setting is one of my biggest inspirations.
So, here’s what I’d suggest: Pick a place you know well – your basement, your street, your workplace, a mall, a doctor’s office, whatever – and then make it creepy!
Describe it as concretely and as eerily as you can, and then start thinking about what might happen there...
Where will your story unfold?
Meet this week’s writer Lydia Cutmore
Hi! I’m Lydia Cutmore, University of Hull English Literature student about to embark on her Postgraduate degree, specialising in Gothic fiction. A new guest blogger for Happy London Press, I can usually be found curled up reading science-fiction and writing book reviews.
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