writing tension and security
I’m writing this to clear my thoughts as I try to get into the head of a character in The Cauldron Bubbles. The story is set in the 1820 uprising in Scotland following the Peterloo affair. It concerns a deaf lad who has escaped threats by running away over the moors of South Lanarkshire. I know the moors and they are a place of sanctuary from life’s problems. The deaf lad is from the north, Dornoch and doesn’t know the area and it has been pointed out he will be terrified and desperate. I can understand he might be in spasms but the moors are empty and while that might worry some people, I have always found them friendly, places where the curlews cry and the skylarks sang. A place where the wind that sighed through the brown grass was scented by the heather. Maybe what I can do is make the lad be alternately terrified and calm. Be a bit lyrical about the scenery compared to the threat from enemies. The contrast might even created more tension than trying straight terror.
One of the reasons I find this difficult is that I normally write light humour about village life but this story came to me from the last armed uprising in mainland Britain, which played out along a strip between Falkirk and Strathaven, pronounced Straven, in South Lanarkshire. I was brought up in the area and taught about Marie Antoinette and Jane Seymour at school but only learned about it this local confrontation after I retired. That is also true concerning the first Scottish parliament, which was held in Lanark at the time of the battle of Stamford Bridge 1066 and all that. I went to school in Lanark but nobody thought to mention the parliament when talking about the Norman Invasion, nor did they mention Roy of the Ordinance Survey, who had attended the school about the time of Bonnie Prince Charlie.