WRITING A NOVEL ABOUT A COUNTRY???

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1185223#post1185223

Characters. People interacting. Rushdie and Grass (along with, say, Shiva Naipaul in Trinidad, Gabriel García Marquez in a mythical and allegorical South America, Dostoyevsky in Russia, Kawabata in Japan, Patrick White in Australia, Victor Hugo in France, Carlos Fuentes in Mexico or Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis in the U.S. Midwest, or for that matter, Ray Bradbury on Mars) didn't write about a "country". They wrote about people in a country. Until you have people, characters, you have no story to tell.

caw

Unless we're going weirdly Ray Bradbury here, and talking about the physical personifications of countries. Like, grizzled hobo Russia murders the car-thief Cuba, which alarms England, who then.....

But I doubt that's what we're talking about. Boy I hope not.

Minchner wrote about a lot of places, at least judging by the titles of his books. I recall reading part of "Space" (which is a whole lot o'nothin' and you'd think it was exceedingly boring, but the part I read was on Earth), and he did indeed have people-characters who interacted and such. People interacting is such an extremely popular theme in novels, that I plan to use it in all my novels as well.

aw99999 said:

Hello Everybody:

Good afternoon,

Dear friends, I have a deep deisre to write a novel about my country. I need some ideas to start. I think I have a lot of materials but don't know how to start and what should the story be based upon? I also have this fear that many novels like this(about countries) have already been written by famous authros. Like " midnight's children" by rushdie and the "the tin drum" by gunter grass. So is it not wise to write about a country? OR if it is then what should be some ideas upon which the story should be based?

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The titles you mention take place in a country, but they're about specific characters.

Edward Rutherfurd started off writing about cities and those books were what you call doorstoppers - for all you lightweights who think 100k is a big book!

Then he moved on to writing books about entire countries. Ambitious. But it works.

Story first, setting second. Once you know what kind of stories to tell, what kind of characters to put in it, you can set it anywhere. If you want to talk about specific things about your country (politics, etc.) then pick a story that would be very relevant. The Kite Runner was very successful not because it was a travel log about Afghanistan, but because it has a great story that is relevant to both Afghanistan and America. It's always about the human conditions first, whether it's about China or South Africa, and if you can relate all that to specifics (such as war, politics, key events, etc.), then all is well.

aw99999 said:

Its a good idea to start with a historical event or event from near past ...but i just want to know should i take into consideration just one event or many events from the past of the country...

in my country there is all kinds of turmoil and disturbances(typical third world country) and the people are a crowd not a nation...

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I can say exactly the same about my own home country. In most of my novels, the setting is so important as to be almost a character itself. This is particularly so for historical novels. If you are writing for a mainstream American or British readership, the country will probably go down as "exotic" and you have to go into a certain amount of detail which is not necessary when writing about a more familiar (to them) place. And because you want to describe places and atmospheres your readers have never seen and don't know, you have to try and conjure that all up in yourself so that it gets out there on the page, without cramming a load of facts down your readers' throats. I do this by closing my eyes and imagining myself right there again, and then writing what I see and experience.

Your characters as natives of that country must be particularly interesting and you must show how they have been formed by that society. Write unusual scenes, scenes that simply wouild not occurs in, say, the US or the UK.

If the country's history is to be the hook on which your story hangs then I would choose ONE incident and let that be central to everything else.
The country's feel - and every country has one - should pervade the whole book so that at the end your reader must get the feeling he or she has actually been there, smelt the marketplace, heard the music, and so on.

Would you let me know which country you mean? You can PM me if you like.

and the people are a crowd not a nation...

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I love that line. I think it sounds so cool. That's all I wanted to add.