A Sense of Place...

... friend and author, Helen Pollard joins me today to talk about the setting for her latest novel.  Hi, Helen, and thanks very much for being here...

I believe that a setting can make or break a work of fiction.  A reader needs to feel fully immersed in a place to believe in the story.  For the genre I write – contemporary romance - readers want an escape from their everyday lives; a virtual trip from their armchair to somewhere fabulous.

I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing about a place I hadn’t visited, no matter how much I could research on the internet!  But even though I pick an area I know, I always seem to end up creating a fictional town or village there.  The surrounding countryside, the nearby towns and other attractions may all be real, and the atmosphere and general sense of the place may be similar to somewhere I’ve visited, but for my book’s main setting there is nothing like the freedom of starting from scratch.  I can decide on the size, the businesses, the cafes, the geography, the views… without having to answer to any facts!

When I decided to set my latest book on the south coast of Cornwall, I was spoiled for choice!  There are so many picturesque coastal villages there – Portscatho, Polperro and Mousehole are just a few examples – but even after “revisiting” such places by looking at our old holiday photos and doing research on the internet, I decided that no one place quite did the trick... and so I invented Porthsteren.  Location-wise, if you know Cornwall, you could perhaps imagine it somewhere around where Mousehole lies.  Indeed, my fictional village does have some of Mousehole’s features, but Porthsteren is very much its own place.  I wanted it to be just right, to fit my story and the characters perfectly, with my main character Claudia’s shop at one end of the village, a beach stretching along to the harbour at the other; small shops and cafés; a wooded hill as a backdrop; and a coastal path leading away from the cliff road at the top where my other main character Jason lives.

But how to invent a name for my village – a name that sounded genuinely Cornish?  Handily, one of my brothers now lives in Cornwall (lucky bloke!) and is learning Cornish, so I asked him to come up with something.  “Porth” is a common beginning to many Cornish place names, meaning port or harbour, so that was an obvious start.  And the book involves the legend of an old seventeenth-century witch called Hester Moon.  Hester can mean star, and the Cornish for star is “steren”… and so the village of Porthsteren was born.  Perfect! (Thank you, bro!)

The only problem with inventing fictional settings is reminding myself that they don’t actually exist – and leaving them behind when a book is finished.  It’s so gratifying when readers tell me they wish my settings were real so they could actually visit them.  I sympathise because I feel the same way!

about the book... Claudia thought she knew how this summer was going to go. Turns out, she didn’t have a clue… 

But as circumstances throw Claudia into Jason’s path in increasingly unexpected ways, she begins to glimpse what lies beneath his fiery temper and sharp tongue. Claudia was sure her new life was perfect in every way. But was there something missing after all?

It’s been two years since Claudia arrived on the beautifully rugged Cornish coast with nothing but a suitcase to her name. She’d walked out on the husband who had never loved her, ditched the corporate job she’d never wanted and vowed that no gym membership card would come within ten feet of her ever again.

Swapping boardrooms and cocktails for a little shop right at the end of the beach road should have been a bit of a shock. But from the moment she first laid eyes on the empty, run-down store, Claudia knew this was where she was meant to be all along. 

After all that upheaval, Claudia was looking forward to a quiet summer, full of the usual holiday makers and long walks along the clifftops. But life in her patch of paradise is about to change in more ways than one.

Enter recently widowed Jason, dragging his sullen teenage daughter Millie in tow. Millie and Claudia immediately hit it off. And while Millie loves everything about Claudia’s free-spirited way of life, practical architect Jason is less than thrilled about his daughter’s new interests. He doesn’t shy away from telling Claudia exactly what he thinks and sparks fly every time they meet.

about the author... As a child, Helen had a vivid imagination fuelled by her love of reading (long past her bedtime!) so she started to create her own stories in a notebook.

Now a bestselling author of contemporary romance, she believes that good characterisation is the key to a successful book and loves infusing her writing with humour and heart.

Helen is a member of the Romantic Novelists' Association and The Society of Authors.

She lives in Yorkshire with her husband, two grown-up (in theory) kids and a Jekyll and Hyde cat.

You can get the book from Amazon and you can follow Helen on Facebook and on Twitter