Dubai Festival of Literature

It’s that time of year again for the annual trip to the Emirates Airline Dubai Festival of Literature.

For those of you who have never been involved in this sort of event – where have you been?

This is your opportunity to get up close and personal with authors of many different genres. Hear about their writing, their personal lives, confessions (ask Ian Rankin about that one) and generally get some idea of what makes them tick.

Should you be an author yourself, or want to get some idea of what is involved in writing, there are many workshops on offer. Improve your writing, your social media skills, and even remove some of the stress from your life. (I kill mine – in stories of course.)

Yesterday, along with my wife, I attended a morning session with Ian Rankin. He talked about his latest book, but at the Dubai Festival of Literature it is never a hard sell of, ‘buy my book’; there is a much more to it than that. We heard a lot about the background to the Rebus stories and indeed the background to Rebus himself. 

I think that when you get these insights from an author, it can bring a whole new dimension to a character and the story. They may be on the pages of a book, but they have a life outside those pages – they are not two dimensional anymore and that is so important to any novel.

Later in the day, in a workshop with Wendy Yorke, Literary Agent, and Author Coach, someone asked the question, how much should you know about your characters? Wendy’s answer was what I expected, know them intimately. Once you know that level of detail about your characters, you can portray them as real beings in your writing. In my opinion, that is where your story comes alive. Descriptions of locations, rooms, décor etc., all have their place in a story; unlike a film, a book needs to set the scene with words, but it is only when you drop your characters into the story that the whole thing becomes a living organism. 

We are people, we want to know about people and we (most of us anyway) care about people.