Joanna welcomes longer days
Ages ago, I wrote a blog about creating atmosphere with light and shade. You can read it here, if you’re interested. But today’s blog is about more factual aspects of writing: the light and dark that go with the time of day.
I reckon light and dark matter in writing. Yes, they add atmosphere. Think of the magic of twilight over a silent, snowy landscape, for example. But light and dark can also make our writing feel more real to our readers.
What started me thinking about light and dark?
Two things.
First that at the end of January as I’m writing this, the days are getting noticeably longer which is very welcome. I hate it when it’s dark at four in the afternoon. Don’t you?
Second, because of vampires 😉
Those who’ve read the Libertà anthology, Beach Hut Surprise, won’t be much surprised (sorry) by that, because my novella in that compilation is I, Vampire.Â
And my vampires really do worry about the light. Some more than others, but you’d have to read about them to understand why.
[Shameless promo here: click to buy Beach Hut Surprise or click on the cover image shown here. You get six separate novellas and it’s a great read. Honest! What’s more, paid-for book sales help to fund this website and you really would like us to keep blogging every week, wouldn’t you?]
Light and dark in different parts of the world
I’m sure you all know this, but it’s a fact of life that the lengths of day and night become more equal, the closer you get to the equator. In the arctic and antarctic, you can have almost constant daylight in summer, and pretty much perpetual darkness in winter. On the equator, day and night are about the same length, all the time.
So that bit’s easy. If you’re setting your romantic encounter on safari in Botswana, say, darkness comes between six and seven in the evening. And it gets light between six and seven in the morning.
You’ll probably also know that there’s not much twilight at either end of the day in those latitudes.
Examples from a wonderful website source
I can show you proof of all this with charts from a very useful website that I strongly recommend. It’s called gaisma which is the Latvian word for light (though the creator is in Finland). It’s at https://www.gaisma.com/en/ where you can put in any one of hundreds of locations in the world and find out about sunrise, sunset, twilight, and more besides. I planned to show you Hereford, where I live, as an example…
In fact, the example I’ve pasted in below is the graph for London. Why? Unfortunately, though the sunsets can be gorgeous, even in January, Hereford isn’t one of gaisma’s available locations. Birmingham, Worcester, Gloucester, yes. Hereford, no. Clearly, I live in the back of beyond. Who knew?
To read: 12 months along the bottom, 24 hours of the day down the side
[NB: if you go to the gaisma website, there are movable cursors to help read the graph]
You can see from the London graph that, in high summer (month VI, June), the sun rises before 5 and sets between 9 and 10 at night. Add on about an hour’s twilight at each end of the day (the thick blue and red lines are dawn and dusk twilight respectively) and you have light for about 18 hours. Whereas, in midwinter, it’s more like 10 hours, max. This is the sort of variation of light and dark that we’re used to, at our European latitudes.
Down on safari in Botswana, for your romantic tryst, it’s a lot different. It’s not quite the equator—Maun is about 20° south of it—but the graph has a totally different shape. For a start, the Botswana winter—such as it is—occurs in our northern summertime, hence the slight dip in months V-VII.
Day length barely changes throughout the year. And, significantly, the blue and red lines for twilight are much thinner. Instead of the hour we’re used to in Europe, it’s well under half and hour in Botswana.
On the equator, as I mentioned, it hardly varies at all. Here’s Nairobi, in Kenya, almost bang on the equator. And again, twilight is short.
Writers need to know their sunrise and sunset
I’ve blogged before about keeping a timeline for a book. In addition to location, my suggested timeline includes day of the week, date, time of day for every scene.
I didn’t talk about light and dark in that blog but they can be important, too.
If my heroine is creeping out to a clandestine rendezvous, it needs to be dark enough that she won’t be spotted. Easy enough in the early part of the year, but in late June, say, she’d need to wait a long time for darkness. That’s when I go back to the gaisma website to check I’m not writing nonsense for whichever part of the world my heroine is in.
And for vampires…?
Right now, I’m re-editing the first of my full-length vampire novels, featuring Theo and his friends. He insisted on having his own book. In fact, a whole series.
I’ve finished two Theo novels in draft and have begun the third. And my self-appointed task for the next few months is to find a commercial publisher for Theo’s urban fantasy series.
So my drafts have to have immediate impact. If you wonder about that, I refer you to the Slush Pile Slam, devised by Janet Gover for the RNA Conference a few years ago. It was staggering—and disquieting, too—to see how quickly industry professionals made up their minds about whether they were interested in a MS or not. Sometimes it took only a couple of sentences.
My vampire planet Earth has to be believable, too. OK, I admit that vampires are creatures of myth and fantasy. But Theo’s world, like any world in fantasy and SF, has to be coherent and credible. Otherwise, the reader will not suspend disbelief (and I certainly won’t convince a publisher to take me on).
One of the key limiting factors for vampires (in my vampire world) is sunlight.
- How much can a vampire take?
- Do individual vampires differ?
- If so, how and why?
- What happens to them if they overdo it?
I do have answers to all these questions, I promise, but they took a bit of finding. Because the rules had to work and to work consistently. Given how powerful vampires are, they have to have some kind of limitation on what they can do or there would be no jeopardy at all for them. Sunlight can be one such limiting factor. And I have others, too…
Those who have read I, Vampire will know that Theo goes off to Paris at the end of the novella. So, yes, I downloaded the Paris chart of light and dark from the gaisma website. And I made sure that the vampires’ various escapades took account of light and dark. I will admit that, sometimes, it made plotting quite a hassle, especially when Theo is interacting with humans, who generally prefer not to do stuff at the dead of night.
However, I made my life easier by setting that first full-length book, like the novella, in spring. European summers can be a bit tricky for vampires, with all those hours of sunlight, you see. They’re not likely to be going up north to enjoy the midnight sun, are they?
Theo is definitely not the figure on the top of this Norwegian peak, gazing toward the midnight sun. Perish the thought 😉
Do you have problems with light and dark in your stories?
Or do you mostly ignore it?
If you’ve found easier ways of solving the problems, please do share.
PS Theo doesn’t look at all like the vampire model in that image further up. I know exactly how Theo should look. I’ve found pics of a gorgeous but rather scary male model who will be Theo on my covers, if I end up self-publishing. Because Theo will be published, one of these days. He insists on it. And who am I, the mere author, to gainsay him?
This is fascinating. Thank you enormously for the Gaisma website. I shall definitely be going back to it.
You’ve made me remember how disoriented I was when I worked for a time in Mexico City. People told me that it was because of temperature variations – they effectively have all four seasons in one day. But I’m coming to suspect that it was more the effect of the light itself. My energy levels varied in a completely different way from what I thought I knew about myself. Very disconcerting.
That’s really interesting about Mexico City, Sophie. Looking at the Gaisma chart for it, I see that day length varies between 11 and 13 hours. Dusk is short, too. Can understand that, for a northern European, that’s all very disconcerting.
Thank you for this, Joanna. As Sophie says, it’s extremely useful. I say this having written books set in both Botswana and Kenya!
Made me smile, Liz. I’m wondering if you found the light/dark changes as disconcerting when you lived in Africa as Sophie did in Mexico? I’ve never lived further south than Cyprus where there’s more variation and dusk is also longer. I remember being conscious of the rain variation there — it never rained between May and October. Never. Which was great for arranging BBQs in the garden. But I don’t remember noticing the difference in the light/dark balance.
Not especially, Joanna. I’d lived in Zambia for a couple of years before then so was used to the lack of long twilight and early dark. In Zambia, during the rainy season, it used to start promptly at 4 pm, just as we were leaving work. (We did start at 7.30!)
When we were in Cyprus, the RAF Akrotiri working hours were 0700-1400, without a break, except on Mondays, when they worked 0700-1700. But it meant most afternoons were free. The shops etc worked different hours. They wanted to be open when we were around to buy, of course.
Having grown up in tropical Africa, the long daylight evenings here were much more difficult to get used to. Didn’t know about the gaisma site, that’s so useful, thank you. Talking of rain, short, sharp showers in Africa were actually more of a deluge. I remember my father getting soaked just getting from the car into the house! We were used to daylight dropping out quite rapidly around 6pm. It didn’t change much, as I recall.
How interesting that someone brought up in Africa sees the issue the other way round. Logical, of course, but I hadn’t thought of it that way. Thanks for the extra insight, Liz
I remember the Slush Pile Slam so well. I too was surprised by how quickly the editors and agents made their minds up. Sometimes for the good and sometimes for the bad. I think the fastest was before the first sentence was even finished. It does reinforce how good those first lines have to be.. AND how subjective the decisions can be. The message is – don’t give up after one or two tries. Keep going.
Couldn’t agree more, Janet. Shall take your words to heart re a publisher for Theo…
I found that experience so illuminating, Janet! I knew exactly the moment when I lost my audience. I could actually feel the drop of tension in the room and cut to good effect..