Plant life provided the seed of inspiration

May 7 2010 by The Journal

Dan Smith, a graduate of the MA creative writing course at Northumbria University, explains the inspiration for his first novel, Dry Season.

AS A teenager I lived on a plantation in Brazil close to a town almost identical to the one in my novel, Dry Season.

I suppose that writing the book was, in part, about a selfish desire to bring some memories to life in a way that would be entertaining, but hopefully Dry Season is more than that.

I want the characters to stick in the reader’s mind, and to give a strong sense of what it would be like to live in a town like São Tiago.

It’s a place of lawlessness and isolation, a place where people must resolve their own problems. There is no Deus ex Machina, no police to step in at the end, and the only protection people have is themselves and their ability to get along with one another.

And sometimes this leads to violence – something which made the main character, Sam, the emotional wreck he has become.

Sam is an English ex-missionary who has seen too much violence and now he’s looking for anonymity in a remote frontier town in central Brazil.

Instead he finds himself entangled in a number of complicated relationships with both friends and enemies. It’s difficult to say when Dry Season started life.

It could have been 20 years ago, when a man stepped on to a dusty road and flagged down our pick-up, agitated because his friend had been stabbed and their hut was awash with blood.

Or maybe it was the day I first took a boat on to the Araguaia river, flanked by rainforest and grazing land.

Or perhaps it was when I watched the workers arriving, rifles over their shoulders, hats pulled low against the morning sun.

Or was it our gardener, the respected killer of 17 men, who inspired me to write Dry Season?

Probably all of those things. But it was here, in Newcastle, that I wrote the novel. It was here that the memories came back. And what began as a short story for an assignment on the creative writing MA at Northumbria University is the novel that now waits on the bookshelves, wanting only to be read.

:: Dan Smith's novel, Dry Season, has recently been published by Orion.