Not every writer feels as strongly as some of us do about places. I find them almost as and sometimes more important than characters and I certainly believe that many places help to form the people who are born and bred and live in them if they are there for long enough. Places that we simply visit influence us strong too - if they have something remarkable about them. It need not be a whole city - Venice - a whole landscape - the Cumbrian Fells ; it can be a single house, a single hill, the lamplit corner of a street. Whatever wherever, the place seems to send out a sense of itself, of its own being, a presence which awakens a response in us. Or not. It is a very very personal thing.

Read Hardy for  a sense of place. Read Dickens. Read Emily Bronte. Read Lawrence Durrell. Not all writers have it or rate it as important but if you don`t make places and their effect on people significant you are perhaps denying yourself not only a great satisfaction as a writer and a great pleasure to the reader, but turning your back on a very useful fictional tool - to say the very least.

TTD 5 is divided into parts. This is TTD5 (A).  Go somewhere alone and relax, in an armchair, in bed, so long as you don`t fall asleep, on a train.... and think about places in your life ; real places first of all. Childhood places. Holiday places. Places you have visited  since then. Places you grew up in. And then when you have a few in your mind, think if they have had any lasting effect upon you, made an impact. If not, ignore them. If so, think some more. When you have two or three places - doesn`t matter if they are cities, landscapes or small cottages or warehouses or stretches of beach.... get paper and pen and start thinking pen in hand. Write down words and phrases which come to mind when you think of your places - don`t describe them, just think of words... adjectives or snatches of sentences. Think more than you write.

Then think whether the effect they have had on you is something important and permanent, formative even - or whether it was fleeting.  What was your response ? Intellectual ? Emotional ?

Good /bad, happy /sad, strong/ weak, unique or common.

Think of this place or these places as if they were characters - in a way they are, because like other people they have power to affect you and change you. For example, I dislike mountains if they are close to me - snow-covered are better than highland mountains covered in grey granite but none of them are good. I feel oppressed, afraid, depressed anxious, I want to escape. More than anything, I want to see what is behind the mountains and around on  the other side... they seem to blot me out and blot the future out. I have been quite strongly spooked among mountains.

This part of TTD 5 may take you half an hour or a couple of days or you may keep coming back to it. Good. It will be time very well spent.