Solitude and isolation - driving the plot with silence and nothing

I'm away on a writing retreat this week, in a converted Wesleyan chapel in the middle of the Somerset countryside.  We're down a dead-end road that leads only to a bridleway for horses, and fields.  The nearest village is a mile away.  It's ideal for three writers wanting to get a lot of work done, and it got me thinking about solitude and isolation in storytelling.

I'm the one who always wakes early, and I'm typing this blog post alone while my two friends are still asleep.  The house is quiet around me, and so is the land.  It's around 6.30 in the morning, and the sun is rising on a peaceful new day.

Solitude and isiolation are great devices to put into a story when we need a character to reflect and question his or her life, or when they have to choose between two impossible options. I've just finished reading Julie Kagawa's Rogue, the second in her Talon series of young adult books.  It's all about Ember, a young dragon who doesn't fit in.  There's a character who feels alone and isolated even when she's with others.  

Solitude is perfect for torturing a character who's been ignoring the voice of his or her conscience for years. Put that character in a place where they're alone and can't sleep.  Get them to be tortured by the whisper of that little voice in their mind at 3 a.m.  Have it tell them how bad they've been, or urge them to do something they're afraid to do, and you set them up for challenge and change.

Fiction is about characters who make choices, who change by the end of the story.  In order for the reader to believe in these changes, the writer has to show how the character was induced to change.  We need to see the events and reasoning that have shaped his or her decision to act.  A short reflective scene of a character in solitude can achieve that, and let the reader into the character's thoughts and motivations.

As I finish this blog post its gone 7 a.m. and my friends have come down to join me. My brief period of solitude and isolation is over.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com