"Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going"
About this Quote
Penelope Lively captures a truth about how fiction finds its own weather. A novel, once set in motion, establishes pressure systems of tone, pace, and moral temperature. That climate does not exist on the first page; it condenses as sentences accumulate, as characters begin to exert their gravitational pull, as the voice settles into its register. The phrase "when you get going" hints at the moment when inertia breaks and momentum takes over. The writer has crossed from planning and speculation into the lived weather of the work, where the air itself tells you what belongs.
Climate is a richer metaphor than atmosphere. Atmosphere can feel decorative; climate governs what can survive. In a narrative climate, some metaphors wilt while others flourish. Certain plot turns feel natural while others stall like a front that never arrives. Style, cadence, and point of view are no longer arbitrary choices but adaptations to local conditions. The seasoned novelist checks the barometer: does this scene raise the humidity of suspense, chill the ethical air, thin the oxygen of hope? If it violates the climate, however clever, it must go.
Lively has long been attentive to time, memory, and place, and her own novels demonstrate how climate emerges from subject. Moon Tiger breathes the heat and dust of wartime Cairo alongside the fever of recollection; its narrative climate permits disjunctions and temporal eddies. A book like The Photograph operates in a cooler, forensic air, where the light is analytic and the pace measured. These climates are not imposed wholesale; they evolve as the prose finds its rhythm and as the characters insist on their weather.
For writers, the insight is liberating and exacting. You do not merely invent a world; you learn its seasons. For readers, it explains how a book becomes inhabitable. When the climate coheres, the novel feels less like a constructed artifact and more like an ecology, a system with its own fronts and currents. Once you are going, the weather takes hold, and the story can breathe.
Climate is a richer metaphor than atmosphere. Atmosphere can feel decorative; climate governs what can survive. In a narrative climate, some metaphors wilt while others flourish. Certain plot turns feel natural while others stall like a front that never arrives. Style, cadence, and point of view are no longer arbitrary choices but adaptations to local conditions. The seasoned novelist checks the barometer: does this scene raise the humidity of suspense, chill the ethical air, thin the oxygen of hope? If it violates the climate, however clever, it must go.
Lively has long been attentive to time, memory, and place, and her own novels demonstrate how climate emerges from subject. Moon Tiger breathes the heat and dust of wartime Cairo alongside the fever of recollection; its narrative climate permits disjunctions and temporal eddies. A book like The Photograph operates in a cooler, forensic air, where the light is analytic and the pace measured. These climates are not imposed wholesale; they evolve as the prose finds its rhythm and as the characters insist on their weather.
For writers, the insight is liberating and exacting. You do not merely invent a world; you learn its seasons. For readers, it explains how a book becomes inhabitable. When the climate coheres, the novel feels less like a constructed artifact and more like an ecology, a system with its own fronts and currents. Once you are going, the weather takes hold, and the story can breathe.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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