3 Key Takeaways: The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

This is part of my ongoing video series of Three Key Takeaways from books I’ve read – the lessons we should take as authors from what worked and what didn’t work. You can view the original video here with the transcript below:

@rhiannondaverc

never wait to read a book that calls to you!! #bookish #booktok #books #mysterybooks #ghostwriter

♬ original sound - Rhiannon D'Averc, Writer

I‘m a professional ghostwriter and these are my three key takeaways from The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry. I feel like I waited 700 years to read this book. I wanted it when it came out, I never got around to it, then I finally got it but it ended up being at the bottom of a very long to be read list and now I finally have read it and I was so disappointed.

I probably built it up way too much in my head but I really thought I was going to enjoy it a lot more than I did. Anyway, let’s get into why that is, what it did well and what you could learn from it if you wanted to improve your own work.

My first key takeaway from The Essex Serpent is this, it’s a really great way to anchor your readers.

You can establish time with tone. Because this is set in the Victorian era, it uses words and phrasing that we wouldn’t necessarily use in modern times just to create that feeling of being back in history. It’s done in the way that the characters speak but it’s also done in the description and the action.

All of it really helps to show us when we are in time and make sure that we are anchored in that time and place and that we can appreciate the history and the moment and we’re not expecting them to whip out a mobile phone. So one of the things that you would expect from an older classic work is longer sentences that would seem almost like run-on sentences in the current style of literature but it was perfectly acceptable to have longer sentences and longer paragraphs back then. And so this is something that Sarah Perry makes really good use of throughout the book. Here’s another example of a time when the word choice shows us when we are.

“She turned from the glass and surveyed the room.” Now, the glass in question, we understand, is that she was looking into a mirror. We probably wouldn’t say glass in a modern piece of literature because it seems really old-fashioned but back then it’s the perfect thing to say.

There are lots of ways that you can do this so look out for opportunities to use the words and phrases, length of sentence, the type of sentence, the length and type of paragraphs. All of these things can be used to put your characters and put your audience, your readers into a specific time and place within their frame of mind.

My second key takeaway from The Essex Serpent is this. Head-hopping makes it really hard to connect with characters. When you have an omniscient POV which floats between multiple different characters. It’s difficult enough to connect with a character when you follow them for a whole chapter and then switch to see things from a different character’s point of view or even when it’s different parts of a chapter split by chapter breaks. In this book it’s literally different paragraphs can be told from the view of different characters and even sometimes it kind of seems to switch during a sentence.

That’s very challenging for a reader because it doesn’t let us settle into the mind and the perspective of one character for very long and it means we’re constantly moving around, constantly connecting with people in very small ways, not enough to actually build up a proper rapport with the characters. And it also kind of lets us focus too much on the wrong people. So we find ourselves, for example, in the point of view of two of the main character’s friends.

They’re not really central to the story. They introduce our two protagonists together and they come out and have dinner with them a few times. They’re not really central to the storyline because if they were taken away and you just said so-and-so who’s my friend introduced us but didn’t actually show that scene happening the story would still be the same.

They don’t have that much impact and yet we spend quite a lot of time inside their heads with this floating head-jumping POV. So to me that’s disorientating, it’s confusing and I think it would have been so much better if that was not the case. You don’t have to choose a single POV when you’re writing a book. Well, in fact, you don’t have to do anything, you could ignore every single thing I ever say, but if you choose one POV or maybe two POVs if you’re switching between two characters, which is the standard for romance for example, then it’s going to be much easier for your audience to resonate with your characters, to grow to love them, to get to know them.

By the end of this, I don’t think I really felt like I cared about any of them.

My third key takeaway from The Essex Serpent is this, give your characters memorable traits. So if you think about some of the characters in this book they’re very strong in terms of the traits that they have.

So you have Cora’s son for example who has these mannerisms that seem very strange to everyone around him. You have also the vicar’s wife who has consumption and she starts to have this obsession with the colour blue so she actually has something in common with the boy and they get to bond over that. You have the vicar himself who is not just a kind of vicar of the pulpit but also someone who goes out into the fields and helps to drag sheep out of mud so that they don’t get stuck.

You have the main character Cora who wears men’s clothing quite a lot, which is at the time obviously very unusual. You have the neighbour at the end of the road who pins dead moles to his fence and his gate. Everyone in this has these really strong unusual things about them that makes them really memorable.

It makes them stand out as strong characters. So long as it’s not two-dimensional, of course. You want to make sure that you back that up with good characterisation and don’t make them into cardboard cutouts, especially when you’re dealing with something like neurodivergence. You don’t want that to be seen too much as being freakish or weird or you don’t want to treat it in a disrespectful way is what I’m saying, but you want to make these into really fleshed out realistic characters with those memorable traits that are going to make sure that your readers remember them for a long time to come and also that will help with that connection that I was talking about earlier. Essentially think of it like this: if someone was to write a fan fiction of your book characters and put them in a different setting, would someone who is a reader be able to identify those same characters by the fact that their mannerisms are so strong or their habits are so strong that you can still see them no matter what setting they’ve been placed into? If you can achieve that that’s a sign of really great characterisation.

So those are my three key takeaways from The Essex Serpent. I really wish I hadn’t waited so long to read it because it wasn’t worth waiting so long for. Next time I’m going to read the damn book as soon as I can.