Health and Safety for Writers?

I took this photograph in a disused pottery in North East France. It's a lovely old health and safety notice positively steeped in period atmosphere.

Roughly translated, the exhortation reads, All injuries must be declared – good guidance for writers of fiction, perhaps, as often what makes characters interesting is not their qualities but their short comings, not their strengths but their weaknesses. A bit of emotional damage can be irresistibly attractive to a reader and therefore good material for an author. The tragic flaw – the trait which traduces a hero – is a key factor in classical drama, so when you are working on a character, remember to focus on their imperfections – declare their injuries, if you like – because that is where growth and change can occur.

Twenty Questions about Characterisation

Do you remember playing that car game, brilliant for long journeys, where one of you assumes a character and the others have to guess who it is by asking twenty questions? When we were little we whiled away hours playing it on the autobahns and autoroutes of Europe, but it has other applications too and can be particularly useful for a fiction writer in search of a protagonist.

When you are in the process of fleshing out your hero or heroine, you might consider submitting them to the same sort of interrogation (and it's also the kind of thing you can do on long car journeys!)

1. When were you born?
2. Where were you born?
3. Do you have brothers and sisters?
4. What is your happiest memory?
5. What makes you saddest?
6. Where do you live?
7. What do you do for a living?
8. Have you had other relationships?
9. Do you consider yourself an extrovert?
10. Do you have secrets?
11. How good is your self-esteem?
12. What is your attitude to your appearance?
13. What is your proudest possession?
14. What are you most ashamed of?
15. What are your politics?
16. What makes you angry?
17. What is your best quality?
18. What do you value most in other people?
19. What do you yearn for?
20. What keeps you awake at night?

There are dozens of other interesting questions you could pose and while some are more simplistic than others, all of them will get you thinking about your character and may even send you off in an unanticipated direction which, in my experience, is where the interesting stuff is to be found...

A Light Touch – A Lesson in Characterisation from Mark Chagall

On a recent trip to France we stumbled upon a stunning window by Mark Chagall in a restored chapel in the town of Sarrebourg. Peace, his extravagant bouquet of scenes from the Old and New Testaments, takes your breath away when you first walk into the room. Although the impact is almost overwhelming, as with most things, the power of the piece lies in the detail...

This Madonna and Child is tucked away somewhere at the bottom of the composition and when you study it, you see how few strokes of colour (and yes, genius) are needed to create an image of Mary cradling the baby Jesus - a line here, the darkening of a shade there - and the job is done.
That's not to underestimate the talent and skill of the artist. Quite the contrary, it demonstrates an absolute understanding of what is needed to engage the imagination of the viewer.
The same is true when you are depicting characters in fiction. Flashes of insight - a telling observation, a revealing line of dialogue - can do more work than whole paragraphs of overwrought description. Work with a light touch, suggest rather than prescribe, and the chances are you will end up with figures as luminous as the simple yet powerful ones in Chagall's beautiful window.

Help from Your Favourite Heroines

What is it that makes a character in a novel memorable? Perhaps it would help to answer this question by asking it in a different way: who are the characters you most remember? If you can come up with the who, it might lead you to the why and that in turn might be of help when you are conjuring your own protagonists out of that thin, thin air.

In terms of heroines, my younger self would probably say Scarlet O'Hara from Gone with the Wind, but more mature contenders would be Anna Karenina, Nana, the heroine from the Zola's book of the same name, and Tess of the D'Urbevilles 

 Why Scarlett O'Hara? Because she is so flawed and so beautiful– she behaves badly, has no moral compass and no self-knowledge. Because she is punished for all of these things and remains indomitable.

Why Anna Karenina? Why Nana? Both of them find themselves on the outside of society, one as an adulteress, the other as a prostitute. They're not conventional, nor are they seen as ideals of womanhood. They are compromised and unhappy and the dilemmas they face seem real. Anna ends by hitting the self-destruct button, Nana ruins every man she comes into contact with. The terrible workings of cause and effect in both their lives are plain to see. The same is true of Tess, whose unfortunate seduction by Alec is her social and moral and doing. She is both victim and avenger.

Perhaps there's a bit of the theme emerging here. The women I have chosen all have tragic stature because their fall from grace is so vertiginous. With the exception of Anna,  these women fight back, they show resilience. Their behaviour is extreme and in some ways subversive, and three out of four of them end by dying, something which makes the stakes of their respective stories extremely high. They are passionate, risk-taking and rebellious, and yet beneath this we glimpse their vulnerability, qualities which form a combustible mix.

When you are thinking about your next project, it might be helpful to conduct a brief survey of the heroines you admire. If you can work out what it is that attracts you to them, you are halfway to being able to endow your own protagonist with their feistiness, or their fragile glamour, or whatever it was that drew you to them in the first place.

On Crusade for Complex Characters

Time to raise the tone a bit, I think, so here goes...
I came across this little fellow in Tournus, gateway to the south of France.

                             


St Guilhem was a ninth century fighter of Saracens, and a cousin of Charlemagne.  Apparently when he died, the church bells rang of their own accord.

The reason he's here, in my creative writing blog, is that his statue perfectly illustrates the kind of contradiction which exists at the heart of most of us - we are all complex combinations of differing impulses.  In Guilhem's case, he was both pious and a warrior (sadly these two qualities often seemed to go together) and he is shown dressed for battle and for prayer, in grey and white, a split personality if ever there was one.

It's a thought to carry over into your work on characterisation.When you are bringing your protagonist to life, you might find that they quicken more readily if you search for the inherent contradiction within their natures: the career woman with her biological clock ticking, or the sadist who nurses his sick mother - you know the kind of thing. When people behave in a contradictory manner, it creates tension and tension is extremely good for writing.  Generally speaking, in life things are rarely black and white, but when you start to grow a character it might be helpful to examine the polar extremes of their personality, because from there you will be able to locate that point of intersection where the black starts to leach into the white and an interesting, subtle shade of grey (or fifty shades??) begins to emerge.

What You Can Learn from John Lanchester...

Well, loads of things, of course, he's a brilliant writer.  But having just read Capital, which is set in a single London street and anatomises the effects of the 2008 financial crisis on its inhabitants, what struck me most was the way in which he was able to accentuate the foibles and of fallibility is of his characters, while still making them seem sympathetic.  It can be a difficult trick to pull off, but it has the effect of giving greater depth and subtlety to characterisation.

I'm always intrigued by any tension in a narrative.  I don't mean narrative tension or suspense, but something at a more structural level:  the sense that the warp and weft of the story are pulling in slightly different directions.  It adds timbre and texture.

In John Lanchester's case, Capital's hot shot banker Roger is lazy, greedy, selfish, concupiscent and utterly lacking in self-awareness, in other words the perfect vehicle for all our prejudices about city high flyers. But at the same time, he is disarmingly human: he does enough, more or less, to get by; he tries to please his insatiably avaricious wife without much success; he lusts after the nanny but is unable to seduce her; whether or not he will get his coveted bonus is open to doubt.  There is something forlorn and disappointed about him; he has shortcomings we can recognise, in spite of ourselves we feel sympathetic.

Lanchester portrays most of the other inhabitants of Pepys Road with similar ambivalence and ambiguity. I think it is part of the alchemy that lifts them from the page and transforms them into credible, complex beings.  It's something to think about in your own work: people are never wholly admirable so, when you are writing, see if you can conjure up a character who is just about likeable, warts and all.

Characterisation -- How to Read a Face

While we were in the seductive book village of Cuisery (see my previous post) we wandered into the little church of Notre Dame, originally begun in the 11th century and completed in 1504.

I was stopped dead in my tracks by some beautiful frescoes in a side chapel.

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Although some of the paint is in lamentably poor condition, the character of the man portrayed here is by no means obliterated.  Standing gazing at his solemn, preoccupied face, it struck me how  rules which apply in one creative form can be easily transposed to another.

Try studying the painting and analysing what you see, because it will tell you so much about the person you're looking at.

• Clothing: he is wearing a hat that is well-fitting and has some kind of shape/design that goes beyond the merely functional.  We can see the collar of his tunic, which has some ornamentation on it, so he is probably reasonably prosperous.  The fact that he is dressed in co-ordinating shades of blue perhaps suggests that he has some sense of style and self-esteem.
• Age: he looks like a man in his prime, sporting a full beard with no apparent flecks of grey in it, nor are there any lines upon his face.
• Build: he seems thickset and well fed, again suggesting that he is well-to-do.
• Features: he has a strong nose and a full mouth, though his head is held at a slightly tentative angle, and his eyes....

Ah, his eyes, the windows of the soul, particularly in this man's case.  All his experience - sorrow?  grief?  loss?  uncertainty?  regret? - is expressed in the look askance, the slight frown, yet none of these emotions over drawn; they are subtly synthesised.

If you look at a face for long enough, you learn its secrets, you discover its landscape -- so much of the early stages of falling in love consist of gazing with unwavering absorption at the face of your beloved and it's this kind of intensity you need to bring to portraying the characters you are writing about. It might be a helpful exercise to try and bring to life on paper the picture in this post.

When it comes to your own work, imagine you're standing gazing at a mediaeval fresco, look long and hard at your hero or heroine, don't be afraid to stare!

What To Leave Out?

I think I've mentioned elsewhere in my blog (several times -- avoid repetition, Ed) that I'm interested in the gaps and spaces in a creative work; in what is alluded to, rather than what is spelt out.  This is particularly true when it comes to characterisation.

To write effectively about a character, you need to know as much as possible about them: their past, their inner life, their appearance, their proclivities, what irritates them, what unsettles them -- the list is endless, but it is ground you have to cover in order to be able to bring them to life on the page.

The million-dollar question is how to convey all the knowledge you have garnered.  Although there are many facts you need to know about your hero or heroine, you don't necessarily have to write them all down for your reader, as it would slow the action immeasurably and have them wandering off to put the kettle on (and find a better book to read).

Rather than swamp them with fast flowing torrents of information, occasionally it can be productive to leave them guessing about some things, to suggest significance without spelling it out too much.  To put this to the test, write yourself a list of a dozen or so important facts about your main character and then choose one that offers most scope for ambiguity, one that raises more questions than it answers.  Start writing about this and see where it leads you.  It's the ambivalent parts of human nature that are usually the most interesting.

Think how a door which is open a crack, rather than flung wide, inflames your curiosity:

Well at least it does mine....

Using Your Influence

Writers work on their readers in many ways, their wonders to perform.

You can convey information directly, by telling the reader that something is so; you can allude to it symbolically and get them to work it out for themselves, but sometimes it can be quite fun, and therefore satisfying, simply to influence them.  By means of mood and atmosphere and choice of words, you can nudge them in the direction that you want them to go.  Done well, this can be a subtle tool, but a lightness of touch is important.

Here's little exercise to practise with, in between wrapping presents.  Write a quick sketch of a character in such a way that it quickly becomes apparent that the person you are describing is sympathetic and likeable.  Then see how  little you have to change -- make sure it is the absolute minimum -- to recast them as somebody for whom the reader will have no sympathy.  Explore the small margin that exists between the two, the grey area, the ambiguous area, as that is often where your most interesting work will occur.

I'll be wrapping presents in the next couple of days, so blogging might become a little sporadic (I'm giving myself plenty of latitude for a could do better  New Year's resolution...)

Characterisation - What's Not to Like?

The protagonist of the book I'm working on at the moment is a middle-aged man who is struggling (and not always succeeding) to be more than the sum total of the disappointments life has visited upon him.: his marriage ended in divorce and in the process he became estranged from his only son.  I have tried to tread a fine line between his own responsibility for his actions and the careless cruelty of those he has loved.  He is not altogether innocent, but he is by no means totally guilty.

My agent's response was that he should be more likeable. Hmm. Is that what characters are for?  To be likeable? In the cautious world of publishing today, likeability is certainly a plus, but I suspect that's only part of the picture.  I think one of the pleasures of reading is to see a vulnerable and fallible character acknowledge and overcome his shortcomings -- that is what gives hope to the rest of us. But because I think it's important to be responsive to criticism (see my last post) I've done everything I can to make him less diffident, less reactive and probably less irritating.  He still does some dreadful things, but that's because (I hope) he's human; good people slip up sometimes and make mistakes they come to regret.

I don't want my readers to feel hostile towards him, but I don't see the harm in a little bit of ambivalence -- I adore my husband, but there are things about him that drive me mad. That's how the real world operates, none of us is perfect, but it's the flaws and the hairline cracks in our characters which make us interesting, otherwise we'd be unbearable, or worse -- unreal.

So when you are working on one of your characters, watching them evolve, don't draw them starkly in black and white, inflect to them with a little colour, even if it is an ambiguous shade of grey.

Growth Spurt

In my last but one post I was talking about how inconsistency in your characterisation can be a sign of both good and bad writing -- consciously done it can add verisimilitude, unconsciously done it ends up looking like carelessness.  Since I wrote that, I've been thinking how inconsistency -- doing something out of character -- can often be a spur to growth and to change, which are the most important objectives for any hero or heroine, so my theme for today's little sermon is growth.

The thing about growth is that it doesn't come easily -- it is not a gift which is given to you, it is something which is hard won and often wrung from you (or wrought in you) at huge personal cost.  This is what makes it worth having in the real world and interesting to read about in the fictional one. After several challenges and setbacks, it often requires a huge leap of faith -- everything will be all right, in the end -- to achieve.  That is what makes it inspiring for readers. Most of us operate within our comfort zones for most of the time, so being made to step outside one's own personal, protective circle is something we do with great reluctance. Seeing a hero or heroine catapulted into an unfamiliar situation where the stakes are high allows your readers vicariously to realise their own fears and dreams.

All of this is heady stuff, the fabric of exciting fiction.  Try writing a story that has at its heart growth and change which doesn't come easily to your main character.  It will probably test you to write about, but should make interesting reading....

Common Pitfalls # 2

Another aspect of writing which can trip up the beginner and often betrays their lack of experience is characterisation.  I suspect that people are too fixated on appearance (in life as well!) and feel that once they have covered hair/eyes/complexion/colouring/natural beauty everything is done and dusted.  Although this can be a part of portraying somebody, it is only a very small part, a first impression which quickly seems incidental and almost beside the point.

You need to add plenty of detail.  By this I don't mean cramming in some kind of curriculum vitae (although all this information needs to be inside your head as you write). Every action you hero or heroine undertakes should reveal something about them.  When they make a cup of tea do they do it distractedly, messily, fussily, in a terrible rush -- or do they bung the teabag in a cup and then forget about it for twenty minutes? The same applies to the way they cross the road, or make love - you need to provide masses of context to begin with.

In your first draft I would include all of this kind of detail - it's a way for you to find out about your hero and what makes them tick.  In addition to showing us how they behave, you can add in information about how they speak, what they think, and how other people see them. By the time you have included all of this your narrative will be groaning under the weight of it all, but then it is time to start the process of distillation (see my previous post.....)

Epiphany - in April

Still working those characterisation muscles, helping to give you core strength as a writer (I can feel a bit of a Pilates metaphor starting to take shape), here is an exercise that you might like to think about over the weekend.

Write a scene in which your central character has a moment of epiphany.  This is a classic term for an instance of realisation, or total clarity.  The dictionary defines it as a sudden revelation or insight into the nature, essence or meaning of something. In this case, try showing your hero or heroine in a situation where something happens which makes them realise they are not the person that they thought they were.  This will give you the opportunity to show two different aspects of their character, a before and after point of view, which will get you thinking about how you can resolve two contrasting or conflicting aspects of their personality and will ultimately lend greater depth to how you portray them.  We are all a mass of contradictions and complexities, but we often have a particular narrative to account for the person we've become: I think/behave like this because such and such happened to me. In this scenario, blow that narrative into smithereens and see what your hero is left with, and what they make of it.

April is the cruellest month, after all....

The Reckless Extravagance of Creating a Character

After my agent had read the first draft of my novel The Dragonfly, she asked me what the main character did.  As he's retired, it's not mentioned in the book, but I told her that he worked in insurance, because that was part of the life that I had created for him.  She was interested because she found him interesting and also because she wanted to know that I knew.

I'm only mentioning this because I think it throws light on the process of evolving a character.  As a writer, you need to know pretty much everything that there is to know about the people in your story, but it would weigh the narrative down and slow it almost to a halt if you put all of the information in.  You need to have that level of detail in your head because it is part of your hero's experience and will inform how he responds and behaves, but if you went into every single tiny aspect you run the risk (unless you are Proust) of boring your reader to death.

What I think works best is a kind of reckless extravagance when you are piecing together the characters who will populate your novel or short story: make notes, draw diagrams, do time  flow charts - the whole shebang.  But once you have chronicled it all for yourself and then stowed it for safe-keeping in your subconscious, be judicious - even economic - with what you tell your reader (and when -- there is mileage in doling out information in dribs and drabs, as the plot requires it.)

Here's the doorway to a great weekend ...

Don't I Recognise You?

And another thing (while I'm in identification mode!)

I've been warbling on about how important it is the your reader to identify with your story and a key way of helping them to do this -- of opening a window for them, if you like -- is to make sure that they can relate to your central character.  Your hero should have a mix of universal and unique attributes that are easily recognisable to your reader.  To help you achieve this, why don't you make a list of three of each and then see if you can flesh them out?

When you are focusing on these characteristics it might be worth bearing in mind that if there is a certain amount of conflict between them, this will make your character more interesting and more plausible.  It could be that he / she is physically brave, but crippled with shyness, or that he is intellectually brilliant, but emotionally unintelligent. You're beginning to catch my drift....

As well as making sure they have conflicting qualities, it will also be a little more true to life if they have weaknesses as well as strengths.  This will help them seem more real, but also give them (but more importantly, you) material to work with, as most narratives hinge around a hero learning to deal with a central flaw in his nature.

Back to my own work in progress now...

Have your very own Lynn Barber moment....

Long before she came to prominence as the writer and central character of her memoir (and subsequent film) An Education, Ms Barber has been producing pithy and unflinching interviews with the great and the good, most recently for The Observer.

She is renowned for not pulling her punches and her pieces consist of reported conversations with her interviewee, but running alongside that is a gritty commentary about the celebrity in question as well.  It occurred to me that this might be a useful starting point for developing a character....

Why don't you subject your hero/heroine to a Lynn Barber-style grilling?  Write an interview with them, (in which you ask them their past, the situation they find themselves in within the plot etc) which combines their own account, in their own words, with your commentary as interviewer (is your hero being evasive, disingenuous, secretive or over-confiding, for example?) In this way you will  put a little bit of spin on  things, revealing your character through what they say of themselves as well as through the observations of others. Little exercises like this can easily be adapted to fit into a scene in your story and may be a good way of getting some momentum going.

SMALL PRESSES

Blue Nose Poets are a London-based group of writers dedicated to bringing poetry to a wider audience by means of events and international writing competitions.

Independent Black Publishers does exactly what it says on the tin - it's an umbrella organisation of publishers specialising in African and Caribbean literature.

Brandon Books has been a leading imprint in Ireland since 1982, producing about fifteen fiction and non-fiction titles every year.