Starting a Character

I started a novel in December 2010.  I talked about its genesis in an earlier blog post (“Origins of a Novel”).  Now the screenplays I’ve written are out in the world, trying to find buyers, I’ve returned to the novel.  Here’s the thing: the few months away from it have allowed me to see it in new light.  It’s funnier than I remember.  A few pages I thought worked really well are actually quite clumsy (and unnecessary) and have been done away with.  For the majority of its 300 pages, though, ‘Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters’ works a treat.  Yeah, it needs tidying up.  A few scrappy lines here.  A missing scene of explanation there.  But the base, it’s solid.  Its walls are strong.  The whole thing works.  The titular characters work, their interaction is strong, and there is a real sense of romance, loss and tension between them.  

I want to talk about the three sisters of the title:

It’s interesting: they were inspired by three real sisters, albeit only very, very loosely.  If they ever read it, they wouldn’t recognise themselves.  My characters do and say very little that the real sisters would do or say.  They have entirely different personalities, world outlooks, and histories.  The only common point of connection is they used to live across the street from a novelist and one of them did one day knock on my door.  That knock on the door, aged fifteen, inspired much of the novels content.

So why did I use them?  Or claim to have used them?  Because when I write I need a physical model to get started: the same way a screenwriter might write for Johnny Depp.  They picture him and his mannerisms, they use their perceived image of him to get the role just right.  I use physical models for my central characters because it’s a way in, a cheat.  I picture someone that I know and instantly half the work is done for me.  What happens next, though, is the interesting part.  As I write my fictionalised version of this real person, the fictional version takes over.  By the time I reach the end of the novel I have to rewrite the initial scenes so the characters conform to who they now are, not who they were inspired by.

It is a little creepy, though, this habit.  I have to use people I don’t really know very well – if you’re my close friend, I’m not going to use you. If I knew you once, for a while, and you’re out of my life, there’s a good chance I might fictionalise you.  In ‘Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters’, Adam is a novelist and this approbation of another’s life for fictional ends forms the final third of the novel – Adam uses the lives of the three sisters (or at least two of them) – and it’s how they react to that.  Badly, if you’re wondering. 

I still live across from the house where these three sisters lived, and where their parents still live.  I see them coming home from time to time (they all live hundreds of miles away most of the year, living lives I know nothing of) and when they do return I don’t see them, I see my characters.  But if I speak to them, which I sometimes do, I see them, the real sisters.  This strange double vision between reality and fiction infuses much of my life – I live in this other world.  I prefer this other world.  But sometimes I have to join the real one.

All this feeds back into a question writers are always asked: where do your ideas come from?  ‘Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters’ was inspired by seeing one of the real sisters in a shopping queue and remembering the time she came to my door.  None of what happens in the novel is real, but everything could be.  It’s not the big things that inspire us, it’s the little things.   Seeing that little divergent path in a life and following it.  Discovering what lies at the end of that ‘what if?’ moment.  It’s following the thread into the other world.  Taking the other path.  It's about starting at a point in reality and changing something, sometimes even the smallest of things.

Left: Fiction                 Right: Real Life

Using real people for the basis of fictionalised ones might not be a method that works for everyone, though.  But if you’re struggling to get a piece of fiction off the ground, it might be because the characters aren’t working.   If so, it might be a good idea to ask of your characters what would they do if…?  If you don’t know, then they’re not working.   This is another reason I use real people as models, right at the start – because I can then ask: What would ‘she’ do if…? And because I know ‘her’, in real life, I can picture her actions and reactions.  By the time I’ve written the character's action or reaction, I’ve already begun sublimating the real person with the fictional person.  The process of erasure of the real world has begun.  The other world is finally living and the work is moving forward.

It might not work for you, as I said, but it’s always worked for me.

The Creation of Character

The one unassailable fact with fiction is that it will contain characters – characters that live and breathe on the page in their own unique ways.  The characters may not necessarily be human (Paul Auster’s Timbuktu [1999] is from the point of view of a dog) but there will be some quality within each character that endears them to the reader.  A qualification: this endearment may not necessarily mean that the character is likeable – think of one of the most beloved figures in British fiction, Heathcliff, and how his passion at times overwhelms into madness.  He is not, by any definition, a loveable character, and yet he is loved.  Or there is Becky Sharp, a character defined by her abrasive wit, and yet it is this that makes Thackeray’s Vanity Fair [1847–48] such a joy.  

Guy de Maupassant

 A sentence beloved of Ford Madox Ford and Henry James comes from the Guy de Maupassant story, Le Reine Hortense [1883] and it is this:

“He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway.” 

It is a sentence I love as well, for it is one that instantly brings forth the image of a man.  A man with a past and about whom you know the psychology.  That one sentence speaks multitudes.  From it we can discern that first he is a gentleman (so we know that he is well attired), that he has red whiskers (and red whiskers immediately brings to mind a certain kind of individual, usually of an irascible nature), and that he always goes through doorways first (telling us that though he is a gentleman he is not always a mannered gentleman).  These qualities, discerned quickly, will inform our understanding of the remainder of the story.  This gentleman is a character defined.  As Ford said of him, “that gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been “got in” and can get to work at once.”

For this is the important issue to the writer – the “getting in” of character.  What Ford means here is creating a character that lives on the page and is defined without much need for lengthy description or detailing.  It is what all novelists want – their characters to be alive.  Much bad fiction suffers because the writer is uncertain as to whom their character is.  You can see the writer struggling to make their characters breathe.  They struggle through this by creating detailed pictures of the characters on the page, framed as if in a photograph.  They read something like:

“Henry was a tall man, six four, with a crop of light blonde hair that waved over his forehead.  His neck was long and thin, and came down to broad shoulders.  His arms, gangly for his body, ended in hands of weathered skin, for Henry was a farmer.  His light blue eyes looked back out at you with such deep resonance.”

And so on for a page or so.  It may be an interesting portrait of a man, but it is a man who is only anatomically alive.  He remains a mere waxwork on the page.  We may have a perfect picture of him, but who is he and why should we care?  It is why Maupassant’s gentleman works – there is a picture of him and he is instantly alive.  He is, as Ford so rightly observed, “got in”.

People Watching

So I missed a day.  It wasn’t my intention, but again being called in early to work, and then meeting friends for a few drinks after finishing at 10pm meant that I failed in my intention to blog every day for 30 days.  So, because this is my blog, and my project, I will modify my original intent to state that I will blog Monday to Friday and then only if I get the chance on the weekend.  The weekend I work crazy hours.  I can easily do 30 hours in those two days.  

As it’s been a steaming hot weekend, with thousands of tourists pouring into our ordinarily quiet little town (quiet, that is, apart from summer months and holiday times, and then not really all that quiet at all – we are a World Heritage Site, afterall), I have barely stopped this weekend and so, unless I bore you with stories of abusive customers, drunk customers, drugged-up customers, confused tourists, confused locals then I have little of interest to say.  Certainly nothing of a creative nature to share, other than this:

While I’m rushed off my feet, serving this myriad display of human nature, I am observing.  I watch people – writers are good people watchers, generally speaking – and I see those little tics that others might miss.  Watching how a man treats his wife, or a wife her husband, or a father his children, or whatever the combination of people, you gain insight into the human condition that, later, you can use in your writing.

I love going to the pub.  But I don’t love going to the pub to drink (though that is sometimes a major bonus, but only sometimes), but to watch people.  People let their guard down in pubs, they say things that they might not outside.  They're prone to gossip, exaggeration and belittling of others, and that is good fodder for a writer.  I do the same in nightclubs, but in such places you don’t get conversation, you get actions – people act boldly, brightly, they all want to be seen, and such actions, when translated to the page, can make all the difference between your characters being mechanical and actually human.  Knowing to look for that look of pained rejection that they don’t think has been seen, and then interpreting it.  I think such careful observation in a person makes the difference between a good writer and a great writer.  The great writers have all been great and keen watchers.

So next time you’re out there, or rushed off your feet in work, take a moment to watch how people react, and act, and then write it down.  Writing it down, working out how best to show such actions on the page, will transmute your literary creations into something better resembling human flesh.  People watching then, not just a pervy thing to do, but a major process of creative art.