Character
Arlene Hunt on Creating the Bad
‘It’s alive, it’s alive!’
Who doesn’t recognise the joyous cry of the demented scientist when Frankenstein, his monster creation, finally comes to life. It’s one of the most classic lines in horror movie history.
Though I leave out the shriek, I often feel this way when a character– once a mere blastocyst of an idea banging about in my brain – fleshes out and takes form. It can be a giddy-making moment when I stop thinking of a character as a thing and begin to think of them as he or she. In general this is a pleasant experience, after all characters are an important part of the crime novel, the people we watch carefully as the plot propels us in, but occasionally I will create a character that leaves me wondering where on earth I found them and why I am so happy to set them loose into the world.
Adrian White on Method Writing
People harm themselves in many different ways and it's never easy for others to understand why.
A few years ago, a colleague of mine - let's call him Jack - told me about a friend of his from college whose self-harm had become her whole life. This woman's story had a profound effect upon me, even though we had never met, and what I learnt about her was ultimately the prompt for my second novel, Where the Rain Gets In.
I met Jack again recently out of the blue and, when the topic of my writing came up, he told me he'd visited his friend just last week in hospital and that she wasn't doing at all well. What Jack told me hit home a second time and I thought of the years in between Jack first mentioning his friend and what those years have meant to this girl, this woman, this human being living through her own private hell.
I was very conscious when I sat down to write Where the Rain Gets In that what I was doing could be seen as exploiting another person's suffering. I told myself then, as I'm telling myself now, that I was writing from the heart, that this was a genuine attempt to put myself into the mind of a woman who could harm herself in this way.
Back Story - How Best to Include it
“Too much Back Story slows down the pace of your narrative…”
Receiving this powerful sentence in a rejection letter set me back for weeks. How could I have got my writing so wrong? I’d read all the books on writing. I’d assumed the reader needed to know about my characters’ pasts – and perhaps they did - just not in the first chapter!
Like a lot of other valuable nuggets associated with the craft of writing, I learned about Back Story through a rejection letter. And, as with many things in this life, we learn our best lessons through our most painful mistakes.
In an earlier draft of my first novel, I had included far too much information in the opening chapters. Dropping characters’ college education into dialogue, mentioning their parents’ occupations in lengthy paragraphs and making reference to their first romance before the end of Chapter One distracted from the real storyline and lost the reader’s attention before I had truly possessed it.
Understanding Characters: Tracy Culleton
We get to know a character throughout the course of a story, through:
- What he/she says
- What he/she thinks
- What he/she does
- What others say about him/her
- To a lesser extent: how he/she dresses, lives etc.
- Also to a lesser extent: how he/she speaks.
If you are a new writer it certainly helps, but you don’t have to know everything about the character before you start – sometimes you learn about them as the story develops. The characters reveal themselves to you with each twist of the plot. But do remember to make notes on the character as you go along – or you will spend hours trying to find where you wrote the name of your heroine’s aunt’s dog when you need to mention it again, time that could be spent writing!
Whose Story is This Anyway? Tracy Culleton on Point of View
Point of View (POV) literally means just that. Whose point of view is the reader borrowing at any given time. From which direction is the camera lens pointing?
Point of View can be quite tricky to get right in fiction, as you draw the reader into your story and reveal your characters thoughts, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of head hopping – switching POV from one character to another – which is extremely confusing for the reader and jerks them out of the story. To ensure you get your POV right, it helps to know what the options are. Your story can be told in the:
Read more: Whose Story is This Anyway? Tracy Culleton on Point of View
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