Getting to know your characters. Part 1: writing a historical character

Part 1: writing a historical character

I’m deep in rewrites for my Dark Ages fantasy novel. One of my biggest issues with draft 1 was weak characterisation. I thought I knew my characters pretty well, but their personalities weren’t really coming across in my prose.

Over the past few months I’ve been trying out lots of different exercises and workshops to get to know my characters better. I’ll be posting a few different approaches and ideas over the coming weeks. Part one is writing a historical character. The exercises can be applied to writing a modern character.

My novel is set in the Dark Ages. As a 21st Century girl, I automatically feel detached from my characters, even though I’m writing the novel in a contemporary style.

A modern character’s identity can be constructed around what they consume and what choices they make about their appearance and lifestyles. In the Dark Ages no one could flag their personality by their choice of phone, their chosen brand of bag or a penchant for a particular style of music. They had no TV, most people couldn’t read (and if they could, their choice of books was pretty limited), they had no leisure time to fill with extreme sports or camping holidays and they certainly couldn’t choose to go clubbing in Ayia Napa.

That doesn’t mean I can’t imagine what lifestyle choices my character would make if she were alive in 21st Century Britain. If you’re writing a story set in a bygone era, why not try the following exercise out?

I re-imagined my character as someone alive in the 21st Century, and then filled out this questionnaire about her. It’s important not to think too hard about your answers: quickly jot down the first thing that pops into your head. Some of the answers I had surprised me.

Q1: How does she dress?

A1: Like a beautiful beat poet. Outfit 1: Scuffed/ well-worn boots, Indian skirt-trousers, thin tight t-shirt, lots of necklaces and bracelets, sunglasses, chipped nail varnish, short dyed black hair, lots of ear piercings. Outfit 2: converse shoes with little skulls on, black tights and denim shorts, tight tee, woollen hand-knitted cardigan with chunky wool and chunky buttons, sunglasses, etc.

Q2: What music is she into?

A2: Edgy street stuff, and stuff like Bonobo.

Q3: What car does she drive?

A3: Something classic and mechanical. She’d have a basic understanding of mechanics and would enjoy tinkering.

Q4: What are her bookshop habits?

A4: She’d start in the military and history section, then mind, body and spirit, next onto Natural History/ animals, then true life stories. She doesn’t care for books – she is a spine-breaker, a folder back of paperback covers. She plays with her lips as she reads. Skims, picks up lots of books, flicks, puts back. Distracted. If she finds a book she really likes, she’ll find a chair, sit down with her feet planted on the floor, legs wide, rests her elbows on thighs. She might mumble good passages aloud as she reads them.

Q5: What phone does she have?

A5: An old flip-phone, battered, cracked screen, dangling charm of beads, worn keys. All her messages would be saved but she would constantly run out of memory and have to delete the spam to free space. Pay as you go.

Q6: What’s her favourite TV programmes?

A6: Documentaries, Planet Earth, David Attenborough

Q7: Where does she buy her food?

A7: Health food stores, foreign shops, farm shops, Waitrose.

Q8: ideal holiday destination and style of stay?

A8: camping holiday in Britain. Enamel ware. Bell tent. Cooks on a fire. She knows her nature and will eat a lot of wild food. She’ll spice everything up (she’d take her spices with her).

And that’s it. You can add more questions as you think of them. I found that by knowing 21st C lifestyle choices, I could more easily relate, I gained a clearer picture of her and felt closer to her. I can't put any of this into my novel, but because I feel I can relate to her/ picture her, I can now confidently start some characterisation exercises that will generate material I can use in my novel directly. I'll talk more about this at a later date. 

I also collected pictures of people I found on the internet that looked something like how I imagine my character to be – modern style people or historical. I found a Dead Weather video and thought there’s something about Alison Mosshart that’s similar to my character Tarmigan, so I watched that a few times and then watched a bunch of interviews of Alison Mosshart and took notes about her gestures.

These pictures aren't mine, I found them on deviantart. Something about them made me think of Tarmigan, though neither explicitly looks like her, and both are modern women (Tarmigan has a pet crow, so the first pic is particularly good for me!):

http://novenarik.deviantart.com/

This method worked well for me, especially as a foundation for further character work. Maybe it'll work for others?

Map Making Competition

My writing group is organising an awesome map making competition. Check it out!

Every story is set somewhere and it’s the writer’s job to immerse their reader fully into that fictional world. How are we to write convincing worlds if we do not know our way around them? 

We challenge any budding writer*/ artist out there to draw a map of their fictional world. It doesn’t have to encompass the entire world, it can be a small part of it; a city/ borough/ street, an island, a country or county, a building-plan etc. 

Please email your map to us at zomara@googlemail.com with Map Making Competition as the subject. Make sure the file isn’t massive, send it as a jpeg 72dpi. Keep a print-version at hand because we’d like to pin some of the best maps up at Shaftesbury Arts Centre (we’ll contact you about this). The winner will be featured on our blog and within Shaftesbury Arts Centre and Shaftesbury Arts Festival on 5th-9th Sept.  We will be publishing the winning map online, so if your world is top-secret then maybe keep it under wraps for now and submit it next time. 

The world/ location must be your own. We don’t want to see lots of renditions of Hogwarts.

The closing date is Friday the 31st August, so get your colouring pencils out and start drafting! 

Further info:

We don’t take ourselves too seriously, so we don’t expect you to either. We’re not concerned about intricacies of scale or worried over the physics of your world. If it looks cool, we’ll be happy. Inspire us, excite us. 

*Wait, you’re not even a writer? But you like to dream up worlds and make maps? – okay, that’s cool, go for it and submit. Maybe one of us writers will like your world and want to team up with you and write a story set in your world. Our writers are always on the lookout for things that will spark the next story, so we’d love to find a new world to write about. 

More information and examples of already published maps can be found here http://www.facebook.com/events/341655955921155/ 

SAC Story Slam

The writing group I co-direct is hosting a Story Slam next month, the 20th July. Come along, either as a writer to perform, or as a cool person to watch and enjoy. There will be book art on sale, as well as drinks and music. 

This fab poster was designed by Danny Morison. Check out his pages: website, facebook , twitter

For more info about the slam and to book tickets, please go here: http://www.shaftesburyartscentre.org.uk/item/creative-writing-storyslingers-story-slam.html

Writers' slots are filling up fast, so secure your place asap!

National Flash Fiction Day

It's National Flash Fiction Day today, which I'm very excited about. Flash fiction is a great way to accept and engage with this Age of short attention spans and on-screen reading. I can't stand to sit at a screen and read anything that's going take longer than drinking a cup of tea (and I'm a fast tea drinker). What I especially like about flash fiction is that there are no rules, nothing matters and if your reader didn't like or understand the story, that's no great loss - it only took them a few minutes to read. This means writers can be really experimental and try new things without fearing failure.

My academic background is in fine art, particularly photographic and contextual theory. I love to read and write fiction that is less about telling a story, and more of an outcome of artistic research - so rather than my project outcome being a fine art photograph - it's a short fiction of less than 1000 words. The fiction can then be read in the same way as you'd read a photograph or fine art piece - certain things might resonate with the reader, especially readers engaged in particular contextual discourses. And I can do that with flash fiction, I can afford to limit my market to only a few people who are going to get it.

I really like the work of Etgar Keret, who tends to write flash fiction. Check his stuff out if you're a fan of the short form. You can buy his collections through Amazon or (very) good book shops.

There are so many options with flash fiction, it can be whatever you want it to be. I like to play with language and be atmospheric and poetic with some of my flash fictions. I wrote a short atmospheric piece called Trapped in Nomansland, which has been published in this anthology in association with National Flash Fiction Day, specifically the South West region of contributing writers: Kissing Frankenstein and Other Stories
So please check it out, buy a copy, read it, lend it to your friends.

Get involved in NFFD here: http://nationalflashfictionday.blogspot.co.uk/

Dorset Writers Network and Bath Literary Festival

Jennifer Oliver and I gave a talk about Online Publishing for the Dorset Writer’s Network over the weekend, which seemed to go down well. There was a literary agent there – it was good to have the agent process demystified. What I think is most exciting about the roles of agents is the working relationship, the fact that the agent wants to bring the best out of the writer and offer a platform of support. I could really use that.

Steve Elsworth gave a talk on digital publishing. He thinks that within 10-20 years printed books will be obsolete/ have the same status as LP records have currently. I really hope that this won’t be so, books have a very long history and I hope that they are as ingrained in our society as other ancient media. Maybe it will be more like painting – a medium that many thought would be replaced by photography.

Some of us Storyslingers (my writing group) went to Bath on Tuesday for a Speculative Fiction workshop lead by Bath Spa University students. It was a really enjoyable evening, especially as I want to study on the MA programme at Bath Spa, so their insight was very helpful. One issue cropped up, and that’s that I’m the sort of writer who loves the first draft stage but struggles to edit – resulting in having about six novels at first draft stage but nothing fully completed or ready to send anywhere.

Many of the Bath Spa students have the opposite problem – they prefer to edit as they go, which means that they don’t get to write THE END for a long time, and when they get there it’s at the same stage as I would be after a few edits and re-writes.

A key piece of advice I was given was to finish up one novel in its entirety, to a level that’s ready to send out, and don’t start anything new until it’s done.

I’ve been struggling with editing my Arthurian novel over the past few days. My main problem is lack of confidence. I’m not the same person I was when I first wrote this story and I feel I could do a better job, or at least I want to be capable of doing a better job. I’m not quite convinced that I’m a good enough writer yet. This makes editing a pretty depressing task.

I wonder if anyone else has this problem?  From what the Bath Spa students said; it’s fairly common and normal to feel like your work isn’t matching up to your expectations. Writers are naturally self-deprecating.

I have one question to any writers out there: Do you listen to music while you write and/ or edit? Does it help? I find that listening to music helps calm me down, gets me past my self-deprecation so I can actually write or edit. But a level of focus is then lost. My writing seems better when I’m editing to music than when I’m editing it in silence – so I cut less out when listening to music. I’m not sure if it’s better to listen to music or face up to my words in all their silent force. Any thoughts? 

Jenny The Obscure

I’ve been struggling a little bit over the past week with my (short story) writing. My shorts writing tends to be obscure, very niche and experimental. Whatever market these kinds of shorts of mine have, it’s very limited. So I’m almost wondering if it’s worth developing such stories. I think I will always write them because they help me learn and they inform my more mainstream novel writing. But I wonder if it’s worth sharpening them for submission to magazines and publications. I’m not sure I should bother showing anyone these stories at all.

Yesterday at one of the two writing groups I attend (the cliquey one), I read out one of my particularly obscure pieces that I am considering sending somewhere. It did not get a good reception. One member was actually quite rude about it. No one there understood the piece. Their reaction was ironic, given the meaning of the piece. I guess in some ways the piece was like a Buddhist Koan (sort of!) and they were reading it from a rational angle.

I think the story failed because it really needs to work on both a rational level and also on a deeper level. I’m still learning, but yesterday’s reaction was off-putting.

Murakami is one of my favourite authors. This is because you can read many of his stories on those two levels. When I first read Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World I thought it was amazing, but I only got hints of the deeper meanings. Since the first reading I have researched into Jungian theory, and now I see that Murakami’s story is very heavily influenced by Jungian theory, to the point that it’s pretty much a narrative version of the Ego/ Shadow/ Animus theory. I’ve also started to research into Semiotics and there’s stuff about that hidden in there too.

I’ve got a lot to learn and it’s pretty daunting. I have no teacher, so it often feels like stabbing in the dark and I feel that I won’t reach the levels I aspire to for a very long time and I’ll have to continue on in this same intense full-time level if I’m ever going to get there.

I think I will take Murakami’s words below to heart and accept that I cannot please everyone, but I have to make sure that those that share my philosophy really, really like it.

This quote is from Murakami comparing running a jazz club to writing a novel:

Even when I ran the club, I understood [that you can't please everybody]. A lot of customers came to the club. If one out of ten enjoyed the place and decided to come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it another way, it didn’t matter if nine out of ten people didn’t like the club.

Realizing this lifted a weight of my shoulders. Still, I had to make sure the one person who did like the place really liked it. In order to do that, I had make my philosophy absolutely clear, and patiently maintain that philosophy no matter what. This is what I learned from running a business.

Overbearing / long skate

I entered the Terry Pratchett first novel prize ages ago. I didn’t win it. They haven’t announced who’s been short listed yet, though they should have done yesterday. I didn’t expect to win; my novel didn’t quite match the criteria for a start. It was well worth doing. I got a 126000 word novel written in four months. Since I submitted it I’ve been editing and doing some retrospective research, checking that what I’ve written is accurate, or at least knowing it’s inaccurate. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but this novel is probably the nearest to being in a decent enough shape to consider sending somewhere.

Aside from novel research and edits I’ve been writing a short story featuring longboarding. The spark point for this story is with this blog post

wherein a longboard dancer pulls slick moves to the beat of an inferior version of Prodigy’s Omen (love that song!)

More on that later.

Stone

I have a new story published on the very excellent Dogmatika website, which I am very excited about. I've only ever read really good stuff on Dogmatika, so having one of my stories accepted there is a really encouraging thing for me.
Please go and read Stone at http://dogmatika.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/stone/



In other news: I was lifting a really heavy bag of compost stuff and as I was walking along with it; shit! I did my back in. Pain.
I'm reading the manuscript of a novel written by my school mate John Tyson. So far, so good. Got to finish reading it by Wednesday, because if I do I get a dedication. :D