Bring Back The Emotional Rollercoaster

I’ve read some incredible books recently. I’m currently reading Threads by Tom Tinney - it’s completely out of my genre and my comfort zone, but I’m hooked by his characterisation of many of those he’s drawn into his intrigue. No, I don’t usually ‘do’ aliens, or space for that matter, but I’m utterly hooked by the marshals in his novel. They are believable, totally plausible and I want to be there when they win through.

I’ve also read some shockers in my time. By that, I mean that I’ve got to the end of a novel having been sped through exciting fight scenes, scintillating dialogue and amazing mysteries that I couldn’t have thought up. I know who killed who and why, where they live and what they ate. I know what kind of music the main characters listen to, but possibly don’t actually recognise any of the bands that they slow danced or drove to. I know that they had some kind of health need because they took a pill which I cannot name, but then worse, far worse, I don’t know what they look like or what actually makes them tick on the inside.

We only have to look around us to find a smorgasbord of human emotion. It’s everywhere. Literally. It doesn’t matter where you work, there is bound to be someone loud, someone strangely quiet, someone with emotional problems, someone who drinks too much. Marriages break up every day. Add that to your own experience of grief and you have a veritable emotional soup. I’ve read some novels with awesome storylines, where the appointed heroine watches the love of her life walk away or draw their last breath and shrugs, picking up the strands of her life and trotting off in the other direction. What’s with that? Within two chapters, she’s snagged herself a more suitable replacement and on we go. In ‘About Hana’, I allowed eight years to have elapsed before my character could even consider the possibility of remarriage. Sometimes in life it does honestly happen sooner, but come on! Two chapters?

There is an insincerity which creeps into some novels. They begin well and I can’t work out whether there’s a lack of skill in the actual writing, or if some overzealous editor has gone through and removed all the character-related information in favour of fast paced action. The trouble is, it breeds an immaturity in the characterisation and as a reader, I find myself unable to anticipate how the lead character feels about something. They become almost automated. I’ve seen on a lot of blogs, the principle of ‘show not tell’ and that is an awesome piece of writing skill. I try but don’t always make it I must confess and there’s a heap of popular authors out there who don’t do any better than me at it. But at least I know that when their character or mine, struggles to cope with abuse, loss of a partner, an argument with a child or family member, they are undoubtedly in pain. I can see it, feel it and empathise with them in their hour of need. That’s what keeps me in a novel.

I watch a lot of action movies with my husband because that’s the genre he loves. But there’s been so many occasions when a sex scene has suddenly appeared slap (dare I say ‘bang’?) in the middle of a series of adrenaline fueled moments. I find myself thinking, ‘What the heck?’ when they strip off and get down to it. It’s almost as though the movie makers debated behind the scenes and one of them said knowledgeably, “Go on, put one in, we better had.” It has no bearing on the plot or the characterisation, it’s almost just paying lip service to the supposed audience for the sake of it. Because obviously we all expect that - not!

Yet some writers do that all the time. Picture the sequence, a car chase followed by a shooting, followed closely by a man hanging from a building by his fingernails, sex scene, woman wiping a tear away and on we go, car chase, stabbing, possible alien landing... And there I am, poking around on my Kindle trying desperately to work out who is who, what on earth they’re up to and how I’m meant to view this.

Relationship and character drawing has of late, been referred to mistakenly as ‘back story’ and yet the two things are very different. If your novel contains the finer points of atom separation and you feel the need to explain it in glorious, enthusiastic technicolour, then please warn me in the blurb and I just won’t buy it. I don’t have a scientific bone in my body and try as I might, I am not going to understand. I would consider that kind of description 'back story' or at the very least unnecessary technical yawn.

I wonder how we would feel in a soap opera that we love, if after the credits, the cameras rushed across our view with people going about their daily business, going to work, bathing their kids, making the tea, but never delved into the people’s actual lives. The wife is upset with the husband long working hours and thumps the tea down on the table. We glimpse the trail of a tear on her cheek. It’s not the meal she’s making that’s important, but the emotional stuff around it. Guys don’t generally like my books because there’s heaps of description and lots of ‘feelings’. That’s fine. I write for women anyway, but have begun to consider putting a warning on my novels, saying ‘NOT FOR MEN’.

In Du Rose Legacy, there’s a pregnancy, which means that at some point, a baby is going to have to come out. I wrote those scenes from experience. They were an emotional roller coaster of excitement, fear and relief, often all in the same minute, an uncontrolled lurching from one to the other, all borrowed from my own life. 

The New Du Rose Matriarch begins with a new mother failing to cope, running all kinds of stupid, unrealistic scenarios through her head, battered by exhaustion and feelings of guilt and failure. Readers have emailed me to tell me that they cried all the way through both of those scenes. They had been there and they understood. It touched something deep inside, something raw and painful but at the same time, reminded them that they had survived.

Perhaps I’m too emotional, too descriptive and verbose, a reader will always be the judge of that. I could have simply written, Hana wasn’t coping with her crying baby... and moved on to some more interesting plot moment, like when she finds a killer waiting for her by her car, or gets snatched. But if I did that, why on earth would the reader care? You care about Hana because you’ve grown to love her, with her red hair and her frustrating thought processes which make you want to kill her yourself, preferably after you’ve taken her out for coffee and tried to explain some salient facts to her.

Emotion isn’t back story, but it’s being confused with it. I’m tired of reading these two dimensional stories with lots of action and no substance. I never used to stop reading a novel, not for anything. I’ve struggled through some real doozies in my time. But lately, I’ve decided that I’m the wrong side of forty to be wasting valuable hours in a dead loss. So I am being more picky and less committed and I don’t think I’m alone. If an author isn’t willing to invest in their own character enough to let me, the reader, know how they feel about their circumstances or describe what they even look like, how can they expect me to battle on through to the end with them? It becomes a one-way partnership and I’m doing all the work.

My favourite novel of all time is MM Kaye's, ‘The Far Pavilions’ and has been for over twenty years. I’ve read it numerous times. It’s a massive piece of work and even in teeny-tiny print, you couldn’t fit the thing in your handbag. It’s easily bigger than a house brick. You could probably brain someone with it actually, only you wouldn’t be able to stop reading it long enough. It’s a colourful parade of the most in depth writing imaginable. The characters become like friends and you care about them enough to stay up late reading, in the hope that their circumstances will improve before you have to get up for work. It’s a detailed emotional roller coaster and I love every single page of it. Nowadays, I get the sense that it would be called ‘too wordy’, ‘not enough action’, ‘a bit too detailed’, ‘let’s cut the emotional stuff and throw the sister on the funeral pyre so that she can get on with committing suttee’. 

As authors, we’re competing in a world where nobody waits for anything. Every need can be fulfilled by a phone call, the push of a button or a sharply issued demand. Our heads are bursting with our own mess, so why on earth would we want to climb into someone else’s head and see how they cope with life?

The answer is: because we can.

I want to. Do you want to?

I want more than just to hang from the wing mirrors of a speeding car feeling disconcerted and afraid. I want to plumb depths that my own life either has, or will never take me into. Above all, I want to escape and I will ultimately do that by making friends and walking a mile in their shoes. 

So help me out here. What do your characters look like and what really makes them tick?