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?
