Spontaneous Character Creation

Spontaneous Character Creation

Or why sometimes your characters know more than you do.

Aspiring writers are often advised to write a biographies of their characters and this can be good advice. Especially when you are stuck or just at that noodling stage when the work is just an amorphous stew of ideas and intentions(1). Again, when writing a long work or a linked series a bio can be handy for working out how old they are in comparison to other characters or reminding you what their hair colour, dad’s job etc is supposed to be from book to book.

Sometime characters spontaneously arise as if out of nowhere but there’s always a catalyst or trigger event. The thing is that you’re usually so pleased to see them you don’t make a note of what caused them to be created. In the case of Elsie “Hatbox” Winstanley the trigger was so tangential as to stick in my mind.

It started with Peter’s Mum(2) who didn’t have a name. Well she did have a name, ironically, it was in the bio I did for her while I was writing Moon Over Soho, but Peter, being her son, never referred to her as anything else other than ‘mum’.

This absence of a name caused some stress amongst my readers who complained that it was inherently sexist that such prominent female character had no ‘canon’ name(3). So I decided that at the next opportunity I would I have someone say her name.

The next work on the bench was a Rare of Book of Cunning Device, a short story that I was writing as a charity fundraiser. I decided pretty much to put her name into the mouth of the first character that came along and thus I wrote.

‘So you must be Mamusu’s boy?’ said the Librarian.

Peter is taken aback that someone would use his mum’s African middle name rather than the English name she put first on her passport all those years ago. Now she could have been a Sierra Leonean herself but it was too late because in the space between writing that line and the next…

‘I knew your mum back in Freetown when she was just a wee slip of a girl,’ she said.(4)

…Elsie “Hatbox” Winstanley had created herself in my head. I knew everything important there was to know about her just as I had when my gingery Scottish pathologist introduced himself as Dr Abdul Walid or Beverley Brook turned up in her mother’s front door wearing a T-shirt with WE RUN TINGZ printed on the front.

So sometimes, yeah, you’re writing a bio and carefully crafting characters to reflect the themes of your storytelling and to fit the intricacies of the plot.

And sometimes they spontaneously create themselves and with a two fingered salute they hare off down the manuscript scattering plot points in their path like startled sheep. And yes you will end up having to rewrite chunks of text and abandon your cherished outline.

And it will be totally worth it. I know this is true because one day I sat down and spontaneously wrote the line

‘My name is Peter Grant and I am a proud member of that mighty army for justice known to all right thinking people as the Metropolitan Police.’

Which is why, sometimes, when people ask me where the series is going the only answer I can give is – beats me mate, I just work here.

(1) This is because unlike some authors I’m not dead.
(2) That’s Peter Grant from my book series, none of this is going to make any sense unless you’ve read the books.
(3) Or possibly they wanted to include her in Fanfic, or both – they’re not exclusive.
(4) The intervening description was added later.

Random Writing Notes - Show Don't Tell

This is part of a series of random notes on writing that will appear as, when or if I think of them. They are essentially random notes that the five of you who read this blog might be interested in.

Show Don't Tell
In scriptwriting this means that wherever possible you should illustrate an idea, a characteristic or a plot point via action rather than dialogue. A crude but effective example is the introduction of the Black Widow in the first Avengers film, you could have had Agent Coulson reading a dossier about how good a spy she is but the sequence is so much more effective and and the line...

NATASHA

Are you kidding I'm working!

....tells you everything you need to know.

In prose you have the great advantage over scripts in that you can illustrate character by showing them not doing something. Hence this sequence in Louis MacMaster Bujold's supurb fantasy novel The Curse of Chalion...

Cazaril, along with Lady Betriz and a couple of wheezing grooms, was cantering in the wake of her dappled mare down a green ride, the crisp air spangled with golden falling leaves, when his ear picked up a thunder of new hooves gaining ground behind them. He glanced over his shoulder, and his stomach lurched ; a cavalcade of masked men was pelting down the track. The yelling crew overtook them. He had his sword half out before he recognized the horses and equipage as belonging to some of the Zangre’s younger courtiers. The men were dressed in an amazing array of rags, bare arms and legs smeared with a dirt suspiciously reminiscent of boot blacking.

         Cazaril drew a long breath and bent briefly over his saddle-bow, willing his heart to slow, as the grinning mob ‘captured’ the royesse and Lady Betriz, and tied their prisoners, including Cazaril, with silk ribands. He wished fervently someone would warn him, at least , about these pranks in advance. The laughing Lord dy Rinal had come, though he apparently did not realize it, to within a fraction of a reflex of receiving a length of razor steel across his throat . His sturdy page, galloping up on Cazaril’s other side, might have died on the backstroke, and Cazaril’s sword sheathed itself a third man’s belly before, had they been real bandits, they could have combined to take him down. And all before Cazaril’s brain had formulated his first clear thought, or his mouth opened to scream warning. They all laughed heartily at the look of terror they’d surprised on his face, and teased him about drawing steel; he smiled sheepishly, and decided not to explain just what aspect of it all had drained the blood from his face.

Not only do we learn just how dangerous Cazaril actually is as a soldier but we also learn that he experienced enough to know when not to react and wise enough to imagine the consequences of his actions.