All Plot and No People

‘One thing we may be certain of – people are the novel’s concern’ – Elizabeth Bowen

‘I believe that all novels…deal with character and that it is to express character… that the form of the novel… has been evolved.’ Virginia Woolf.

Without characters there are no  stories. Our characters must live in the minds of our readers. In order for this to happen they must live in our minds first and this means we need to know our characters very well – how they live and breath, what they eat, who their last text was from, what music they play, how they walk…..

Hemingway said, ‘A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing…’ To avoid such hollow places we need to know as much about our characters as we can. We may not include everything we know in the text but it will inform our writing. So we need to imagine and invent…

Now there are a million ‘how to’ writing books out there which will give you helpful ideas/exercises for developing your characters, so I don’t intend to go into extensive detail here. There are just two things I’d like to say

• This may all seem very simple and you may think, as I did with my first novel, that I knew my characters well but it came as a big surpirse to me that this did not always come across to my editors in the reading.

             I had to do further character devlopment before the novel was published..

• Editors commented that the protagonist in my second novel, The Orchid House, was too passive – this can be another pitfall – that of the passive hero – remember the hero needs to act and advance the action, and be seen in action, and don’t forget there must be confict/tension from the start – something he wants, needs etc.

In This Year You Write Your Novel – a great book on writing, Walter Mosely (pgs 36 -37) recommends, ‘the pedestrian in fiction – Maybe your character gets up out of bed and walks across the room to the mirror. You need to see the bags under her eyes… (hear) the sound of the sheets falling to the floor…(feel) the grit beneath her bare feet…the pain in her left knee  where she twisted her ankle on a stone stairway while attending her mother’s funeral…’ 

Such pedestrian details will help the reader enter the character’s reality and believe.

Writing Tip – have your character get up out of bed and go on a journey to the bathroom – as above. Give us the pedestrian detail. It may surprise you – you may find out something you didn’t know.

 http://lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com/ – Do read Wendy Robertson’s – Making People Is Mad – Wendy says,  ‘it’s crazy, isn’t it, inventing all these people who live and breathe in my imagination.’  I cannot disagree. Crazy but good.