Category: Books

This week on the Open University FutureLearn Start Writing Fiction course, we’re developing characters. We’re being asked to try ways of doing that which we’re unfamiliar or uncomfortable with.

Letting the character develop from a starting point is the way that normally works for me. I’ve found that, once I’ve established my basic character, whether that’s a tattooed lady, a Hitchcockian gangster or a travelling tyre-fitter, I enjoy imagining the dialogue they’d use and I find out more about the character by virtually ‘listening’ to them. I can always visualise my character quite vividly, so I often make a quick sketch of them.

One rare method, that writer Alex Garland describes in an interview on the course, is of a character coming and tapping you on the shoulder, like a ghost. That’s something that I’d probably find impossible to conjure up. However, I will jot down any ideas that come to me unbidden, just in case a likely character manifests itself.

Getting to know Uncle Joe

As a back up, I’ll try a method that Monique Roffey sometimes uses, of writing a 5-15 page biography. I think that I’d enjoy doing that as it sounds a bit like researching your family tree. However much I know about a character, such as my real life Great, Great, Great Uncle Joe in Victorian times – who survived attempted murder by his wife Mary with a pair of decorating scissors – I want to know more about them:

• Why were the scissors in the house?
• Had he and his wife been drinking at the same pub before the incident?
• Did he ever visit her in prison?
• What happened when she was released 11 years later and was seen heading back to Sheffield?
• And, yes, what did he have for breakfast?

The mundane stuff would fascinate me and this is why it’s so interesting if you do come across a murderer in your family tree. The newspaper reports include information that would otherwise never have been recorded, such as Joe and Mary’s sleeping arrangements and the kind of quarrels they had behind closed doors.

‘Ophelia’

As I was reading through the assignment on my iPad, a woman in her early 30s with long dark hair,in camel-coloured coat and purple silky scarf walked thoughtfully up the road holding a little bouquet. She looked like a character from a television drama serial. I decided that I’d have no difficulty writing about such a striking figure, so I’m using her as the starting point for my imagined character.

Any long-haired, thoughtful, youngish woman holding a posy of herbs is sure to remind me of Ophelia, but hopefully I’ll get beyond that archetype as I go through the suggested checklist we’ve been given and build up a CV for the character.

The kind of character I would struggle to elaborate on would be an ‘ordinary’ everyday person doing nothing in particular and looking blank and expressionless, such as a shopper standing in a queue. But I realise that these ‘ordinary’ characters would probably turn out be the most surprising to explore, when you really get to know them.

My latest assignment on the Open University’s ‘Start Writing Fiction’ course, is a study of an imagined character:

The effects of the oil of cloves were already wearing off as she wandered aimlessly around the aisles in the co-op. Shrink-wrapped displays of fruit and veg and a bargain bin of pumpkins that had missed out on halloween did nothing to lift her mood. Golden Delicious from Spain? Bobby beans from Kenya? What’s wrong with seasonal produce home-grown right here in the village? The Howgate Wonders from her orchard wouldn’t get held up at the Channel Tunnel and why pay for beans that have flown halfway around the world when you can save enough broads and scarlet runners to grow a crop for free each year? She was still growing the old varieties that her mother had grown thirty, no forty, years ago, when she’d kept the family allotment.

When people called her old-fashioned, she’d smile politely and suggest that sometimes the old ways were the best. But one old remedy really wasn’t working any more and very soon she’d have to face the consequences. The sharp ache deep in her lower jaw was coming back with a vengeance. She walked across the green to the church and paced around amongst the headstones.

She felt like a condemned prisoner awaiting execution. Perhaps, like them, she could allow herself one last cigarette. As she sat on the bench, going through the familiar routine of rolling her Golden Virginia, she felt a little calmer, even though, if anything, the throbbing pain was increasing.

The church bells chimed for quarter past. Tuneful, yes, but no character. Why had they melted down the old ones? When they’d hoisted them down from the belfry she’d seen an inscription on one which showed that it was as old as the church itself. Cracked and tarnished with age. Why can’t things stay just as they are?

She stubbed out her cigarette and dropped it in the bin. She couldn’t leave it any longer. Ten minutes later she was there in the waiting room. The last time she’d been in here, Mr Emmerson’s father had run the practice. Bored-looking goldfish pouted and flounced their diaphanous fins as they rose, then subsided, in the tank in the corner. Why did a creature with no teeth take pride of place in a dentist’s waiting room?

A soft but insistent beep. Her name came up on the screen:
‘Rosemary Lister, Benjamin Emmerson, Surgery 4.’