Writing Fiction a user-friendly guide by James Essinger

Author:James Essinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: writing;guidelines;fiction-writing;script-writing;expert advice;teach yourself writing
Publisher: The Conrad Press
Published: 2019-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

13. Choosing your characters

It certainly makes sense to write about characters who you want to write about so much that you can’t not write about them. After all, you’re going to be spending a year on your novel, and maybe much longer. You may as well spend it with characters you like and care about.

Don’t, by the way, make your characters too perfect. After all, again to refer you to life, no-one is too perfect. On the other hand, the reader needs to have some basic liking for the character. Also, the character, even if really bad, has to be to some extent attractive.

Hannibal Lecter, in the novel The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and the 1991 movie of the same name, likes eating people generally and their inner organs in particular, but he is attractive because he’s cultured, polite, fair-minded, (he doesn’t kill you if he finds the world more interesting with you in it, so we’d better all make sure we’re interesting), and he is not actually physically unattractive.

So make your characters interesting by giving them certain strong characteristics. If you write about a character you find interesting, you are likely to be able to convey that interest to your reader. But, again, don’t make the character too much like you; after all, it’s a novel you’re writing, not an autobiography.

Next, write about people, and situations and settings, you know about both technically and emotionally. I think The Mating Game works reasonably well as a novel because my co-author Jovanka Houska and I know about the world of chess and what goes on in it.

However, you don’t need to confine yourself to what you know about literally. No, use your imagination. I very much doubt J.K. Rowling has ever done a genuine magic spell, but she writes about magical people (and non-magical ones) brilliantly. If you only write about what you literally know about that’s going to limit your fiction-writing, because writers tend to be relatively sedentary people who are often at happiest at their desk writing, and who don’t necessarily want to do stuff that other people find so necessary such as climbing Everest, doing lots of travelling, attending demonstrations, doing a charity bungee jump etc.

Besides, your emotional knowledge of situations and things is more important for your writing than your literal knowledge of them. The secret is to make the most imaginatively of what you’ve experienced emotionally. For example, when J.K. Rowling writes so well about those ghastly creatures the Dementors, it’s obvious she associates them with the worst times she’s had in her life, and she uses that knowledge to make them emotionally perfectly convincing in their ghastliness. To take an example from the work of a less well-known writer, viz me, my Young Adult novel Josh Moonford and the Lost City of Cantia is set in a weird underground world, Cantia, underneath Canterbury. Clearly, I can’t know anything literally about that, but I do think I know about it emotionally. I used to live in Finland and I often felt pretty alienated there, even though I learnt to speak the language.

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