Character Traits and Revisiting Favourite Places

I’ve just come back from a visit to Sydney sandwiched with a short road trip along some of the coast north of the city. If you’re a regular visitor to this blog you’ll know that Sydney is my favourite city to visit. It has the spectacular Opera House and Harbour Bridge, and is built on a beautiful harbour. A ferry trip anywhere from Circular Quay gives you stunning views. The city has some beautiful architecture in its older government and cultural buildings, as well as fabulous parks and gardens. I absolutely love visiting Sydney. One of my favourite pastimes is taking a ferry trip to Manly, not least because you have the best views of the harbour bridge and Opera House. 

We spent the last evening of the trip in Manly. It was a lovely warm evening and so we were outside on deck on the ferry trip back to the city. As we reached the promontory with the Opera House, everyone pulled out their cameras and phones to take photos. It doesn’t seem to matter how many photos you have of this amazing building, there’s always a reason to add a few more. Just as we were snapping away, there was a blaze of fireworks for about two minutes, what brilliant timing! 

When I was younger, I used to wonder why people would visit the same place year after year, I couldn’t imagine anything more boring. To be honest, I still wouldn’t want exactly the same holiday every year. I guess one of the delights of visiting Sydney is that it’s usually a long weekend visit and so doesn’t really count as a holiday!  However, there are pleasures in revisiting a favourite restaurant or café and in seeing sights and views that continue to inspire and amaze you. 

On a different note, although there is a connection, I have just about finished the first draft of my latest novel. I still have a few scenes to write, but the main story is finished. 

Editing is an interesting process, and very different from writing the first draft. Before I start to write a novel, the characters have lived in my head for several months, sometimes a year, so I already know them pretty well.

Once the first draft is finished, I know them even better. I’ve been with them during an event or two that sends their life into a crisis they never imagined, and through mounting problems and challenges that bring them to despair. 

The editing process is a little like going to a destination you’ve visited before. There are places you love and want to see again, but also new things to discover. With the main characters in a novel, there are personality traits and characteristics you already know and show in the writing, but there are also deeper qualities and attributes you need to explore or even discover to make sense of the things they do.

For a character to be well-rounded and real, there has to be understandable reasons for the things they do, otherwise they appear two-dimensional. This is especially true of the villain or nasty character. Very few people wake up in the morning and think, today I’m going to be horrible and make everyone miserable. There is a reason they act like that, or at least in a book there needs to be a reason so the character is realistic.  Think about the most memorable evil or unlikeable characters in novels you've read. Something has happened to shape them, and sometimes even make us feel sympathy for them even if we don't like them.

Currently, I'm looking at the early life of one of my less-likeable characters to figure out what made him like this. As authors, we put our characters through hell, and I wouldn't have it any other way!

Airport Ideas - Small Changes

I was at the airport yesterday, always an interesting experience during school holidays. As I was a little early (useful as the car park was full!), I spent some time wandering around. Watching people arrive and depart (doing my writerly duty), I was reminded of the opening lines from the film Love Actually – yep always a sucker for the sentimental.

‘Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.’

I’ve travelled on my own enough to know that moment when you stop momentarily in the arrivals lounge, and look around for that special person (or people). There's nothing quite like it.

As I mentioned the car park was full, and for a moment I experienced the sinking feeling of where the hell do I go now? Then a lovely man in a high viz jacket approached, asked me how long I would be parked, and directed me to some other parking.

Even though it was bedlam inside the airport building (school holidays!) the lady on the desk was polite, friendly and very helpful. 

Even simple experiences can turn on the edge of a coin. Nowhere to park and working to tight timeframes can change even the best mood into something less than lovely. I’ve known people be very polite, while still being extremely unhelpful and obstructive.

My experience yesterday was good, but it made me consider how small the change of events needed to be, to make it an unpleasant experience.

Consider your characters. They should already be under pressure with the big challenges and conflicts you’re throwing at them, but do you have any situations or events where everything goes okay for them, or scenes that could do with a little more tension? How could a small, seemingly insignificant action change the way the situation unfolds? It doesn’t have to be the main conflict or plot, but something else in their life that doesn’t run according to plan.

This has been on my mind recently, and in changing a few small things, I’ve made life so much harder for Tom, just as in the real world – tomorrow probably!

When Things Get Bad

Last week was one of ‘those’ weeks. The car was playing up and had to go into the garage for some work. My laptop had a meltdown and ultimately had to be rebuilt, quite a major when it’s my livelihood. There were a couple of other things, but you get the picture. 

I kept telling myself that in the scheme of things it could be much worse, no deadly diseases had reared their heads, and sometimes life throws these things at you to remind you how good you’ve got it.

It also got me thinking about the characters in Lies of the Dead (my current WIP). I’m throwing lots of problems their way, but mostly they are to do with the main conflict. Life doesn’t work like that. We don’t live in a vacuum, and major traumas happen along with the smaller problems in our lives. At the moment my main character Tom has lots of serious problems to solve because of the main conflict, but his everyday life is going along smoothly, and characters there aren't causing him problems. Hah, things are about to change Tom!

While our characters may be going through some major crisis or trauma, it won’t be the only thing on their mind. They will also be thinking about the problems they had before that started. They still have their work deadlines, burst pipe and broken down car. The main conflict may be uppermost in their mind, but so will the argument with their partner/child/neighbour/work colleague, the unpaid bills, and the undesirable boyfriend their daughter has just taken up with.

Oh yes, let’s make it really bad.