amwriting – Page 2 – A. L. Lester

#AMA: The Nix List

This week’s question is another by Anabela (who gave me a wheelbarrow-load of really good ones!) Do you have subjects you think you could never write about?

Yes! Definitely! Is the short answer—I should think everyone does. And I should think everyone’s answer is very different and probably changes with time.

The first one that jumps to mind though is children. I’ve always been very disinclined to write about characters with children. Mine are in their early teens now and I was first published in 2017 when they were…thinks very hard…nine and ten. The absolutely last thing I wanted to do was revisit that in fiction. Likewise now, I can’t see myself writing in the parental romance genre any time soon. I had a rubbish time when they were tiny babies and it’s simply not something I want to explore, whether it would be a story that sells or not. I’m utterly baffled by epilogues in romance that show characters having children. I read them and they leave me cold, they’re not my thing at all. So I can’t ever envisage me writing one.

Having said that I do have a character in the Theatr Fach world who has a child; but that’s accidental—I wrote them as a side character in Out of Focus and threw in a kid they had to pick up from school as an excuse to leave Alex alone at the hospital; and I’d quite like to explore them further, so ta-da, they’re a parent. But generally speaking…writing about characters with children is a nix.

Also a nix is mpreg. Does that come under the ‘people with children’ caveat? It probably does, but it should also be a category on its own. I just…can’t. I think it might be my own dysphoria that makes me so revolted by it. Let me emphasise people should absolutely read and write what they want, this is my own personal reaction, not a judgment. I think, actually, giving it more thought whilst writing this, it’s not just mpreg, it’s an entire pregnancy thing. So let’s expand the nix to cover pregnancy. I cannot envisage ever writing a pregnant character. Even writing this paragraph has made me shudder. I did not enjoy being pregnant—I loathed it, every single minute of it. I had the two children very close together—sort of by design as I was nearly forty by the time the first one came along—but so close together that at one point I was pregnant and had post-natal depression. When Littlest was born, my lovely obstetrician wrote me a letter of congratulation expressing the wish never to see me in her clinic again. So a nix to pregnancy completely, please!

I don’t think there’s anything else I am conscious of definitely not wanting to write about. I’ve written about death and violence and assault, all sort of horrible things. I do find writing about sexytimes quite difficult sometimes. I don’t think that’s an inherent disinclination though, more that sex is inherently messy and funny and stupid and I find it hard to do right without slipping in to cliché. I’m always worried that readers will come across a sex-scene and it’ll throw them out of the story because I’ve done sexing in a way that no-one else will find acceptable/interesting/arousing/relevant to the narrative.

I’m sure there are other things and I don’t know it, simply because I haven’t come across them yet or I’ve buried them so deeply I don’t have a clue they’re there!

I’m really enjoying these posts…if you have an #AskMeAnything question, do drop me an email or pop in to Lester Towers to ask.

Read around the Rainbow: What’s your ideal Writing Shack?

Welcome to the first Read Around The Rainbow! A few of us have got together to write about the same topic once a month on the same day and I hope you’ll visit some more of the people in the webring—I’m including links to everyone else’s posts at the bottom of this one; and just click on the image to see who we are and for the links to our websites.

This month we’re all writing about our ideal writing shack.

I should confess before I begin that I do, actually, have a writing shack at the bottom of my garden. Here’s a picture! It’s got electric and wifi and in theory it means I can retreat away to commune with my muse. However, it’s also a long way from the kettle and the last two summers the garden has got away from me and I’d have needed a machete to get to it. Also…when the kids are home I need to be in the house and when the kids aren’t at home, I don’t need a writing shack! Perhaps this year I’ll manage to use it a bit more frequently in the summer when the family are out in the garden.

I’m very much a proponent of not wishing for things you can’t have…so my ideal writing shack is a bit nebulous and there’s a lot of crossover with my ideal place to live.

view through door in wooden cottage — Photo by Marina Leonova on Pexels.com

Ideally then… I’d like a small strawbale-built cottage, please. There would be a south-facing veranda, glassed in for the winter and with doors and windows that open wide in warm weather. It would be located in low rolling hills in a forest or wood, with wildish garden with a pond that I could sit and gaze at when I was thinking what to write. In spring there would be a riot of wild flowers in the surrounding woodland and I’d be able to walk to clear my head.

I’ve done a lot of the off-grid thing and I’m too old to be chopping wood for heating and cooking these days; so I’m afraid I’d need to be connected to the grid, although I’d have a woodburning stove I could also cook on in the winter. It would, I’m afraid, have very high-speed internet. But it would only be connected to the physical world by a long bumpy track only navigable carefully by people who really wanted to visit. My groceries would be delivered to the end of the track weekly and I’d go and wait for the delivery person with my donkey-cart. Did I mention I’d have a couple of donkeys? Or maybe elderly ponies.

cozy fireplace in light minimalist living room — Photo by Rachel Claire on Pexels.com

And it would have a desk on the veranda where I’d work. And also one in the living room by the fire for writing in the early morning or evening. It would have comfortable couches and a wing chair with a footstool for when I wanted to sit in comfort with my legs up and the laptop on my knee. I would write a couple of thousand words every day and I’d have time to meditate and do a bit of walking in my wonderful woods and sleep in the extra-comfortable bed I forgot to mention earlier!

Also, there would be a biscuit jar with an infinite supply of biscuits and a very large tea-pot.

I think reading this back, actually, my ideal writing shack is very much like where I live now…it’s just time, life-stressors and the lack of a magic biscuit jar that are an issue!

#AMA: Resonating with your characters

This time’s topic is a question from Fee. Which of your characters, if any, do you resonate with most?

I suppose the easiest way to fudge this is to say well there’s something of myself in all my characters and be all highbrow about it. However, there are definitely characters I resonate with more than others. It tends to be the people who are lost that I find I chime with most, or the people who are unhappy with themselves. What does that say about me? I don’t know*. None of my characters are me, but a few of them have quite a few elements of me in them…so, I’m going to pick two. Laurie from Taking Stock and Walter from The Quid Pro Quo.

Laurie from Taking Stock

Laurie Henshaw, farmer. Recovering from a stroke. Age 33. Brown hair, brown eyes, sheepdogs Nell and Fly. Came to Webber's Farm in 1954. Taking Stock.

Laurie is in his mid-thirties and has had a stroke, which means he can’t work his own farm any more. Yeah, okay, I wrote this just after my Mama had her stroke, but actually Laurie’s emotions and feelings of powerlessness are right out of the Ally Lester Playbook. My own chronic disability is a seizure disorder paired with fibromyalgia and I loathe not being able to drive, or even go shopping alone in case I keel over. I hate not being able to have animals any more—I use to run the egg stall at the local farmers market and teach poultry-keeping courses and generally heave bags of animal feed and animals and animal housing around and I am now dependent on Mr AL and Talking Child to even take care of the handful of hens we keep ourselves. I put a lot of that frustration into Laurie—his feeling of losing his livelihood and his anger at the universe and I think it comes through. Bits of him were very therapeutic to write and bits of him were very upsetting.

Walter from The Quid Pro Quo

The same with Walter. Walter’s happy enough. He’s got his friends and his work and his travelogues. But he’s hiding his big secret from the world and no-one but his very closest friends know it. So he keeps that bit of distance from everyone else to protect himself. I am not out as non-binary or pan to the little village I live in. Some people know—I don’t make a secret of it exactly, but it’s not something that comes up in the village jubilee committee meetings. I present as a short, round, grumpy, middle-aged, straight married lady. And so I feel quite a bit of kinship with Walter. He’s short, soft around the middle and a bit grumpy…and he hides his gender and sexuality. It’s not the same. But there’s elements of me in there and that resonates.

Walter Kennet. Born 1880, East End of London. Profession, army nurse (orderly). Smokes a pipe. Appearance. Small, running a little bit to fat, dark brown hair and eyes, London accent. Personality, sarcastic, loyal, competent. Pansexual, transgender. Can cook. Reads travelogues for pleasure. The Quid Pro Quo.

The fact I was able to give both characters happy endings means a lot to me. A lot of what I write is about people finding a home in other people—found family as well as a romantic happy ending—and I guess that’s what I desire for myself. I do have a large and supportive family of choice, so I draw from that in the real world and hope my characters can have that too. But these characters also carry the sense of dislocation I still sometimes feel when the world gets out of whack and that also makes them close to my heart.

Thank you, Fee, for asking the question and making me think about it!

*Dear Reader, ALLY DOES KNOW

Introducing Read Around the Rainbow

Read Around the Rainbow, Writers and bloggers of LGBTQIA+ romance

So, here’s our New Thing! My Office Writing Buddies ™, Nell Iris and Ofelia Grand and I all run blogs and we like to drop in to each other’s places and make things collaborative. So we have set up a little group of like-minded people who write similar stories and we are all going to pick a topic once a month and write about it.

I have [please insert your drumroll here] set up a webring. Webrings are an ancient and venerable part of the internet and some of you might not even know what they are. My memories of them from the glorious nineties and noughties are…variable. There weren’t many easy options to find like-minded people on the world wide interweb, so bloggers and website hosts with similar interests got together in groups and directed one-another to our sites. You signed up, stuck a bit of code on your webpage that produced something like this and off you went:

Read around the RainbowVisit the rest of The Rainbow bloggers!

Previous Random Next

(Purely in hopes of admiration, I need to say at this point that I forked a repository on Github to make this happen—I regularly say my coding days are over and they definitely are, I found it tortuous!)

The result of all this is that a handful of us are going to pick a topic, write about it on the last Friday of the month and link to each other’s posts. Because we are all high-stress people, the plan is to be very easy going and not put pressure on ourselves…if we don’t fancy a topic one month, we just don’t do it.

Our first posts will be going up on the Friday 25th of March, so do keep an eye out! We hope to see you around!

Ofelia Gränd/Holly Day :: Nell Iris :: A.L. Lester :: Lillian Francis :: Fiona Glass :: Amy Spector :: K.L. Noone :: Ellie Thomas

#AMA: Blending real people and fictional characters

I’ve been having a bit of blog-block recently, so I asked in my facebook group for suggestions and a lot of lovely people gave me questions to answer and topics to write about. To start with today, I picked Anabela’s…Are there any real people or personalities you’d like to turn into fictional characters? (I’ll also be asking this regularly in my newsletter if you don’t do facebook).

Well…

It’s a tricksy subject, because I think as a writer no-one would ever speak to you again if they thought you spent every interaction making mental notes about them to slide them in to a novel. Also…it’s a bit rude, I think? As if you’re using real people for other people’s entertainment. It seems immoral to me to pinch someone wholesale from real life and stick them in a work of fiction for other people’s entertainment, particularly if it’s painful situations or trauma that one’s writing about or putting the character through. It just doesn’t seem right.

So the broad answer to that is no, there aren’t.

But then we get to the narrow answer, of which there are two!

Firstly, my the development of my main characters is sometimes sparked by real-life people. For example, Edie in the The Flowers of Time was inspired by the artist Marianne North, a British woman who travelled all over the world painting flowers in the second half of the nineteenth century. She was remarkable both for her travels and for her talent. And a lot of Edie and Jones’ travels are based on those of Isabella Bird, another Victorian woman from Britain who travelled widely and wrote travelogues. (She was casually racist in the standard manner of the British at that time, so do be aware of that if you want to explore her work further. I took some of her travels as inspiration and I left her personality well behind.)

The Fog of War by A. L. Lester, First in the Bradfield Trilogy, part of the Border Magic Universe

Sylvia Marks in The Fog of War was sparked by an Edwardian lady doctor I remember my grandmother telling me about in Wellington in Somerset during her childhood. I know nothing about her personality apart from her nephew’s wife, a friend of mine, reporting that ‘she was a game old bird who smoked like a chimney’ when he knew her in the 1960s. Granny was struck by the fact that she’d come to visit her mother and sit on the kitchen table and swing her legs and smoke. So that was where Sylvia began. I jumped off from those two things and went and researched women doctors of that era.

For main characters like this I begin with a glimmer from somewhere and the character then grows on their own. Sometimes it doesn’t work…I have an abandoned post-apocalyptic-plague thing I began six months before covid where the MC is based on a dear friend and I made them too alike—even talking to him about it to check whether it freaked him out too much—and I can’t write it. That’s possibly for covid reasons but also because I don’t want to think about him naked (sorry about that, P, if you’re reading this!). And for my upcoming May release, the one for Naked Gardening Day, I got stuck when I realised I’d drawn heavily on my memories of my father for George, one of the protagonists. It made things just a tad awkward until I realised and could rewrite him so it didn’t make me need therapy.

So that’s the main character bit. I sometimes start with a snapshot of a real person and develop a main character from there. If I try and make them too like a real person, then it doesn’t work.

Jimmy, age 84. Extremely elderly farmhand from Inheritance of Shadows. Married. Lots of children and grandchildren.

Secondly though, there are definitely aspects of people I’ve met that I make a part of my supporting cast. Of necessity supporting cast members tend to be more caricatures, I think? So they have one or two traits that make them useful in the story, to move it along or provide comic relief or pathos or even just background depth. I’m thinking in particular of Jimmy from Taking Stock, who acts a bit like a local chap I know who used to help my Mama with her sheep. His appearances are third-party, we only ever see him through the eyes of the main characters. We never know what he’s thinking or what his feelings are. He’s just a foil for my main characters and the story and I don’t ascribe him any motivations.

Similarly in Out of Focus (out on 26^th March, pre-order now etc etc!) some of the supporting cast have traits of people I’ve met on my travels. Things like the way they swear, or something someone said…that sort of thing. But again…nothing that is actually them, if that makes sense? Nothing about what they might be thinking or feeling.

I think that’s the crux of it, Anabela! I sometimes use a real-life situation as a spring-board for character development. And I sometimes attribute something I remember someone doing or saying as part of a minor character. The idea of taking a real person wholesale and making them in to a fictional character doesn’t ring my bell at all—quite the opposite.

Next time…a New Thing I’m doing with some author friends…Reading Around the Rainbow!

Category: amwriting