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 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.
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!
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.)
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.
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 26th 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!
So I’ve been round and about trying to bring Eight Acts to the attention of a few more potential readers this week. It came out in March 2021 and I really didn’t do much to launch it, so it’s sat there quietly and people haven’t really known it exists.
It’s a companion novella to Taking Stock and like Taking Stock it doesn’t have any paranormal shenanigans, it’s a straightforward historical gay romance. However, it’s set in 1967–the year the UK’s Sexual Offences Act was amended to decriminalise consenting homosexual sex between two men over twenty one, in private. My Mama, that bastion of English greatness, doesn’t believe anything before the first world war is history. So for her, it’s a contemporary.
For me, both books are historical (Taking Stock is set in 1972), partly because they are set fifty(ish) years ago and partly because society has changed so much since then. Not only the law with the Equality Act and the Human Rights Act; but how we live generally in the UK. I was born in 1970 and the things I remember from my childhood in the 70’s and 80’s are so different now.
It was a time of the Cold War, public phone-boxes; buying your shopping with cash and being more worried what people thought about you. Your immediate community was very important. Versus today when we have East and West Europe unified, the internet and mobile phones that give us the possibility of wider communities, and a more relaxed attitude to non-traditional genders and relationships. Just for starters.
Memories of the second world war were still very fresh…the young people who’d been on the front line were in their forties and fifties and in middle management and positions of authority. Rationing had only ended fifteen years earlier, in 1954. The generation that had fought in the trenches in the first world war were retired and retiring. A good proportion of people had been born whilst Victoria was still queen.
Social change doesn’t come about quickly. It happens slowly and gradually, almost unnoticed if you’re living it. And every single generation ever has bemoaned that things aren’t as good now as they were when their grandparents were young–see Gildas, The Ruin of Britain, writing in the sixth century AD as an example.
My personal opinion is that it isn’t possible to say when something becomes ‘history’. There’s no precise cut-off. I suppose you could probably say as a rule of thumb that it begins to happen when less than half the population remember it as lived experience. But it depends how different things were too.
The 1960s and how different life was then means that I’m happy for both these books to go into the historical category. I’ve got a page on the website citing the resources I used writing the books, with links to some interesting YouTube videos of personal recollections of gay life at the time and about Polari, the ‘secret language’ of gay men in the twentieth century in Britain, that enabled them to talk about sensitive subjects in public without outing themselves.
Eight Acts
London in 1967 is swinging. It’s the summer of love and consensual gay sex in private has just been decriminalized. Percy and Adrian meet through friends and over the summer their relationship deepens and grows. What will happen in September when it’s time for Percy to go back to his every-day life as a boarding school teacher?
A 20k word stand-alone novella with cross-over characters from Taking Stock.
Trigger warning: A secondary character suffers an off-screen sexual assault.
With The Fog of War coming out in August I thought it might be interesting to blog about the differences between writing in all the different time-periods I seem to dip in to. I went straight from writing The Flowers of Time, set in in India in the 1780s to Taking Stock in England in 1970. It was a bit of a mind-jump.
Firstly, the main difference between writing Taking Stock in the 1970s and my books before that point, was that there was no magic. Up ’til then, I’d written in the 1920s and the 1780s with a with a paranormal twist. My magical world lies underneath the real one and I try to be as accurate as possible with that. But by education I’m a medievalist focusing on Britain, so the intricate historical detail of the 1970s was all new to me when I began.
For the 1920s books, I took inspiration from family stories about living in the East End of London in the first part of the twentieth century and there was a lot of documentary stuff to read. I’m a Dorothy L. Sayers fan, too, so it was quite easy to get a 1920s murder investigation vibe going.
Initially The Flowers of Time was supposed to be in the 1920s, too—it would have worked much better with plucky lady plant collectors toddling off around the world on behalf of Kew Gardens at that point in time and I already had a universe they could have slotted in to. However as I began writing, the characters got really bolshy and insisted they were from an earlier time period and we ended up in the 1780s. This is one of the disadvantages of discovery writing. Things can take a corkscrew turn quite quickly.
The bolshy characters made a lot of reading for me, as not only was the geographical area very new to me but the history was as well. I started off reading about the East India Company from resources that were easily available to me—British historians—and then I moved on to contemporary accounts of people’s travels and finally felt I knew enough to read from Indian historians and get a proper understanding. Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire was particularly good for that. Contemporary accounts of women travellers in India the eighteenth century are very patchy and a lot of the story was based around Isabella Bird’s account of her journey across the Himalayas in the late nineteenth.
I was very conscious of not wanting my characters to be horrible colonialists–it’s one of the real risks of setting anything in British history. Everyone has some sort of connection to exploitation. Rich people trot around exploiting their empire in order to provide romantic heroines with fainting couches in pretty Georgian houses. Poor people join the army and serve in India or join the navy and collude in the slave trade. It’s easy enough to ignore all that. But does that make your main characters nice people with whom the writer and reader can empathise? Not so much, in my opinion. The Flowers of Time was hard to write for that reason and although I feel like I did a reasonable job, towards the end I felt like I maybe shouldn’t have been writing it at all because it’s basically about English people travelling through the sub-continent for fun.
I like the book because I love my characters–Jones, the non-binary academic in particular is very close to my heart. But I am very uncomfortable with the setting now and if I had given it more thought before I began to write I would probably have done it differently. On the one hand the sweeping adventures of the Kew Gardens’ plant collectors are fascinating and they were interesting to me because of my family background–my Mama used to work at the Botanical Gardens in Dublin. But on the other hand…they’re a perfect example of white people travelling all over the world ‘discovering’ things that have always been there.
I have a companion story wafting round in my head, focusing on the male secondary characters and I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. One of them is an East India Company soldier. He’s busy mapping the Himalayas and is of course, queer and a nice person. But should I be writing it in that setting? Probably not. I need to think about it some more and maybe find a different setting for the story that will still dovetail.
Anyway, after all that soul-searching with Flowers and a spell in hospital for a month to try to get a handle on the Functional Neurological Disorder–which worked very well as quiet time to write away from the family thanks!–for some reason, I decided to set Taking Stock in 1972. Firstly, this made me feel old, because I was born in 1970. Secondly, it appalled my mother, who is still cross that the second world war is being taught as history. Thirdly, it’s almost impossible to find cover art for people that gives a 1970s feel without also feeling that one is advertising a Sirdar knitting pattern. Apart from that though, it’s fine.
Webber’s Farm
A lot of the farming references in Taking Stock are from my own childhood memories—the sheep dipping scenes for example—and from talking to older friends and family. I pigeon-holed a friend who worked in the City of London in the mid-1980s and extracted stock-exchange information from him, and I found a fascinating contemporary documentary on YouTube about stockbroking in the early 1960s. It was much easier to find that sense of place that I think is needed in historical fiction, because the references were all to hand. I can happily google ‘what happened in 1972’ and have a whole list of things come up that my characters would have been aware of. And the same for the 1920s really – there are millions of words written about the years immediately after the Great War and the social changes that were happening.
Those social changes make it easier to write characters who are conscious about those things and more easily sympathetic to the modern reader without ignoring all the horrendous colonialism behind British history. The 1970s are even more so, in my opinion. It’s easy to write fairy-tale historical romance stories if you ignore colonialism, social inequality and bad teeth. But if you want to do it properly, you need to take all those things into account.
Despite having a paranormal twist in most of my books, I really think of myself as writing historical romance and I take pride in getting the history right. It’s a balance though, it has to give colour and a setting without throwing the reader out of the story either with factual errors—someone one-starred my first book because I shifted the publication date of The Beautiful and the Damned back a year to fit my timeline and it clearly spoiled the whole thing for them—or with colonialist assumptions, or with making them feel they’re reading a history text-book.
As a writer it’s my job to do that and I hope I make a reasonably workmanlike job of it. I enjoy swapping between time periods, despite the dislocation that initially comes with it!
Here’s a deleted scene I found from Taking Stock. It’s Patsy Walker, who runs the Post Office, talking to HER friend Sally, who’s Laurie’s housekeeper. It’s whilst he’s in hospital recovering from his stroke. I took it out because it didn’t move the story along at all.
Taking Stock
“He’s going to be a handful,” Patsy Walker said to her friend Sally Beelock as she filled the tea-pot. “You’ll have trouble with him.”
Sally pulled a face. “You don’t need to tell me that,” she said. “He’s already talking about coming home and the stupid idiot can’t even stand up without help yet.”
“He’s improving though, yes?” Patsy asked.
“Yes, definitely. And it’s only been a week. They say that he needs to keep trying to move everything, his arm, his fingers, his leg, and the more he does that the more it’ll help.” She sighed. “They don’t know if it’ll all come back properly, but they say there’s a good chance.”
Patsy passed her a mug of tea and sat down opposite her at the kitchen table where she could see in to the shop. There weren’t any customers at the moment, but the early autumn day was warm and she had the outside door propped open as usual, which meant the bell wouldn’t ring if anyone came in.
“How are you managing?” she asked Sally. “It must have been a shock. He’s only what, thirty?”
“Thirty-three,” Sally said absently. “Yes. I thought it was curtains for him to be honest, Pat. Jimmy came down to get me at Carsters once the ambulance had gone. He didn’t tell me much, just said I should get into the hospital. Apparently he was unconscious, pretty much.”
Patsy patted her hand. “Well, he’s going to be fine, love. You’ll see. Look at Roger Chedzoy. He had a stroke four years ago and you’d never really know to look at him now.”
“He’s sixty-three though,” Sally said. “I mean, there’s never a good age, is there? But Laurie’s so young.”
Patsy nodded. “And that means he’s got more fight in him and he’ll get over it quickly. You’ll see.”
