I’m not writing. This doesn’t make me an ex-writer – not in absolute terms anyway – but just means I’m preoccupied with other matters that are taking up most of my ‘thinking time.’
Thinking time is often mistaken for idleness. That apparently aimless staring into space or sitting in the shade ‘resting my eyes.’ No, I’m not asleep; I’m thinking. It’s exactly the system I used when I was writing, more or less, full-time.
A friend asked me a question today. When I write, are my characters ‘real?’ She didn’t mean, do they really exist, but are they real, to me? Yes, they are. Even those monstrous sociopaths who somehow manage to creep out from the far reaches of my mind are real to me. I live with them for a year or more, these people rattling around inside my head. As a novel progresses, the nature of these characters changes. Events bring different forces to bear and as with ‘real’ people, they react to events in different and often irrational ways. The later stages of a novel are when the process becomes most interesting; for this writer at least.
I’m not an organised writer. I don’t write to a prescribed outline. Mostly, I have a basic idea and run with it. All my novels to date have been written in a chaotic manner. I may have an idea for a beginning or an end mapped out, but even this is subject to change. My first novel started its life many, many years ago. When I finally submitted part of it to publishers and agents, it was still in a state of flux. Hardly surprising that they weren’t rushing to accept me into their world. I went away and did more ‘thinking.’
A complication arose when an early draft won a (fairly) prestigious award for ‘best unpublished novel of 2002’ and a panel of literary worthies offered up fulsome praise. Sadly, the rest of the publishing world took no notice.
In the last year of its pre-publication life that debut novel changed radically. All that thinking bore fruit. The title changed, the ending was different, it shifted from a First Person narrative to Third Person and, most importantly, I stopped taking heed of the opinions of others and wrote ‘my’ book.
I’m a prolific reader and I know what makes books sell well. I set out to write a ‘commercial’ book and that first novel amassed over 100,000 sales on Kindle – in one year – but if I went back to it now, I’d write it in a very different manner. The gestation period of that first novel was a decade or more and I’m a better writer than I was back then. Less self-indulgent, more sure of myself, although, sadly, no better organised. I’ve now written nine books, some sold well, some didn’t, under various names and presently have three writing projects at a reasonably advanced stage. Potential novels with at least 50,000 words ‘in the bank.’ A rational person would decide which one best fitted the needs of the market and cash in on the notoriety that selling shed-loads of books once brought in its wake. Hmm! The problem is: I’m not enthused by these projects. Two are crime fiction. Easily the best examples of the genre I’ve ever written and yet…
My problem is, I’ve been there, done that. Written ‘commercial’ books and somehow managed to find buyers in completely unexpected numbers.
It’s time to move on now. Do something else. I’m writing a travel blog and will possibly expand it into a book. It won’t sell in high numbers, but I can live with that. I’ll enjoy writing it and that’s important. I don’t need to sell books to live. Money doesn’t motivate me. It. Never has. I’ve lived well and survived on very little at different times of my life and been happy at either extreme.
Those ‘real’ characters… Back in the days when I was still deluded enough to submit my work to conventional publishers, I chatted for an hour or so with an Editor at Harper Collins. It was late in the evening and she’d consumed almost as much wine as myself which may explain our inability to find common ground. My unpleasant character, Marcus, left a lingering impression on her. She couldn’t ‘relate’ to him and it was this absence of perceived rationality in his behaviour that would make her unable to recommend the book to her superiors.
She called Marcus a ‘fantasy’ character. Now, I regard the Fantasy genre as a cop-out so I know what she meant. Imagination running unchecked, heedless of reality and operating under a different set of ‘rules’ to reality is the staple diet of a Fantasy novel. I don’t write fantasy and I tried to explain this, without conspicuous success. That Editor had no point of reference for a man like Marcus.
Unlike myself.
‘Men like him, men with no redeeming features, don’t exist,’ she said. She was young, bright, personable and obviously relishing having secured a prestigious job after three years at Cambridge University, but she’d led a sheltered life. Unlike her, I’ve met many people without a single redeeming feature. I’ve sat in rooms with men who were the personification of evil. Talked to them, ate with them, even shared a joke with them. Men who would kill without compunction and never give the matter another thought. Men who would willingly kill a fellow human being for gain and men who killed for their own warped pleasure. No, they’re not common, these unpleasant people, but they certainly exist.
A while ago now I wrote in my blog about a man I called Carl. I met this man many times. On every occasion I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck; just from being in close proximity to a man who was the very personification of evil. Carl was charming, personable, highly intelligent, well read and a good conversationalist. He also lacked any appreciation of right and wrong. Carl terrified me in a way that men who radiated physical danger never had. Men of violence are straightforward. Their threat is strikingly evident and easily rationalised. Men like Carl defy conventional understanding and we fear the unknown, the irrational, to a far greater extent than we fear the thug wielding a pickaxe handle.
The sociopathic characters I create are not directly based on real people. Not in any way, even though I’ve come into close contact with many of their ilk. They exist solely in my mind, but are real in most senses of the word. I know what makes them tick, how they act. I have to as without me they wouldn’t exist. A storyline develops in a constant state of fluidity; governed by the characters that drive it along. How they react to different situations. For the purposes of the story; they’re real people.
I wrote recently about ‘friends who live in the computer’ – cyber-friends – having equal viability with ‘real’ friends. I once had a vast online following, long since departed, and treasured many of my cyber-friends. I enjoyed interacting with them. In the same way, characters in a novel are real for the duration of their existence. They live inside my head and are with me every waking hour. I know them intimately. I know what they think and how they react. They may not exist, but in every other respect they’re ideal companions. A writer with a book at an advanced stage will never experience loneliness!
Gulliver Smith 