Scott Carter's Blog, page 2
October 14, 2013
Barrett Fuller's Secret - Goodreads Giveaway
Barrett Fuller's Secret Giveaway on Goodreads from October 11- November 8th - 5 copies. See Barrett Fuller's Secret Goodreads page for details.
October 12, 2013
Scott Carter - Proust Questionnaire - Open Book Toronto
The Proust Questionnaire, with Scott Carter
Barrett Fuller is a womanizer. A boozer. A drug user. What many people don't know though, is that he's also the man behind an incredibly successful (and necessarily pseudonymous) series of children's books. Someone though, has found out his secret — and decided it is time for him to live up to the morals he espouses in his books. Or else.
So opens Scott Carter's aptly titled new novel, Barrett Fuller's Secret (Dundurn). Barrett's adventures takes a turn when he finds himself spending time with his nephew, who also seems to have a secret.
Scott, who is also a screenwriter and whose films have played at festivals across North America, joins us today to tackle the Proust Questionnaire. In his answers, Scott tells Open Book about how he's going to use his eight hundred months, one very young up-and-coming artist and reading The Road as a dad.
The Proust Questionnaire was not invented by Marcel Proust, but it was a much loved game by the French author and many of his contemporaries. The idea behind the questionnaire is that the answers are supposed to reveal the respondent's "true" nature.
_________________________________
What is your dream of happiness?
Balance. Putting time into my wife, kids and friendships while still having time to pursue my passions.
What is your idea of misery?
My mother used to ask me what I was going to do with my eight hundred months as a way of shaking me up as a teenager, so I’d say on a personal level, my idea of misery would be not making the most of my time on the planet.
Where would you like to live?
Where I do now. I love Toronto. But having just visited Paris, that would be fun too.
What qualities do you admire most in a man?
Loyalty. To himself, his partner, his family, friends and passions. It’s a tricky one to get right.
What qualities do you admire most in a woman?
Loyalty. To herself, her partner, her family, friends and passions. It’s a tricky one to get right for all people.
What is your chief characteristic?
That’s likely best answered by anyone but me, but I’ll say passion. I wake up excited and feel that way about most things I do until the day’s done.
What is your principal fault?
Obsessing. For example, I decided not to eat candy a long time ago, and my wife thinks I’m a fool to be so absolute.
What is your greatest extravagance?
My penchant for eating out. I love restaurants.
What faults in others are you most tolerant of?
Self-indulgence.
What do you value most about your friends?
Conversation. Talking to my friends is one of my favourite things to do. I love stories. Hearing them and telling them, and my friends are incredible storytellers with strong opinions and I’m grateful for that daily.
What characteristic do you dislike most in others?
Racism. It’s intolerable and toxic.
What characteristic do you dislike most in yourself?
The tendency to think existentially at the expense of embracing the moment.
What is your favourite virtue?
Generosity. I’ve never understood, supported or sympathized with being cheap. It’s a high blower.
What is your favourite occupation?
I’m lucky enough to have two. Teaching and writing. Never had a bad day doing either.
What would you like to be?
Someone who enriches the lives of people I have relationships with.
What is your favourite colour?
Whatever one my four-year-old daughter is into most at the time. I’m a terrible artist, she appears to have talent and she gets me to see colours in a different way when we draw or paint together.
What is your favourite flower?
Purple lilacs. We have a great tree in the backyard and it’s quickly linking a lot of wonderful memories.
What is your favourite bird?
Hawks. I love the way they hover.
What historical figure do you admire most?
Malcolm X. One, because my mother got me to read his biography when I was young so there’s a connection to her and what drew her to him, and two, because he had the courage to admit he was wrong and recalibrate his methods. I’m guilty of tunnel vision at times, so I hold that message close as a reminder.
What character in history do you most dislike?
I took a course on the American South during university and read a book about a man named Joshua John Ward, who was the largest American slave holder with over a thousand slaves on his plantation. He was a bad man in every way and I remember disliking everything I read about him and how he lived his life.
Who are your favourite prose authors?
There are so many and it changes, but recently, Glen Duncan, Joyce Carol Oates, Craig Davidson, Daniel Woodrell and Patrick De Witt have been blowing my mind.
Who are your heroes in fiction?
Now that I have two kids, the dad in The Road tops the list. I loved the book when I first read it and wasn’t a parent, but reading it with the love of my children flowing through me was potent. It really is incredible just how perfectly he nailed the parent/child dynamic.
Who are your heroes in real life?
I look up to my wife, Keri’s magic. She just gets things right and is always graceful. I’m lucky to have one moment a year as cool as the ones she produces on a regular basis.
Who is your favourite painter?
I don’t know much about painters, but I saw a painting in Italy this summer of a tiger fighting a lion in the Coliseum and in a museum full of art, my daughter and I stared at it for a long time. So I’ll go with the creator of that one.
Who is your favourite musician?
It changes all the time. Recently, I’ve been listening to a lot by a composer named John Murphy. He’s famous for a lot of soundtracks. The Chromatics, Little Dragon, Nas and Daft Punk have also been in steady rotation.
What is your favourite food?
I love seafood, so I’ll say seafood risotto because then I get a bit of everything from the sea.
What is your favourite drink?
Green tea.
What are your favourite names?
Keri, Harlow and Clive. I had a barbecue recently. A small gathering with like ten people and there were two Chris’ two Scotts and two Matts present, and I realized I prefer the less ordinary names.
What is it you most dislike?
Discrimination. Life is difficult enough without the ignorance.
What natural talent would you most like to possess?
Being more musical would be fun.
How do you want to die?
With the warmth of my wife and children.
What is your current state of mind?
Grateful.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Having children with my wife. It’s the only thing that’s lived up to the hype. Money is comforting and reaching goals is satisfying but children are transformative and ambient in a way that is beautiful and to create life with someone you are so close to is an incredible experience.
What is your motto?
My mother drilled into me when I was young that you are getting better or you are getting worse every day but you are never staying the same. She challenged me not to strive for comfort and to accept that each day you are a better or worse husband, father, teacher, writer, friend etc than the day before and to use that reality to push for as many great moments as possible. She was big on trying to make the ordinary extraordinary and I like that.
Scott Carter is an author and screenwriter. His first short film debuted at the Exploding Cinema Film Festival in Los Angeles. Since then his films have played in festivals across North America and his script The Unspoken Promise was written for Bravo! Television. His first novel was the critically acclaimed Blind Luck. Carter is a Toronto native who still lives in the city.
Barrett Fuller is a womanizer. A boozer. A drug user. What many people don't know though, is that he's also the man behind an incredibly successful (and necessarily pseudonymous) series of children's books. Someone though, has found out his secret — and decided it is time for him to live up to the morals he espouses in his books. Or else.
So opens Scott Carter's aptly titled new novel, Barrett Fuller's Secret (Dundurn). Barrett's adventures takes a turn when he finds himself spending time with his nephew, who also seems to have a secret.
Scott, who is also a screenwriter and whose films have played at festivals across North America, joins us today to tackle the Proust Questionnaire. In his answers, Scott tells Open Book about how he's going to use his eight hundred months, one very young up-and-coming artist and reading The Road as a dad.
The Proust Questionnaire was not invented by Marcel Proust, but it was a much loved game by the French author and many of his contemporaries. The idea behind the questionnaire is that the answers are supposed to reveal the respondent's "true" nature.
_________________________________
What is your dream of happiness?
Balance. Putting time into my wife, kids and friendships while still having time to pursue my passions.
What is your idea of misery?
My mother used to ask me what I was going to do with my eight hundred months as a way of shaking me up as a teenager, so I’d say on a personal level, my idea of misery would be not making the most of my time on the planet.
Where would you like to live?
Where I do now. I love Toronto. But having just visited Paris, that would be fun too.
What qualities do you admire most in a man?
Loyalty. To himself, his partner, his family, friends and passions. It’s a tricky one to get right.
What qualities do you admire most in a woman?
Loyalty. To herself, her partner, her family, friends and passions. It’s a tricky one to get right for all people.
What is your chief characteristic?
That’s likely best answered by anyone but me, but I’ll say passion. I wake up excited and feel that way about most things I do until the day’s done.
What is your principal fault?
Obsessing. For example, I decided not to eat candy a long time ago, and my wife thinks I’m a fool to be so absolute.
What is your greatest extravagance?
My penchant for eating out. I love restaurants.
What faults in others are you most tolerant of?
Self-indulgence.
What do you value most about your friends?
Conversation. Talking to my friends is one of my favourite things to do. I love stories. Hearing them and telling them, and my friends are incredible storytellers with strong opinions and I’m grateful for that daily.
What characteristic do you dislike most in others?
Racism. It’s intolerable and toxic.
What characteristic do you dislike most in yourself?
The tendency to think existentially at the expense of embracing the moment.
What is your favourite virtue?
Generosity. I’ve never understood, supported or sympathized with being cheap. It’s a high blower.
What is your favourite occupation?
I’m lucky enough to have two. Teaching and writing. Never had a bad day doing either.
What would you like to be?
Someone who enriches the lives of people I have relationships with.
What is your favourite colour?
Whatever one my four-year-old daughter is into most at the time. I’m a terrible artist, she appears to have talent and she gets me to see colours in a different way when we draw or paint together.
What is your favourite flower?
Purple lilacs. We have a great tree in the backyard and it’s quickly linking a lot of wonderful memories.
What is your favourite bird?
Hawks. I love the way they hover.
What historical figure do you admire most?
Malcolm X. One, because my mother got me to read his biography when I was young so there’s a connection to her and what drew her to him, and two, because he had the courage to admit he was wrong and recalibrate his methods. I’m guilty of tunnel vision at times, so I hold that message close as a reminder.
What character in history do you most dislike?
I took a course on the American South during university and read a book about a man named Joshua John Ward, who was the largest American slave holder with over a thousand slaves on his plantation. He was a bad man in every way and I remember disliking everything I read about him and how he lived his life.
Who are your favourite prose authors?
There are so many and it changes, but recently, Glen Duncan, Joyce Carol Oates, Craig Davidson, Daniel Woodrell and Patrick De Witt have been blowing my mind.
Who are your heroes in fiction?
Now that I have two kids, the dad in The Road tops the list. I loved the book when I first read it and wasn’t a parent, but reading it with the love of my children flowing through me was potent. It really is incredible just how perfectly he nailed the parent/child dynamic.
Who are your heroes in real life?
I look up to my wife, Keri’s magic. She just gets things right and is always graceful. I’m lucky to have one moment a year as cool as the ones she produces on a regular basis.
Who is your favourite painter?
I don’t know much about painters, but I saw a painting in Italy this summer of a tiger fighting a lion in the Coliseum and in a museum full of art, my daughter and I stared at it for a long time. So I’ll go with the creator of that one.
Who is your favourite musician?
It changes all the time. Recently, I’ve been listening to a lot by a composer named John Murphy. He’s famous for a lot of soundtracks. The Chromatics, Little Dragon, Nas and Daft Punk have also been in steady rotation.
What is your favourite food?
I love seafood, so I’ll say seafood risotto because then I get a bit of everything from the sea.
What is your favourite drink?
Green tea.
What are your favourite names?
Keri, Harlow and Clive. I had a barbecue recently. A small gathering with like ten people and there were two Chris’ two Scotts and two Matts present, and I realized I prefer the less ordinary names.
What is it you most dislike?
Discrimination. Life is difficult enough without the ignorance.
What natural talent would you most like to possess?
Being more musical would be fun.
How do you want to die?
With the warmth of my wife and children.
What is your current state of mind?
Grateful.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Having children with my wife. It’s the only thing that’s lived up to the hype. Money is comforting and reaching goals is satisfying but children are transformative and ambient in a way that is beautiful and to create life with someone you are so close to is an incredible experience.
What is your motto?
My mother drilled into me when I was young that you are getting better or you are getting worse every day but you are never staying the same. She challenged me not to strive for comfort and to accept that each day you are a better or worse husband, father, teacher, writer, friend etc than the day before and to use that reality to push for as many great moments as possible. She was big on trying to make the ordinary extraordinary and I like that.
Scott Carter is an author and screenwriter. His first short film debuted at the Exploding Cinema Film Festival in Los Angeles. Since then his films have played in festivals across North America and his script The Unspoken Promise was written for Bravo! Television. His first novel was the critically acclaimed Blind Luck. Carter is a Toronto native who still lives in the city.
October 5, 2013
Globe and Mail Review of Barrett Fuller's Secret
Margaret Cannon
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Oct. 04 2013, 4:00 PM EDT
Barrett Fuller’s Secret, by Scott Carte (Dundurn, 272 pages, $19.99)
How much of him/herself does a writer put into a story? In the case of famed children’s author Barrett Fuller, extremely little. So little, in fact, that he writes under a pseudonym so that fans (and their parents) won’t know he’s a narcissistic womanizer with a serious drug problem. Then one day, someone discovers his secret and sends him a letter: Live up to your imaginary morality or else … This is the terrific premise of Scott Carter’s second novel and it’s even better than Blind Luck, his excellent debut.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Oct. 04 2013, 4:00 PM EDT
Barrett Fuller’s Secret, by Scott Carte (Dundurn, 272 pages, $19.99)
How much of him/herself does a writer put into a story? In the case of famed children’s author Barrett Fuller, extremely little. So little, in fact, that he writes under a pseudonym so that fans (and their parents) won’t know he’s a narcissistic womanizer with a serious drug problem. Then one day, someone discovers his secret and sends him a letter: Live up to your imaginary morality or else … This is the terrific premise of Scott Carter’s second novel and it’s even better than Blind Luck, his excellent debut.
September 24, 2013
The Myth of the Hard-drinking Writer
Here's my second piece for the National Post's Afterword on "The Myth of the Hard-drinking Writer"
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/09/...
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/09/...
September 23, 2013
Guest Editor at National Post's Afterword
I'll be guest editing at the National Post's Afterword all week. Check out the first essay, "Can you dislike the author and love the book?" at:
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/09/...
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/09/...
September 21, 2013
Winnipeg Free Press Review of Barrett Fuller's Secret
Hilarious tale of caddish children's author
Reviewed by: Elizabeth Hopkins
Barrett Fuller's Secret
By Scott Carter Dundurn Canada,
272 pages, $22
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts...
Have you ever wondered about the people who write children's books? Surely they must be kind, gentle and trustworthy souls, and certainly not narcissistic, substance-abusing and philandering cads.
If you hold the former opinion, you've yet to be introduced to the 38-year-old title character in Torontonian Scott Carter's second novel.
Carter's absorbing followup to his 2010 debut, Blind Luck, is the hilarious and suspenseful story of Barrett Fuller, whose bestselling "Mil Bennett" series he has written under a pseudonym, for obvious reasons.
If anyone were to learn of his actual nature ("immature, irresponsible and inane"), his true proclivities would end his popularity, not to mention deplete his wealth.
Barrett values his money above all else, and being blackmailed would be his nightmare.
Then the nightmare comes true. Anonymous children begin delivering extortion letters to his walled mansion gates, threatening to destroy both his career and his fortune should he fail to comply with their demands, termed "opportunities."
They require him to atone for his wantonness and gluttony by donating to children's organizations or selling of some of his properties, for instance.
Carter depicts Barrett's Mils Bennett series, by the way, as being as popular as the Harry Potter books (although Carter never mentions Potter by name).
Barrett's series consists of modern fables of sorts. Each story offers a moral, and he's being blackmailed because of the contradiction between his books and the way he lives.
The kids are just the delivery people, an important point, because all the letters threaten to expose his caddishness, of which the kids are unaware. The kids are paid to do it by someone who knows Barrett personally.
Carter endows his story with depth in the characters of Barrett's younger sister, Carol, a graphic designer whose financial situation is a tad different from her brother's, and her 11-year-old son, Richard.
Richard's father is a minor character, who, thorough a rollicking set of circumstances, has been ejected from the family. Naturally, Barrett has neither stayed in contact with Carol, nor given her any financial support throughout the years.
Over the course of Carter's surprisingly exciting and evocative tale, relationships among Carol, Richard and Barrett acquire meaning, though, initially, not through Barrett's free will.
Unsurprisingly, Richard is one of the millions of Mil Bennett fans. Not revealing his true nature is one way that Barrett maintains his distance from everyone, except for those who provide him with money or pleasure.
Carter again does a wonderful job of creating a well-imagined character in Richard. The relationship between the sensitive, thoughtful boy and his reluctant uncle reveals aspects of Barrett's character long ago suppressed or denied.
The question is whether the companionable relationship between Barrett and Richard will be enough to change the man.
Barrett Fuller's secret may be that he actually is the decent, responsible and reliable sort of children's novelist, or it may be that his mansion walls simply are what they appear to be, and not a way to keep meaning, trust and hurt at bay.
Elizabeth Hopkins is a Winnipeg writer and, unfortunately, not an evil, famous and rich one.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 21, 2013 A1
Reviewed by: Elizabeth Hopkins
Barrett Fuller's Secret
By Scott Carter Dundurn Canada,
272 pages, $22
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts...
Have you ever wondered about the people who write children's books? Surely they must be kind, gentle and trustworthy souls, and certainly not narcissistic, substance-abusing and philandering cads.
If you hold the former opinion, you've yet to be introduced to the 38-year-old title character in Torontonian Scott Carter's second novel.
Carter's absorbing followup to his 2010 debut, Blind Luck, is the hilarious and suspenseful story of Barrett Fuller, whose bestselling "Mil Bennett" series he has written under a pseudonym, for obvious reasons.
If anyone were to learn of his actual nature ("immature, irresponsible and inane"), his true proclivities would end his popularity, not to mention deplete his wealth.
Barrett values his money above all else, and being blackmailed would be his nightmare.
Then the nightmare comes true. Anonymous children begin delivering extortion letters to his walled mansion gates, threatening to destroy both his career and his fortune should he fail to comply with their demands, termed "opportunities."
They require him to atone for his wantonness and gluttony by donating to children's organizations or selling of some of his properties, for instance.
Carter depicts Barrett's Mils Bennett series, by the way, as being as popular as the Harry Potter books (although Carter never mentions Potter by name).
Barrett's series consists of modern fables of sorts. Each story offers a moral, and he's being blackmailed because of the contradiction between his books and the way he lives.
The kids are just the delivery people, an important point, because all the letters threaten to expose his caddishness, of which the kids are unaware. The kids are paid to do it by someone who knows Barrett personally.
Carter endows his story with depth in the characters of Barrett's younger sister, Carol, a graphic designer whose financial situation is a tad different from her brother's, and her 11-year-old son, Richard.
Richard's father is a minor character, who, thorough a rollicking set of circumstances, has been ejected from the family. Naturally, Barrett has neither stayed in contact with Carol, nor given her any financial support throughout the years.
Over the course of Carter's surprisingly exciting and evocative tale, relationships among Carol, Richard and Barrett acquire meaning, though, initially, not through Barrett's free will.
Unsurprisingly, Richard is one of the millions of Mil Bennett fans. Not revealing his true nature is one way that Barrett maintains his distance from everyone, except for those who provide him with money or pleasure.
Carter again does a wonderful job of creating a well-imagined character in Richard. The relationship between the sensitive, thoughtful boy and his reluctant uncle reveals aspects of Barrett's character long ago suppressed or denied.
The question is whether the companionable relationship between Barrett and Richard will be enough to change the man.
Barrett Fuller's secret may be that he actually is the decent, responsible and reliable sort of children's novelist, or it may be that his mansion walls simply are what they appear to be, and not a way to keep meaning, trust and hurt at bay.
Elizabeth Hopkins is a Winnipeg writer and, unfortunately, not an evil, famous and rich one.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 21, 2013 A1
September 16, 2013
Open Book Toronto - Fiction Craft
http://www.openbookontario.com/news/f...
FICTION CRAFT BY SHAUN SMITH, ET AL
Submitted by shaunsmith on September 12, 2013 - 9:12pm
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Inner Views
With: Paul Blackwell, Krista Bridge, Scott Carter, Craig Davidson, Brian Fawcett, Meaghan McIsaac, Mary Novik, Noami Ragen, Richard Scarsbrook, Brad Smith, Ian Thornton, Elizabeth Wein, and Lucie Wilk
This month for Fiction Craft, I asked a group of authors the question: What methods do you use to get into the mindset of your characters?
I’ll freely admit that around this I happily take the low road. I have never done anything “extreme” like sleeping in a jail cell or climbing a giant oak tree (as have two of my characters) to get into the minds of my characters. I’m willing to entertain the idea that my characters might be better drawn if I did such things, but then I look at the great science fiction and fantasy novels. Novels like Ender’s Game – about a boy being trained to lead an attack against an alien race – or Watership Down – about the life of a warren of rabbits - afforded their authors no opportunity for experiential research, yet both are infused with brilliant characterizations. If I had more time, I might do more experiential research, but I suspect it would become a distraction – a reason not to write. And I always try to push things that get in the way of writing out of the way. So to get into the mindsets of my characters, I might do a little reading on what it is like to be, say, a prison inmate or a teenage girl, but I’d eventually let my imagination take over. No one’s experience of the world is the same, yet people are all very similar at certain levels. What’s important to me is that the characters have integrity. I do like creating exceptional characters, and I don’t think there is a way to research being exceptional. So to render characters, in general, I draw on my own experiences and imagine how my characters might react to the specific pressures that I put on them. And if I have set their moral compasses right, they will eventually tell me who they are and show me what they must, specifically, do that is exceptional. This is where they usually prove themselves to be better (or worse) than an average Joe like me. Beyond this, if I discover I need to know something practical about a character, I research it as I write, but I try to never let such research impede the writing.
Now let’s find out how some other authors get inside their characters’ heads.
Paul Blackwell is author of the novel Undercurrent. He lives in Montreal, QC.
Authors are a bit like magicians, I like to think. And as such, getting into characters’ minds and bringing them to life is our best trick. But it’s really more about disappearing than anything else. Readers want to believe in a story, not in its author. So we have to hide, not just in the shadows, but completely out of sight.
This vanishing act is the most elusive part of the fiction-writing process, I believe. You first need to loosen your grip on the story enough to let your characters surprise you, which of course is really just you surprising yourself. This means letting go of all your precious plotting and other busy work. Then, seeing the world through the eyes of your character feels like part meditation, part astral projection. Or like a terrible self-inflicted case of multiple personality disorder. It depends.
I like it best when things feel totally out of control, like I’m just a stenographer trying to keep up with everything that’s happening. That’s when I start having the most fun. Once the characters take charge, you no longer feel the burden of having to invent everything. Then it’s all about the typing, and I type pretty fast.
I must confess to otherwise having no other earthly idea how it’s done; my method is to just work and work until I fall into the necessary trance. To get to this state however, I first have to pass through a great deal of misery, frustration, and uncertainty. That part never varies. But then one day I’ll wake up and it’s as if the characters have filled the pages themselves. I then have only the foggiest memory of having ever been involved. That’s when I know I’ve sufficiently disappeared. Poof, I’m gone! Just like a magician.
Krista Bridge is author of the novel The Eliot Girls and the short-fiction collection The Virgin Spy. She lives in Toronto, ON.
Learning about your characters and who they are is a long process of discovery. There isn’t a concrete process I follow, but there are certain things I do that help me uncover the full picture of my characters. When my writing is going well, I feel that I’m learning about the characters rather than dictating the terms of their existence. Describing what characters look like helps me see them as real people. Their physical appearances—features, clothing, comportment—become a reflection of their internal traits. A character who has long messy hair she never brushes is going to be quite different than one with a tidy blonde bob. I also tend to write a lot of backstory that never makes it into the final product—although I don’t necessarily realize while I’m writing that it won’t outlast the edits. It’s useful to write significant events in that character’s life, things that have happened in the recent past or maybe longer ago in the character’s childhood. These interludes of backstory might be as long as thirty pages or as short as three, and they might or might not have any bearing on what’s happening in the book, but they add to the character’s history and therefore his or her reality in my mind. I also tend to imagine (often while I’m not actually trying to write—I’ll be out walking my dog or taking a shower or looking after my kids) a conversation that character might have with another in the novel. I jot those conversation bits on a piece of paper, and even if I never use them, they help solidify that character further.
When I sit down to write, I get into the character’s mindset by reading through the most recent sections I’ve written for that character. I try to end each day’s writing with notes for what’s to come in the next few paragraphs—it’s much easier to pick up in the middle of a scene or a conversation than to start entirely fresh on a new section. When I’m really struggling, I’ll often pick up a book—either the one I’m reading at the moment or one I admire—and I’ll read for a little while. I often find that once I’ve done that for a bit, my mind flips over into my own book. Sometimes you have to stop trying to think in order to think.
Scott Carter is author of the novels Barrett Fuller’s Secret and Blind Luck. He lives in Toronto, ON.
I love this question because characterization is the most important part of novels for me. Both as a reader and writer. I root for people, admire people, dislike people and am fascinated by people, so if the texture and detailing of a character isn’t compelling I start thinking about other things.
For me, dialogue is the pillar of a character’s mindset. If I know how they sound, what their verbal ticks are and whether they are on or off rhythm in a conversation then I’ve reached full control of their ideology. So I’ll often start by writing scenes with just dialogue until the character’s next thought flows.
Second for me in creating a character is putting careful thought into the motivation. If you know what drives a character, that will be an organic guide to whether you are being truthful to a person with the mindset you have created. And that’s paramount. Nothing shuts a reader down faster than contrived.
The next step is visualization. Having spent a lot of time writing scripts this is natural for me at this point, but I recommend it for anyone. If you can’t picture every detail of the character you are working on, keep developing the character.
Visualization flows naturally into details. What music does the character listen to? How do they dress? What are their tastes in film? Any question you can ask is useful. I know many authors keep character journals that answer all the questions they can think of. I don’t work that way, but what I’m suggesting is the same idea, so whether you keep it in your head or write these details down, they will lead you to a character’s mindset.
Craig Davidson is the author of the novels Cataract City and The Fighter, and the short-story collection Rust and Bone. He lives in Toronto, ON.
For the most part, I find that my characters' mindsets often mimic my own. I'm generally interested in presenting conflicted but compassionate individuals, people who are flawed but somehow aware of their shortcomings, fighting mightily against those flaws while sometimes (often?) failing to quite surmount their inborn emotional directives.
So I try to think: What would I (or someone, maybe a friend who is very much like me) do in these situations? And frequently, depending on the physical or emotional crucible I've put that character in, well, the response isn't the right one. Or not quite. It may be right in that moment, it may be necessary even, but the repercussions of that act in that bubble of time can be dire. And that character has to live with it, and the damage it incurs.
Personally, I always get a little ticked when someone says, in conversation: If that was ME, I'd have never done that. To me, that requires a deep sense of yourself—a sense that nobody really possesses until you're put in a position that test what you perceive to be your innate goodness or reasonableness or compassion, whatever. My feeling is: I don't know how I'll react when I'm really up against it. Will I do the right thing? Or will I do 70 percent of the right thing, even, and will that lingering 30% haunt me or have repercussions I couldn't possibly imagine? I think people set themselves up to be shocked and disappointed in themselves when they're so sure of their hypothetical response to stressors. Because really, how well do any of us know ourselves? We hold this picture of ourselves and hope to pass through life never having to grapple with or confront the ways in which we may fail that image.
So, long story short, that's the general mindset of my characters: they try mightily to do good but are constantly fearful they may do wrong (or have somehow, awfully, already done wrong), either accidentally or by steering against their best intentions in that critical moment.
Unless I'm writing a sociopath. That requires different methods altogether ... but that's another story, for another time.
Brian Fawcett is the author of numerous books of non-fiction and the new novel The Last of the Lumbermen. He lives in Toronto, ON.
All characters in fiction are partly based on real-world people writers have encountered, and partly projections of the author her/ or himself. To suggest that a writer gets into a character's mindset as if that character is autonomous has always struck me as creative-writing school malarkey. I could tell you where every single character in my fiction comes from if I had a gun stuck in my ear, and so can most intelligent writers. But very few writers will reveal the sources of their fictional characters with any candour, because there are nearly always issues of discretion involved, and sometimes legal and other risks are involved. When I wrote about things I learned while working in maximum security prisons, for example, I ran what I'd written about past the real world people I'd depicted, even though I'd changed names and altered physical appearances. Occasionally I'd have to make changes, too, sometimes because I'd inadvertently risked their safety by being too literal. That said, I try to invent as little as I can, because when I do that, I'm all alone inside my own imagination, and that is the place where I'm most likely to get things badly wrong. This quote from Joseph Conrad explains why better than I can:
“All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is -- marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state.” - The Shadow Line (1920)
Meaghan McIsaac is author of the novel Urgle. She lives in Toronto, ON.
This answer may seem silly, or uninspiring, but its the result of a lot of my own careful thinking. I was nervous to answer this because all I could think was, what the heck do I know? I've read all the standard advice -- read everything you can get your hands on, make sure you know your world (historical? Futuristic? Fantastic?) inside and out, etc. But that’s for writing in general. Getting into the head of a character? That’s a special thing that happens between two minds – your’s, and your character's. And I think it's different for everyone.
So, how do I get into the mindset of my characters? Boredom.
I know how that sounds, but after careful consideration I've come to realize it's the truth for me. You know how when you were a kid, you'd be coming up with make-believe games -- you'd BE a Power Ranger and sock your brother when you were tired of watching Power Rangers. Why? Because you can only watch so many episodes before you're bored and want to do something else.
The same holds true now. When I'm bored, I come up with something more exciting to do which usually involves being someone else in a land far away. On the commute to work, tossing a ball to my dog at the park, waiting for a football game to end so I can watch what I like -- this is when me and a new character get really well acquainted. Eventually, they take on a life of their own and all I can do is ride along with them.
And all this is well and good for initially finding a character, but what happens when you're halfway through the story and you've hit a wall and you're so sick of your character that you don't even know if you can keep going?
Simple. Get bored. Quick.
Go for a long walk, take a train ride to go see your parents, clean the fridge -- don't bring an ipod, or anything else that might fend off boredom. Just a notepad. Now think. Just let your mind go wherever it has to go and eventually, you and your character will get back to getting along because when you're bored, all you've got is each other.
Mary Novik is author of the novels Muse and Conceit. She lives in Vancouver, BC.
Getting into the mind of a literary character is a gradual process, just as it is with real people. My biggest wow moment in my understanding of Solange Le Blanc in Muse came when I was on the secret tour of the popes’ palace in Avignon. I stared at the bare walls of a basement chamber trying to imagine the décor of the Pope’s bathing room as the guide was describing it. Then she led the way up a narrow corkscrew staircase—the only one that climbs six floors to the roof of the palace—and we emerged in the Pope’s bedchamber, with its decorated walls. Next to it was the even finer room where Pope Clement VI slept, with its magnificent frescoes of a stag hunt, hawking, fishing, gathering fruit, and the other secular pleasures of a seigneur. This room has always puzzled historians. Why did the Pope have such pagan art on his walls?
The main feature of the Stag Room was the Pope’s bed where, in medieval fashion, he sat to receive important guests. Although the bed is long gone, it was shorter than normal because he slept upright in case Christ arrived to claim him in the night. However, nothing else about this room was theological. Reports of luxurious bed hangings—crimson velvet and green taffeta—rival the tales of lavish banquets in the palace. The Avignon Pope lived more like a king than the spiritual leader of the Christian church.
I wondered what went on in this bedchamber in the 14th century. What would my character Solange have felt the first time she was brought here? I decided that a woman who had ascended so many stairs would realize that although the Pope was an immensely powerful man, he was also carnal and emotionally needy. Exhilarated by her own power over him, she would embrace the opportunity to become Pope Clement VI’s favourite, the most influential woman in Avignon.
Noami Ragen is author of numerous novels, including The Sisters Weiss, The Tenth Song and The Saturday Wife, as well as the play Women’s Minyan. She lives in Jerusalem, Israel.
When I first began writing fiction, what was most difficult was dialogue. It always sounded so stiff and unreal, and the speakers never came alive as human beings.
To counter this, I began to listen to conversations in restaurants and buses between strangers, taking copious notes. I realized that spoken language provides a rare and invaluable insight into who a person is: his/her level of education, interests, character.
I also understood that if I didn’t put my “thumb on the scale” and demand characters behave as conveniently as possible to push my plot forward; if I simply listened to them they--quite shockingly I might add-- began to speak to me, and then all I needed to do was take down dictation.
However, I also learned that when you allow a character to behave anyway they please, surprising things happen. For example, in my novel Sotah, based on a newspaper account of an adulterous affair between ultra-Orthodox married neighbors, the cuckolded husband was described as a boring loser. Perfect for my plot. However, when I tried to write him that way, he refused to cooperate. Listening to him, I found that he was devoted, kind, creative, and loving. I simply fell in love with him. This left me in a real pickle plot-wise.
I considered throwing out what the character was telling me and rewriting a more convenient husband, but then I stopped. I went with the truth of what I was hearing, and in the end the plot became richer, deeper, and more interesting. The relationship took on its own life, nothing like the one in the newspaper saga.
Here was a young, bored, innocent girl in an arranged marriage who couldn’t see or appreciate the goodness in the loving man she had married until she experienced the betrayal of a man who was his opposite.
The book stayed on the bestseller list for 93 weeks.
Richard Scarsbrook is author of the novels Nothing Man and the Purple Zero, Cheeseburger Subversive, Fearless Bipeds and The Monkeyface Chronicles. He lives in Toronto, ON.
In introducing a character in the context of a story, I try to use as many of my senses as I can when creating an image of a character, much like one does when describing a place or creating a setting. An author doesn’t have to show the reader everything about a character; the important part is picking the right details of appearance, mannerisms, actions, and speech that best capture the uniqueness of a particular individual.
Once you have established some kind of physical presence for your character, and the reader has an image of the character that they can relate to, then it’s time for the more important task of making the character a believable human being (or an alien being, or zombie, or biplane-flying beagle, or whatever).
What a character looks like, dresses like, moves like, sounds like, and even smells like is important initially, but what the character SAYS (and how they say it!) and what the character DOES (and how they do it) are the most critical elements in developing a real understanding of any given character.
What people DO and SAY is what they ARE (at least at the moment that they are doing it and/or saying it). As a writer, understanding what motivates a person to do what they do, good or bad, and being aware of this motivation as you write about them, will make what the character does seem more real.
The most important thing to remember when you are creating a character is this: BE THERE with the character. If your character is experiencing bereavement, disappointment, heartbreak, or some other form of sadness, tears should be welling up in your eyes as you write the scene in which they feel this way. If something funny is happening to the character, you should be laughing as you write.
You should have a clear picture in your mind of places and people you are writing about as you write about them; but, even better, try to INHABIT your characters as they move through the situations you’ve created for them. If you are THERE with your characters within the framework of your story, chances are that your readers will be there too.
So. . . What characters DO, and what they SAY, is what they ARE.
And. . . BE THERE with your characters as you write them.
And. . . PRESTO! Your readers will care about your characters, and will want to know what happens to them.
Brad Smith is author of numerous novels, including Shoot the Dog, Crow’s Landing, All Hat and Busted Flush. He lives in Ontario near the north shore of Lake Erie.
When writing a novel, I’m a big proponent of developing background for characters, and not just the main characters. I will do this knowing full well that ninety per cent of that background will never make it into the book. The history, once I have it, informs me who that person is – where he came from and why he behaves as he does. If a man is a nasty prick, I want to know what went on in his life to make him that. Was he abandoned at an early age, beaten by a drunken uncle, raised by rabid skunks? People don’t arrive fully formed, and it’s the molding that is sometimes more interesting than the finished product.
Motivation is also important. Everyone has a reason for doing what they do – no matter how small or trite the action might be. A man ties his shoes so he doesn’t trip. A woman applies make-up because she cares about her appearance. Conversely, a woman may eschew make-up because she doesn’t care, or perhaps she cares more about something else at that particular moment. There are few unconscious actions in life and little things matter when writing. Lives are made up of mundane moments and – like it or not – most people have feet of clay. I prefer to write about ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. After all, without the Civil War, Abe Lincoln would have been just another president.
Ian Thornton is author of the novel The Great & Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms. He lives in Toronto, ON.
We are all natural mimics to a degree. One needs to channel these abilities. Some, the lucky ones, write from a swaggering confident stance of being able to impersonate physically and verbally; some have an inferiority complex and pick up on others' mannerisms, speech emphasis, dialect and tics in order to (consciously or subconsciously) seek approval or to minimise their own differences. Well-versed natural mimics manage to get into the mindset of their characters so very easily. It is what they are doing naturally each and every day anyway whenever they converse or interact with someone. It is second nature to them. And because they can often find fun in this process, it can make for very entertaining writing. The shackles are off, and when one stops worrying about the minutiae and the small errors, interesting and ambitious thoughts run amok, as they should be encouraged to do, while being minimally aware of boring old 'discipline.' It is easier to edge back later in editing.
The blissed out and altered states achieved by Byron, Shelley and Jim Morrison may have produced great writing, but for most mere mortals, it is not advised, unless the character whose mindset one is aiming to replicate is an utter degenerate. It would probably explain how Bruce Robinson awoke with his face wedged into the keys on his battered typewriter, surrounded by broken glass, empty bottles of fine wine, precipitously steeped ashtrays, and crucially, the first fifty pages of his Withnailian masterpiece. I would suggest, in most cases, not to try this at home. Though it might be fun to try once when the kids are in bed.
Being mildly schizophrenic (or even better quadrophenic) can certainly help. Have different characters inhabit different areas of your brain. This part of writing really is the equivalent of playing chess against oneself, or perhaps is simply an extension of sitting in front of a mirror in an empty room, and pulling faces and speaking in strange voices. Are these the actions of a normal person? I think madness is an absolutely key element within a lot of writers anyway; we have to be so to even consider, in the first place, that complete strangers (never mind close friends) might be interested in what we have to say. Fully embracing and proudly and overtly celebrating a psychosis of some sorts certainly adds a solid armour of confidence that is required to tackle and complete such a daunting and often ridiculously delusional task as writing a novel. This is all the more necessary when one has to enter the head of a fictional character and to then ask him or her to act, speak, walk, love, kill, fuck, eat an ice-cream cone, plant a small tree, play a slide trombone. If one is timid about one's oddness, it must be so much more of a difficult process. Maybe impossible. Perhaps it is the Englishman in me, for we are nothing if not a nation of mild to vicious eccentrics. We are shoulders back, chest out and chin up about it. But it is a Greek, whose words I would recommend recalling; those of Aristotle. "No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness."
Elizabeth Wein is author of numerous works of fiction including the novels Rose Under Fire, Code Name Verity and The Lion Hunters: The Arthurian/Aksumite Cycle. She lives in Scotland.
I am afraid this is all a bit mysterious. There is sorcery in it.
From a very early age – from two or three – I pretended I was other people, and they were people in books. Little Bear, Madeline, and Mary Frances from The Mary Frances Cookbook were my heroes. But I didn’t just admire them—I became these characters. If you called me “Elizabeth” when I was being Mary Frances, I would correct you. I thought their thoughts.
This pleasure in “pretending” to be other people lies behind all my fictional characters. When I am involved in writing a novel, in my head I really do become those characters; I think their thoughts. This isn’t a method that I’ve developed; it’s something I’ve been doing throughout my life. Verity, the title character of Code Name Verity, also does this—I used my own experience in creating her, though in Verity’s case her “pretending” leads her to take on different identities as a spy rather than creating characters on a page.
It’s my main way of getting in the head of my major characters, but to a certain extent I also use it to get inside the head of supporting characters. It is pretty characteristic of my writing that I am incapable of creating a straightforward villain. This is because I always end up trying to put myself into their heads to find out what drives them. And then I discover that they are protecting their family, or they’re jealous of someone, or they’re scared of failure.
For Rose Under Fire, I gave the title character a Pennsylvania Dutch background very similar to my own, which made it easy for me to reference her past. I just altered a few place names and used my own familiar landscape to define Rose’s. Not only did this give Rose’s life a very distinct cultural flavour, but it helped me to colour Rose’s narrative with specific and individual details.
Here are a few things I do as exercises to get into my characters’ heads:
* I act out scenes (when no one is looking!)
* I improvise conversations, aloud, between characters (when no one is listening!)
* I draw my characters. This is something I did all the time up to about five years ago; I’m not sure why I stopped, but I kind of miss it. Drawing my characters helped to fix them in my head and was also a productive thing to do if I found myself stuck in a patch of writer’s block.
* I visit scenes and settings appropriate to the book. An airfield, a hill fort, a windy beach, a castle dungeon, a train station, a ferry boat—putting yourself in your character’s shoes is a great way to get inside his or her head. I also find I have epiphanies about character motivation if I actually visit a setting (or something like it) for my story.
* And finally – I touch things. I try to find objects that my characters might have used or seen or held—little things, like an appropriate coin, a compass, a handkerchief, a key, a button, a shell. Touching things helps to ground me and to create a kind of shadowy reality for my character – sympathetic magic, making the imaginary character more real by linking him or her to a real object.
Lucie Wilk is author of the novel The Strength of Bone. She lives in London, UK.
I create “what if” situations and try to imagine how my character would react to them. I’m grateful if this reaction is different to my own reaction: this means the character lives and breathes independently from me.
I allow a personal history to develop for each character: what was her childhood like? Her parents? Any siblings? Any challenges faced growing up? Any traumas endured? This usually informs her take on any situation encountered during the course of the story.
I give them space. Sometimes I find characters, like real people, need space to develop their own personalities. I often find that my original point of view character gets a bit stifled by me constantly occupying their mind. They don’t have a chance to grow into their own. Often this contrasts strikingly with the supporting characters who have been allowed to do their own thing--be a bit naughty or nasty, take risks, develop bad habits. Part way through the story I often notice that these are the characters who are suddenly much more interesting, and who are more fallible and real. And then I hop into their mind and go along for the ride.
I try to be empathetic. Day to day as I live in the world, I often try to position myself in others’ points of view, try to imagine how they are feeling, seeing a situation, reacting to someone else’s actions, how their personal history might be colouring their experience. Imagining the world from others’ perspective in the real world helps me imagine it in the world of the story.
I try to imagine the character’s reaction to his environment: his physical surroundings (Would he notice the rug? Or the reminders up on the fridge? Would he hate or love the music being played?) Their reactions to their immediate environment helps me get to know them better.
Above all, I just keep writing. Only by hanging out with the characters on the page can they grow into themselves, become increasingly well-defined, vivid, opinionated. I have to spend time with them to see their true and unique colours.
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SHAUN SMITH is a novelist and award-winning journalist in Toronto, Canada. His young-adult novel Snakes & Ladders was published in 2009 by the Dundurn Group. His book Magical Narcissism: Selected Writings on Books, Writers, Food, and Chefs was published by Tightrope Books in June 2013. shaunsmith.ca
FICTION CRAFT BY SHAUN SMITH, ET AL
Submitted by shaunsmith on September 12, 2013 - 9:12pm
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Inner Views
With: Paul Blackwell, Krista Bridge, Scott Carter, Craig Davidson, Brian Fawcett, Meaghan McIsaac, Mary Novik, Noami Ragen, Richard Scarsbrook, Brad Smith, Ian Thornton, Elizabeth Wein, and Lucie Wilk
This month for Fiction Craft, I asked a group of authors the question: What methods do you use to get into the mindset of your characters?
I’ll freely admit that around this I happily take the low road. I have never done anything “extreme” like sleeping in a jail cell or climbing a giant oak tree (as have two of my characters) to get into the minds of my characters. I’m willing to entertain the idea that my characters might be better drawn if I did such things, but then I look at the great science fiction and fantasy novels. Novels like Ender’s Game – about a boy being trained to lead an attack against an alien race – or Watership Down – about the life of a warren of rabbits - afforded their authors no opportunity for experiential research, yet both are infused with brilliant characterizations. If I had more time, I might do more experiential research, but I suspect it would become a distraction – a reason not to write. And I always try to push things that get in the way of writing out of the way. So to get into the mindsets of my characters, I might do a little reading on what it is like to be, say, a prison inmate or a teenage girl, but I’d eventually let my imagination take over. No one’s experience of the world is the same, yet people are all very similar at certain levels. What’s important to me is that the characters have integrity. I do like creating exceptional characters, and I don’t think there is a way to research being exceptional. So to render characters, in general, I draw on my own experiences and imagine how my characters might react to the specific pressures that I put on them. And if I have set their moral compasses right, they will eventually tell me who they are and show me what they must, specifically, do that is exceptional. This is where they usually prove themselves to be better (or worse) than an average Joe like me. Beyond this, if I discover I need to know something practical about a character, I research it as I write, but I try to never let such research impede the writing.
Now let’s find out how some other authors get inside their characters’ heads.
Paul Blackwell is author of the novel Undercurrent. He lives in Montreal, QC.
Authors are a bit like magicians, I like to think. And as such, getting into characters’ minds and bringing them to life is our best trick. But it’s really more about disappearing than anything else. Readers want to believe in a story, not in its author. So we have to hide, not just in the shadows, but completely out of sight.
This vanishing act is the most elusive part of the fiction-writing process, I believe. You first need to loosen your grip on the story enough to let your characters surprise you, which of course is really just you surprising yourself. This means letting go of all your precious plotting and other busy work. Then, seeing the world through the eyes of your character feels like part meditation, part astral projection. Or like a terrible self-inflicted case of multiple personality disorder. It depends.
I like it best when things feel totally out of control, like I’m just a stenographer trying to keep up with everything that’s happening. That’s when I start having the most fun. Once the characters take charge, you no longer feel the burden of having to invent everything. Then it’s all about the typing, and I type pretty fast.
I must confess to otherwise having no other earthly idea how it’s done; my method is to just work and work until I fall into the necessary trance. To get to this state however, I first have to pass through a great deal of misery, frustration, and uncertainty. That part never varies. But then one day I’ll wake up and it’s as if the characters have filled the pages themselves. I then have only the foggiest memory of having ever been involved. That’s when I know I’ve sufficiently disappeared. Poof, I’m gone! Just like a magician.
Krista Bridge is author of the novel The Eliot Girls and the short-fiction collection The Virgin Spy. She lives in Toronto, ON.
Learning about your characters and who they are is a long process of discovery. There isn’t a concrete process I follow, but there are certain things I do that help me uncover the full picture of my characters. When my writing is going well, I feel that I’m learning about the characters rather than dictating the terms of their existence. Describing what characters look like helps me see them as real people. Their physical appearances—features, clothing, comportment—become a reflection of their internal traits. A character who has long messy hair she never brushes is going to be quite different than one with a tidy blonde bob. I also tend to write a lot of backstory that never makes it into the final product—although I don’t necessarily realize while I’m writing that it won’t outlast the edits. It’s useful to write significant events in that character’s life, things that have happened in the recent past or maybe longer ago in the character’s childhood. These interludes of backstory might be as long as thirty pages or as short as three, and they might or might not have any bearing on what’s happening in the book, but they add to the character’s history and therefore his or her reality in my mind. I also tend to imagine (often while I’m not actually trying to write—I’ll be out walking my dog or taking a shower or looking after my kids) a conversation that character might have with another in the novel. I jot those conversation bits on a piece of paper, and even if I never use them, they help solidify that character further.
When I sit down to write, I get into the character’s mindset by reading through the most recent sections I’ve written for that character. I try to end each day’s writing with notes for what’s to come in the next few paragraphs—it’s much easier to pick up in the middle of a scene or a conversation than to start entirely fresh on a new section. When I’m really struggling, I’ll often pick up a book—either the one I’m reading at the moment or one I admire—and I’ll read for a little while. I often find that once I’ve done that for a bit, my mind flips over into my own book. Sometimes you have to stop trying to think in order to think.
Scott Carter is author of the novels Barrett Fuller’s Secret and Blind Luck. He lives in Toronto, ON.
I love this question because characterization is the most important part of novels for me. Both as a reader and writer. I root for people, admire people, dislike people and am fascinated by people, so if the texture and detailing of a character isn’t compelling I start thinking about other things.
For me, dialogue is the pillar of a character’s mindset. If I know how they sound, what their verbal ticks are and whether they are on or off rhythm in a conversation then I’ve reached full control of their ideology. So I’ll often start by writing scenes with just dialogue until the character’s next thought flows.
Second for me in creating a character is putting careful thought into the motivation. If you know what drives a character, that will be an organic guide to whether you are being truthful to a person with the mindset you have created. And that’s paramount. Nothing shuts a reader down faster than contrived.
The next step is visualization. Having spent a lot of time writing scripts this is natural for me at this point, but I recommend it for anyone. If you can’t picture every detail of the character you are working on, keep developing the character.
Visualization flows naturally into details. What music does the character listen to? How do they dress? What are their tastes in film? Any question you can ask is useful. I know many authors keep character journals that answer all the questions they can think of. I don’t work that way, but what I’m suggesting is the same idea, so whether you keep it in your head or write these details down, they will lead you to a character’s mindset.
Craig Davidson is the author of the novels Cataract City and The Fighter, and the short-story collection Rust and Bone. He lives in Toronto, ON.
For the most part, I find that my characters' mindsets often mimic my own. I'm generally interested in presenting conflicted but compassionate individuals, people who are flawed but somehow aware of their shortcomings, fighting mightily against those flaws while sometimes (often?) failing to quite surmount their inborn emotional directives.
So I try to think: What would I (or someone, maybe a friend who is very much like me) do in these situations? And frequently, depending on the physical or emotional crucible I've put that character in, well, the response isn't the right one. Or not quite. It may be right in that moment, it may be necessary even, but the repercussions of that act in that bubble of time can be dire. And that character has to live with it, and the damage it incurs.
Personally, I always get a little ticked when someone says, in conversation: If that was ME, I'd have never done that. To me, that requires a deep sense of yourself—a sense that nobody really possesses until you're put in a position that test what you perceive to be your innate goodness or reasonableness or compassion, whatever. My feeling is: I don't know how I'll react when I'm really up against it. Will I do the right thing? Or will I do 70 percent of the right thing, even, and will that lingering 30% haunt me or have repercussions I couldn't possibly imagine? I think people set themselves up to be shocked and disappointed in themselves when they're so sure of their hypothetical response to stressors. Because really, how well do any of us know ourselves? We hold this picture of ourselves and hope to pass through life never having to grapple with or confront the ways in which we may fail that image.
So, long story short, that's the general mindset of my characters: they try mightily to do good but are constantly fearful they may do wrong (or have somehow, awfully, already done wrong), either accidentally or by steering against their best intentions in that critical moment.
Unless I'm writing a sociopath. That requires different methods altogether ... but that's another story, for another time.
Brian Fawcett is the author of numerous books of non-fiction and the new novel The Last of the Lumbermen. He lives in Toronto, ON.
All characters in fiction are partly based on real-world people writers have encountered, and partly projections of the author her/ or himself. To suggest that a writer gets into a character's mindset as if that character is autonomous has always struck me as creative-writing school malarkey. I could tell you where every single character in my fiction comes from if I had a gun stuck in my ear, and so can most intelligent writers. But very few writers will reveal the sources of their fictional characters with any candour, because there are nearly always issues of discretion involved, and sometimes legal and other risks are involved. When I wrote about things I learned while working in maximum security prisons, for example, I ran what I'd written about past the real world people I'd depicted, even though I'd changed names and altered physical appearances. Occasionally I'd have to make changes, too, sometimes because I'd inadvertently risked their safety by being too literal. That said, I try to invent as little as I can, because when I do that, I'm all alone inside my own imagination, and that is the place where I'm most likely to get things badly wrong. This quote from Joseph Conrad explains why better than I can:
“All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is -- marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state.” - The Shadow Line (1920)
Meaghan McIsaac is author of the novel Urgle. She lives in Toronto, ON.
This answer may seem silly, or uninspiring, but its the result of a lot of my own careful thinking. I was nervous to answer this because all I could think was, what the heck do I know? I've read all the standard advice -- read everything you can get your hands on, make sure you know your world (historical? Futuristic? Fantastic?) inside and out, etc. But that’s for writing in general. Getting into the head of a character? That’s a special thing that happens between two minds – your’s, and your character's. And I think it's different for everyone.
So, how do I get into the mindset of my characters? Boredom.
I know how that sounds, but after careful consideration I've come to realize it's the truth for me. You know how when you were a kid, you'd be coming up with make-believe games -- you'd BE a Power Ranger and sock your brother when you were tired of watching Power Rangers. Why? Because you can only watch so many episodes before you're bored and want to do something else.
The same holds true now. When I'm bored, I come up with something more exciting to do which usually involves being someone else in a land far away. On the commute to work, tossing a ball to my dog at the park, waiting for a football game to end so I can watch what I like -- this is when me and a new character get really well acquainted. Eventually, they take on a life of their own and all I can do is ride along with them.
And all this is well and good for initially finding a character, but what happens when you're halfway through the story and you've hit a wall and you're so sick of your character that you don't even know if you can keep going?
Simple. Get bored. Quick.
Go for a long walk, take a train ride to go see your parents, clean the fridge -- don't bring an ipod, or anything else that might fend off boredom. Just a notepad. Now think. Just let your mind go wherever it has to go and eventually, you and your character will get back to getting along because when you're bored, all you've got is each other.
Mary Novik is author of the novels Muse and Conceit. She lives in Vancouver, BC.
Getting into the mind of a literary character is a gradual process, just as it is with real people. My biggest wow moment in my understanding of Solange Le Blanc in Muse came when I was on the secret tour of the popes’ palace in Avignon. I stared at the bare walls of a basement chamber trying to imagine the décor of the Pope’s bathing room as the guide was describing it. Then she led the way up a narrow corkscrew staircase—the only one that climbs six floors to the roof of the palace—and we emerged in the Pope’s bedchamber, with its decorated walls. Next to it was the even finer room where Pope Clement VI slept, with its magnificent frescoes of a stag hunt, hawking, fishing, gathering fruit, and the other secular pleasures of a seigneur. This room has always puzzled historians. Why did the Pope have such pagan art on his walls?
The main feature of the Stag Room was the Pope’s bed where, in medieval fashion, he sat to receive important guests. Although the bed is long gone, it was shorter than normal because he slept upright in case Christ arrived to claim him in the night. However, nothing else about this room was theological. Reports of luxurious bed hangings—crimson velvet and green taffeta—rival the tales of lavish banquets in the palace. The Avignon Pope lived more like a king than the spiritual leader of the Christian church.
I wondered what went on in this bedchamber in the 14th century. What would my character Solange have felt the first time she was brought here? I decided that a woman who had ascended so many stairs would realize that although the Pope was an immensely powerful man, he was also carnal and emotionally needy. Exhilarated by her own power over him, she would embrace the opportunity to become Pope Clement VI’s favourite, the most influential woman in Avignon.
Noami Ragen is author of numerous novels, including The Sisters Weiss, The Tenth Song and The Saturday Wife, as well as the play Women’s Minyan. She lives in Jerusalem, Israel.
When I first began writing fiction, what was most difficult was dialogue. It always sounded so stiff and unreal, and the speakers never came alive as human beings.
To counter this, I began to listen to conversations in restaurants and buses between strangers, taking copious notes. I realized that spoken language provides a rare and invaluable insight into who a person is: his/her level of education, interests, character.
I also understood that if I didn’t put my “thumb on the scale” and demand characters behave as conveniently as possible to push my plot forward; if I simply listened to them they--quite shockingly I might add-- began to speak to me, and then all I needed to do was take down dictation.
However, I also learned that when you allow a character to behave anyway they please, surprising things happen. For example, in my novel Sotah, based on a newspaper account of an adulterous affair between ultra-Orthodox married neighbors, the cuckolded husband was described as a boring loser. Perfect for my plot. However, when I tried to write him that way, he refused to cooperate. Listening to him, I found that he was devoted, kind, creative, and loving. I simply fell in love with him. This left me in a real pickle plot-wise.
I considered throwing out what the character was telling me and rewriting a more convenient husband, but then I stopped. I went with the truth of what I was hearing, and in the end the plot became richer, deeper, and more interesting. The relationship took on its own life, nothing like the one in the newspaper saga.
Here was a young, bored, innocent girl in an arranged marriage who couldn’t see or appreciate the goodness in the loving man she had married until she experienced the betrayal of a man who was his opposite.
The book stayed on the bestseller list for 93 weeks.
Richard Scarsbrook is author of the novels Nothing Man and the Purple Zero, Cheeseburger Subversive, Fearless Bipeds and The Monkeyface Chronicles. He lives in Toronto, ON.
In introducing a character in the context of a story, I try to use as many of my senses as I can when creating an image of a character, much like one does when describing a place or creating a setting. An author doesn’t have to show the reader everything about a character; the important part is picking the right details of appearance, mannerisms, actions, and speech that best capture the uniqueness of a particular individual.
Once you have established some kind of physical presence for your character, and the reader has an image of the character that they can relate to, then it’s time for the more important task of making the character a believable human being (or an alien being, or zombie, or biplane-flying beagle, or whatever).
What a character looks like, dresses like, moves like, sounds like, and even smells like is important initially, but what the character SAYS (and how they say it!) and what the character DOES (and how they do it) are the most critical elements in developing a real understanding of any given character.
What people DO and SAY is what they ARE (at least at the moment that they are doing it and/or saying it). As a writer, understanding what motivates a person to do what they do, good or bad, and being aware of this motivation as you write about them, will make what the character does seem more real.
The most important thing to remember when you are creating a character is this: BE THERE with the character. If your character is experiencing bereavement, disappointment, heartbreak, or some other form of sadness, tears should be welling up in your eyes as you write the scene in which they feel this way. If something funny is happening to the character, you should be laughing as you write.
You should have a clear picture in your mind of places and people you are writing about as you write about them; but, even better, try to INHABIT your characters as they move through the situations you’ve created for them. If you are THERE with your characters within the framework of your story, chances are that your readers will be there too.
So. . . What characters DO, and what they SAY, is what they ARE.
And. . . BE THERE with your characters as you write them.
And. . . PRESTO! Your readers will care about your characters, and will want to know what happens to them.
Brad Smith is author of numerous novels, including Shoot the Dog, Crow’s Landing, All Hat and Busted Flush. He lives in Ontario near the north shore of Lake Erie.
When writing a novel, I’m a big proponent of developing background for characters, and not just the main characters. I will do this knowing full well that ninety per cent of that background will never make it into the book. The history, once I have it, informs me who that person is – where he came from and why he behaves as he does. If a man is a nasty prick, I want to know what went on in his life to make him that. Was he abandoned at an early age, beaten by a drunken uncle, raised by rabid skunks? People don’t arrive fully formed, and it’s the molding that is sometimes more interesting than the finished product.
Motivation is also important. Everyone has a reason for doing what they do – no matter how small or trite the action might be. A man ties his shoes so he doesn’t trip. A woman applies make-up because she cares about her appearance. Conversely, a woman may eschew make-up because she doesn’t care, or perhaps she cares more about something else at that particular moment. There are few unconscious actions in life and little things matter when writing. Lives are made up of mundane moments and – like it or not – most people have feet of clay. I prefer to write about ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. After all, without the Civil War, Abe Lincoln would have been just another president.
Ian Thornton is author of the novel The Great & Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms. He lives in Toronto, ON.
We are all natural mimics to a degree. One needs to channel these abilities. Some, the lucky ones, write from a swaggering confident stance of being able to impersonate physically and verbally; some have an inferiority complex and pick up on others' mannerisms, speech emphasis, dialect and tics in order to (consciously or subconsciously) seek approval or to minimise their own differences. Well-versed natural mimics manage to get into the mindset of their characters so very easily. It is what they are doing naturally each and every day anyway whenever they converse or interact with someone. It is second nature to them. And because they can often find fun in this process, it can make for very entertaining writing. The shackles are off, and when one stops worrying about the minutiae and the small errors, interesting and ambitious thoughts run amok, as they should be encouraged to do, while being minimally aware of boring old 'discipline.' It is easier to edge back later in editing.
The blissed out and altered states achieved by Byron, Shelley and Jim Morrison may have produced great writing, but for most mere mortals, it is not advised, unless the character whose mindset one is aiming to replicate is an utter degenerate. It would probably explain how Bruce Robinson awoke with his face wedged into the keys on his battered typewriter, surrounded by broken glass, empty bottles of fine wine, precipitously steeped ashtrays, and crucially, the first fifty pages of his Withnailian masterpiece. I would suggest, in most cases, not to try this at home. Though it might be fun to try once when the kids are in bed.
Being mildly schizophrenic (or even better quadrophenic) can certainly help. Have different characters inhabit different areas of your brain. This part of writing really is the equivalent of playing chess against oneself, or perhaps is simply an extension of sitting in front of a mirror in an empty room, and pulling faces and speaking in strange voices. Are these the actions of a normal person? I think madness is an absolutely key element within a lot of writers anyway; we have to be so to even consider, in the first place, that complete strangers (never mind close friends) might be interested in what we have to say. Fully embracing and proudly and overtly celebrating a psychosis of some sorts certainly adds a solid armour of confidence that is required to tackle and complete such a daunting and often ridiculously delusional task as writing a novel. This is all the more necessary when one has to enter the head of a fictional character and to then ask him or her to act, speak, walk, love, kill, fuck, eat an ice-cream cone, plant a small tree, play a slide trombone. If one is timid about one's oddness, it must be so much more of a difficult process. Maybe impossible. Perhaps it is the Englishman in me, for we are nothing if not a nation of mild to vicious eccentrics. We are shoulders back, chest out and chin up about it. But it is a Greek, whose words I would recommend recalling; those of Aristotle. "No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness."
Elizabeth Wein is author of numerous works of fiction including the novels Rose Under Fire, Code Name Verity and The Lion Hunters: The Arthurian/Aksumite Cycle. She lives in Scotland.
I am afraid this is all a bit mysterious. There is sorcery in it.
From a very early age – from two or three – I pretended I was other people, and they were people in books. Little Bear, Madeline, and Mary Frances from The Mary Frances Cookbook were my heroes. But I didn’t just admire them—I became these characters. If you called me “Elizabeth” when I was being Mary Frances, I would correct you. I thought their thoughts.
This pleasure in “pretending” to be other people lies behind all my fictional characters. When I am involved in writing a novel, in my head I really do become those characters; I think their thoughts. This isn’t a method that I’ve developed; it’s something I’ve been doing throughout my life. Verity, the title character of Code Name Verity, also does this—I used my own experience in creating her, though in Verity’s case her “pretending” leads her to take on different identities as a spy rather than creating characters on a page.
It’s my main way of getting in the head of my major characters, but to a certain extent I also use it to get inside the head of supporting characters. It is pretty characteristic of my writing that I am incapable of creating a straightforward villain. This is because I always end up trying to put myself into their heads to find out what drives them. And then I discover that they are protecting their family, or they’re jealous of someone, or they’re scared of failure.
For Rose Under Fire, I gave the title character a Pennsylvania Dutch background very similar to my own, which made it easy for me to reference her past. I just altered a few place names and used my own familiar landscape to define Rose’s. Not only did this give Rose’s life a very distinct cultural flavour, but it helped me to colour Rose’s narrative with specific and individual details.
Here are a few things I do as exercises to get into my characters’ heads:
* I act out scenes (when no one is looking!)
* I improvise conversations, aloud, between characters (when no one is listening!)
* I draw my characters. This is something I did all the time up to about five years ago; I’m not sure why I stopped, but I kind of miss it. Drawing my characters helped to fix them in my head and was also a productive thing to do if I found myself stuck in a patch of writer’s block.
* I visit scenes and settings appropriate to the book. An airfield, a hill fort, a windy beach, a castle dungeon, a train station, a ferry boat—putting yourself in your character’s shoes is a great way to get inside his or her head. I also find I have epiphanies about character motivation if I actually visit a setting (or something like it) for my story.
* And finally – I touch things. I try to find objects that my characters might have used or seen or held—little things, like an appropriate coin, a compass, a handkerchief, a key, a button, a shell. Touching things helps to ground me and to create a kind of shadowy reality for my character – sympathetic magic, making the imaginary character more real by linking him or her to a real object.
Lucie Wilk is author of the novel The Strength of Bone. She lives in London, UK.
I create “what if” situations and try to imagine how my character would react to them. I’m grateful if this reaction is different to my own reaction: this means the character lives and breathes independently from me.
I allow a personal history to develop for each character: what was her childhood like? Her parents? Any siblings? Any challenges faced growing up? Any traumas endured? This usually informs her take on any situation encountered during the course of the story.
I give them space. Sometimes I find characters, like real people, need space to develop their own personalities. I often find that my original point of view character gets a bit stifled by me constantly occupying their mind. They don’t have a chance to grow into their own. Often this contrasts strikingly with the supporting characters who have been allowed to do their own thing--be a bit naughty or nasty, take risks, develop bad habits. Part way through the story I often notice that these are the characters who are suddenly much more interesting, and who are more fallible and real. And then I hop into their mind and go along for the ride.
I try to be empathetic. Day to day as I live in the world, I often try to position myself in others’ points of view, try to imagine how they are feeling, seeing a situation, reacting to someone else’s actions, how their personal history might be colouring their experience. Imagining the world from others’ perspective in the real world helps me imagine it in the world of the story.
I try to imagine the character’s reaction to his environment: his physical surroundings (Would he notice the rug? Or the reminders up on the fridge? Would he hate or love the music being played?) Their reactions to their immediate environment helps me get to know them better.
Above all, I just keep writing. Only by hanging out with the characters on the page can they grow into themselves, become increasingly well-defined, vivid, opinionated. I have to spend time with them to see their true and unique colours.
--
SHAUN SMITH is a novelist and award-winning journalist in Toronto, Canada. His young-adult novel Snakes & Ladders was published in 2009 by the Dundurn Group. His book Magical Narcissism: Selected Writings on Books, Writers, Food, and Chefs was published by Tightrope Books in June 2013. shaunsmith.ca
September 9, 2013
Toronto Quarterly Interview - Scott Carter
http://thetorontoquarterly.blogspot.c...
Scott Carter - Barrett Fuller's Secret (an interview)
Interview:
TTQ – What inspired you to start writing and who were some of your early influences or mentors?
Scott Carter – I’ve loved writing since I was a kid. It’s what I gravitated to throughout school, but professionally, I started thinking about contributing a verse during university. I was reading all the time, volunteering at a radio station so I was deep into lyrics, and watching all the movies I could, and I became obsessed with words and expression. I remember thinking that writing felt like the perfect mix of the thrill of entertainment and the importance of enlightenment, and so I started writing my own stuff. Some really bad stuff for while, and then gradually really average stuff, and then a few pieces that were accepted to campus papers.
As far as influences, almost everything I read and a lot of what I watched gave me a spark during university. When I took a swing at doing this professionally, Jack David at ECW Press was a wonderful mentor during my time there as an intern. I knew nothing about the industry and he was kind enough to let me behind the scenes, research and spend time with veteran authors, and observe how books reach publication from both a creative and business perspective. It surprises people when I tell them how important understanding the business end of the journey is as a writer but the time I spent at ECW all those years ago really was the catalyst for my professional writing.
TTQ – How did get you involved with film-making and tell me about some of your short films, and how natural was the evolution of being a screenwriter and now a novelist?
Scott Carter – A childhood friend of mine had just finished film school and was looking to make his first professional short. We wanted to work together, so he dug a short story I had recently published and so I adapted that into a short film. That short, “The Proposition Cheat”, played in numerous festivals and won an award, and that generated interest in feature-scripts, gave me the credibility to receive grant money, and lead to more shorts and more festivals and it flowed from there. My favourite short is one we made for Bravo! called “The Unspoken Promise”. It’s a poetic narrative set to jazz about a father trying to help his son navigate life. And then I had a number of feature-length films receive funding from Telefilm and Astral Media that never reached the screen for a variety of reasons. The development of movies is a slow-roast and things such as not being able to secure the right director for a project, disagreement about where the project should go creatively, and changes in funding administration are routine in the pursuit of getting films made. But everything I’ve written in that world has been worth the time. The collaborative nature of film and the flexibility and ability to re-write under tight time constraints are invaluable lessons for a writer, and have proven to be very useful when I write novels.
As far as the evolution from screenwriter to novelist, I was writing and publishing short fiction while working on scripts, so I was developing the skills required for the nuances of each genre simultaneously. And they feed each other. Ultimately, writing is writing and the more you do it in any genre, the stronger those neurological pathways become. Words come faster, ideas flow better and I see the flaws more clearly than when I become precious about one project.
TTQ – How would you best describe your second novel Barrett Fuller's Secret (Dundurn Press, 2013), and tell me about the genesis behind the storyline and the Barrett Fuller character?
Scott Carter – Barrett Fuller is a best-selling children’s author, who writes under a pseudonym because he is a pig of a man. His life changes when he receives a letter demanding that he live up to the morals he espouses in his books or be outed as the morally corrupt man behind the pseudonym.
The project started as an idea for a movie and the tone of Barrett’s character was clear to me from the beginning, but when I decided to write it as a novel the story expanded. Prose gives the author control over details that you rely on other people for in film, and I really enjoyed writing about his nuances. The secret aspect is fun, but the most intriguing part for me was asking, how is this man who is a walking Id that will choose debauchery over reason every time able to captivate children so effectively? It’s a compelling contradiction, so exploring that irony and what makes a man in his moral state so good at what he does really drove the creation of his character.
TTQ – Barrett Fuller enjoys writing at the beach where he is relaxed enough to do the emotional mining that writers do. Where do you find inspiration and how do you go about doing the emotional mining that writers do?
Scott Carter – The enjoyment of creation is the inspiration, and then reading, watching movies and listening to music feeds the whole process. As far as emotional mining, instrumentals are a must for me. Not while I’m writing, but before to take me into the vibe of whatever I’m hoping to conjour. It has to be instrumentals though, because while I love lyrics, they make me a passive consumer of the song, instead of triggering an emotional response.
TTQ – What kind of things were you better able to understand about yourself or society in general after writing Barrett Fuller's Secret?
Scott Carter – So many things. The dangers of excess, the beauty of kids, the importance of balance, the value of creation, and ultimately the idea that one’s relationships should trump everything. Having a four-year old and one-year-old, I’m definitely on the pulse of how kids affect change. They are humbling, inspiring and ambient in a way nothing else can be.
TTQ – How arduous was the editing process for the novel, and who helped you get through that process and how important was their input in completing it?
Scott Carter – My editor, Allister Thompson, who I was lucky enough to have edit my first novel as well, is a master at what he does, so it wasn’t arduous at all. There were rewrites and tightening of bolts, but he has this wonderful way of making me want to do it, and I can tell you having worked with numerous story editors in film over the years and many editors in various literary journals that it’s not always the case. What he’s great at is pushing the material to be the best it can be instead of trying to insert his creative vision on the project. That’s likely always tempting as an editor in any genre, but I never feel that with him. And that trust allows me to focus on the important part, which is writing better where necessary.
TTQ – What message do you hope your readers will take away with them after reading Barrett Fuller's Secret?
Scott Carter – The word message makes me uncomfortable because I want them to take away whatever they’ve experienced while reading, but I will say that I wanted readers to think about the secrets they keep and whether or not their lives would be better if they faced the truth.
TTQ – Do you have aspirations of seeing Barrett Fuller's Secret made into a movie one day and are there currently any talks underway that might see that happen in the near future?
Scott Carter – There are no talks right now as the book isn’t released until the end of September, but as I mentioned, it started as an idea for film, and I do have experience in the industry so I could see it happening. I’ll keep you posted.
TTQ – What words of advice would you give to aspiring writers and filmmakers?
Scott Carter – That while there is no step-by-step process to follow like becoming a lawyer or doctor, there are blueprints. It’s a slow roast, so put in your ten-thousand hours, start by publishing short fiction or making short films to build your credibility and then feed the momentum by making sure you keep creating new product. Consistency over time is a good goal.
TTQ – What’s next for Scott Carter?
Scott Carter – I’m in the early phases of another novel, and I’m loving it. The world of this concept is a bigger canvas than I’ve created before so it’s been fun immersing myself in that headspace.
Posted 9th September by The Toronto Quarterly
Scott Carter - Barrett Fuller's Secret (an interview)
Interview:
TTQ – What inspired you to start writing and who were some of your early influences or mentors?
Scott Carter – I’ve loved writing since I was a kid. It’s what I gravitated to throughout school, but professionally, I started thinking about contributing a verse during university. I was reading all the time, volunteering at a radio station so I was deep into lyrics, and watching all the movies I could, and I became obsessed with words and expression. I remember thinking that writing felt like the perfect mix of the thrill of entertainment and the importance of enlightenment, and so I started writing my own stuff. Some really bad stuff for while, and then gradually really average stuff, and then a few pieces that were accepted to campus papers.
As far as influences, almost everything I read and a lot of what I watched gave me a spark during university. When I took a swing at doing this professionally, Jack David at ECW Press was a wonderful mentor during my time there as an intern. I knew nothing about the industry and he was kind enough to let me behind the scenes, research and spend time with veteran authors, and observe how books reach publication from both a creative and business perspective. It surprises people when I tell them how important understanding the business end of the journey is as a writer but the time I spent at ECW all those years ago really was the catalyst for my professional writing.
TTQ – How did get you involved with film-making and tell me about some of your short films, and how natural was the evolution of being a screenwriter and now a novelist?
Scott Carter – A childhood friend of mine had just finished film school and was looking to make his first professional short. We wanted to work together, so he dug a short story I had recently published and so I adapted that into a short film. That short, “The Proposition Cheat”, played in numerous festivals and won an award, and that generated interest in feature-scripts, gave me the credibility to receive grant money, and lead to more shorts and more festivals and it flowed from there. My favourite short is one we made for Bravo! called “The Unspoken Promise”. It’s a poetic narrative set to jazz about a father trying to help his son navigate life. And then I had a number of feature-length films receive funding from Telefilm and Astral Media that never reached the screen for a variety of reasons. The development of movies is a slow-roast and things such as not being able to secure the right director for a project, disagreement about where the project should go creatively, and changes in funding administration are routine in the pursuit of getting films made. But everything I’ve written in that world has been worth the time. The collaborative nature of film and the flexibility and ability to re-write under tight time constraints are invaluable lessons for a writer, and have proven to be very useful when I write novels.
As far as the evolution from screenwriter to novelist, I was writing and publishing short fiction while working on scripts, so I was developing the skills required for the nuances of each genre simultaneously. And they feed each other. Ultimately, writing is writing and the more you do it in any genre, the stronger those neurological pathways become. Words come faster, ideas flow better and I see the flaws more clearly than when I become precious about one project.
TTQ – How would you best describe your second novel Barrett Fuller's Secret (Dundurn Press, 2013), and tell me about the genesis behind the storyline and the Barrett Fuller character?
Scott Carter – Barrett Fuller is a best-selling children’s author, who writes under a pseudonym because he is a pig of a man. His life changes when he receives a letter demanding that he live up to the morals he espouses in his books or be outed as the morally corrupt man behind the pseudonym.
The project started as an idea for a movie and the tone of Barrett’s character was clear to me from the beginning, but when I decided to write it as a novel the story expanded. Prose gives the author control over details that you rely on other people for in film, and I really enjoyed writing about his nuances. The secret aspect is fun, but the most intriguing part for me was asking, how is this man who is a walking Id that will choose debauchery over reason every time able to captivate children so effectively? It’s a compelling contradiction, so exploring that irony and what makes a man in his moral state so good at what he does really drove the creation of his character.
TTQ – Barrett Fuller enjoys writing at the beach where he is relaxed enough to do the emotional mining that writers do. Where do you find inspiration and how do you go about doing the emotional mining that writers do?
Scott Carter – The enjoyment of creation is the inspiration, and then reading, watching movies and listening to music feeds the whole process. As far as emotional mining, instrumentals are a must for me. Not while I’m writing, but before to take me into the vibe of whatever I’m hoping to conjour. It has to be instrumentals though, because while I love lyrics, they make me a passive consumer of the song, instead of triggering an emotional response.
TTQ – What kind of things were you better able to understand about yourself or society in general after writing Barrett Fuller's Secret?
Scott Carter – So many things. The dangers of excess, the beauty of kids, the importance of balance, the value of creation, and ultimately the idea that one’s relationships should trump everything. Having a four-year old and one-year-old, I’m definitely on the pulse of how kids affect change. They are humbling, inspiring and ambient in a way nothing else can be.
TTQ – How arduous was the editing process for the novel, and who helped you get through that process and how important was their input in completing it?
Scott Carter – My editor, Allister Thompson, who I was lucky enough to have edit my first novel as well, is a master at what he does, so it wasn’t arduous at all. There were rewrites and tightening of bolts, but he has this wonderful way of making me want to do it, and I can tell you having worked with numerous story editors in film over the years and many editors in various literary journals that it’s not always the case. What he’s great at is pushing the material to be the best it can be instead of trying to insert his creative vision on the project. That’s likely always tempting as an editor in any genre, but I never feel that with him. And that trust allows me to focus on the important part, which is writing better where necessary.
TTQ – What message do you hope your readers will take away with them after reading Barrett Fuller's Secret?
Scott Carter – The word message makes me uncomfortable because I want them to take away whatever they’ve experienced while reading, but I will say that I wanted readers to think about the secrets they keep and whether or not their lives would be better if they faced the truth.
TTQ – Do you have aspirations of seeing Barrett Fuller's Secret made into a movie one day and are there currently any talks underway that might see that happen in the near future?
Scott Carter – There are no talks right now as the book isn’t released until the end of September, but as I mentioned, it started as an idea for film, and I do have experience in the industry so I could see it happening. I’ll keep you posted.
TTQ – What words of advice would you give to aspiring writers and filmmakers?
Scott Carter – That while there is no step-by-step process to follow like becoming a lawyer or doctor, there are blueprints. It’s a slow roast, so put in your ten-thousand hours, start by publishing short fiction or making short films to build your credibility and then feed the momentum by making sure you keep creating new product. Consistency over time is a good goal.
TTQ – What’s next for Scott Carter?
Scott Carter – I’m in the early phases of another novel, and I’m loving it. The world of this concept is a bigger canvas than I’ve created before so it’s been fun immersing myself in that headspace.
Posted 9th September by The Toronto Quarterly
August 20, 2013
On Fiction Writing - Barrett Fuller's Secret Review
http://onfictionwriting.com/myspotlig...
Barrett Fuller's Secret
By: Scott Carter Reviewed by OFW editor: Renée Miller
Published: August 10, 2013
From the Cover
Barrett Fuller is a world-famous and very wealthy children's author who writes under a pseudonym because he's a self-absorbed womanizer and drug-user. His life changes when he receives an extortion letter, challenging him to live up to the morals he currently espouses in his books. He is presented with a series of tasks to complete or face having his identity revealed to the public, resulting in the ruin of his financial empire.
Richard Fuller, Barrett's nephew, has a secret too, and it's one no kid should bear. He knows why his father left the family and he's never told his mother.
When the extortionist challenges Barrett to spend time with his nephew, their respective secrets move towards a collision that will change their lives forever
Disclaimer: I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes.
When I read Scott Carter’s first novel, BLIND LUCK, I fell in love with his masterful plotting and fantastic dialogue, but I didn’t think I’d be sucked in quite as fully again, because gone is that pleasant surprise one experiences when discovering a favorite author for the first time.
BARRETT FULLER’S SECRET is a vastly different experience than Carter's debut novel, and I've added brilliant characterization to the things I love about his writing. At first I was more than intrigued by the premise behind this book. In “real life” when authors use pen names or aliases, it’s usually to hide “unsavory” content from folks they know. It’s all about keeping our real world reputation squeaky clean. Porn authors, for example, often use pen names because for most people, finding out your child’s teacher or your doctor wrote something that forced you into a cold shower would result in some shit-losing. This book’s protagonist, bestselling children’s author, Barrett Fuller, is the opposite of the typical author. He uses a pen name to hide the fact that his personal life is unsavory. If anyone knew who he really was, they’d never buy a single book, no matter how well-written. Kind of a sad statement on the reality that readers too often judge books by the author, rather than the writing, but it is what it is.
I knew from the first pages that this would be a fun ride. The character is instantly an asshole and I do love assholes. They have so much potential. The reader is fully drawn in (if you aren’t already) when an anonymous extortionist catches on to Barrett’s secret, and threatens to ruin everything. The “opportunities” Barrett is given to redeem himself begin easily enough. He’s asked to do things like donate money to charity and attend sensitivity training. Then the demands, and their consequences, become more serious. For example, his blackmailer knows that he slept with an underage girl, and warns that if he does not do what is asked to make amends for the crime, the girl will come forward and he faces criminal charges. Later, the demands made by Barrett’s blackmailer force him to look at his life and what he’s made of it. This is pretty tough, considering Barrett has committed all the sins; sex, booze, drugs, deceit and more. I won’t give more detail because I’d be giving away the juicy bits. I’ll just say that Carter doesn’t shy away from making this character unlikeable, but most impressive is that I was engaged and guessing until the “big reveal” of the blackmailer. Also impressive is how Carter wrings every ounce of gut-wrenching tension and heartbreak from the reveal that could possibly be wrung without making it feel hokey.
Now that I’m done rambling, I suppose you’ve guessed I highly recommend reading this book (It will be available in October, 2013) but if you read BLIND LUCK, don’t expect the same experience. While Carter’s easy voice and style are definitely there, where BLIND LUCK was written with smooth prose that lulled you gently along, BARRETT FULLER’S SECRET is gritty, jolting, and the most fun I’ve had reading a novel in a while.
Barrett Fuller's Secret
By: Scott Carter Reviewed by OFW editor: Renée Miller
Published: August 10, 2013
From the Cover
Barrett Fuller is a world-famous and very wealthy children's author who writes under a pseudonym because he's a self-absorbed womanizer and drug-user. His life changes when he receives an extortion letter, challenging him to live up to the morals he currently espouses in his books. He is presented with a series of tasks to complete or face having his identity revealed to the public, resulting in the ruin of his financial empire.
Richard Fuller, Barrett's nephew, has a secret too, and it's one no kid should bear. He knows why his father left the family and he's never told his mother.
When the extortionist challenges Barrett to spend time with his nephew, their respective secrets move towards a collision that will change their lives forever
Disclaimer: I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes.
When I read Scott Carter’s first novel, BLIND LUCK, I fell in love with his masterful plotting and fantastic dialogue, but I didn’t think I’d be sucked in quite as fully again, because gone is that pleasant surprise one experiences when discovering a favorite author for the first time.
BARRETT FULLER’S SECRET is a vastly different experience than Carter's debut novel, and I've added brilliant characterization to the things I love about his writing. At first I was more than intrigued by the premise behind this book. In “real life” when authors use pen names or aliases, it’s usually to hide “unsavory” content from folks they know. It’s all about keeping our real world reputation squeaky clean. Porn authors, for example, often use pen names because for most people, finding out your child’s teacher or your doctor wrote something that forced you into a cold shower would result in some shit-losing. This book’s protagonist, bestselling children’s author, Barrett Fuller, is the opposite of the typical author. He uses a pen name to hide the fact that his personal life is unsavory. If anyone knew who he really was, they’d never buy a single book, no matter how well-written. Kind of a sad statement on the reality that readers too often judge books by the author, rather than the writing, but it is what it is.
I knew from the first pages that this would be a fun ride. The character is instantly an asshole and I do love assholes. They have so much potential. The reader is fully drawn in (if you aren’t already) when an anonymous extortionist catches on to Barrett’s secret, and threatens to ruin everything. The “opportunities” Barrett is given to redeem himself begin easily enough. He’s asked to do things like donate money to charity and attend sensitivity training. Then the demands, and their consequences, become more serious. For example, his blackmailer knows that he slept with an underage girl, and warns that if he does not do what is asked to make amends for the crime, the girl will come forward and he faces criminal charges. Later, the demands made by Barrett’s blackmailer force him to look at his life and what he’s made of it. This is pretty tough, considering Barrett has committed all the sins; sex, booze, drugs, deceit and more. I won’t give more detail because I’d be giving away the juicy bits. I’ll just say that Carter doesn’t shy away from making this character unlikeable, but most impressive is that I was engaged and guessing until the “big reveal” of the blackmailer. Also impressive is how Carter wrings every ounce of gut-wrenching tension and heartbreak from the reveal that could possibly be wrung without making it feel hokey.
Now that I’m done rambling, I suppose you’ve guessed I highly recommend reading this book (It will be available in October, 2013) but if you read BLIND LUCK, don’t expect the same experience. While Carter’s easy voice and style are definitely there, where BLIND LUCK was written with smooth prose that lulled you gently along, BARRETT FULLER’S SECRET is gritty, jolting, and the most fun I’ve had reading a novel in a while.
July 10, 2013
Barrett Fuller's Secret selected for Toronto's Word on the Street - Great Books Marquee
Excited to announce that Barrett Fuller's Secret has been selected for Toronto's Word on the Street in the Great Books of 2013 Marquee. I'll be speaking and answering questions about the novel. I worked this festival as an editorial intern when I was a fresh university graduate, so to come back as an author is fun.
http://www.thewordonthestreet.ca/wots...
http://www.thewordonthestreet.ca/wots...
