Character Assassination
Since my David Good stories are light and entertaining, I need the reader to find the main characters are people they can buy in to. Usually, I don’t have a lot of trouble developing these characters, but occasionally things start to go wrong. In this blog article, I will take a look at a recent experience I have had with this and how at times it left me feeling like I wanted to bump off the troublesome individual.
I love writing about David Good, climbing inside his head and following him wherever he wants to take me. From the very start, I have felt I’ve had a strong, clear grasp on who he is, his motives and foibles. My relationship with him has rarely wavered and it’s hard to see right now how things will ever be any different.
However, Dave does not live in a world of his own. It is his relationships with other people that sits at the heart of the books. Which means that for each book, I always need to develop a number of characters that he can interact with and these too need to have their own appeal to the reader. Fortunately, most of the time these other characters take shape, if not smoothly, then successfully.
But sometimes, it all goes pear-shaped, I find myself at a point where I’ve lost touch with the character. When this happens, I’m stuck, because I simply can’t continue to develop the story without it becoming inconsistent, even plain wrong. When this unwelcome state of affairs happens, I’ve even gone as far as considering character assassination, bumping off the individual concerned and starting over again. Death by delete button.
This happened recently with the third novel in the David Good series. I was about two-thirds of the way through the initial draft when I lost touch with Dave’s chief adversary, a strong-willed woman by the name of Lydia. It all seemed so clear, her motives, her chief characteristics and the inter-play between her and Dave were all there in my head, rolling out beautifully on the page and then, one day, I had to stop. I’d lost touch with her.
In the end, I found a solution and got back inside the head of Lydia. I had been developing an idea for a slightly different ending to the one I’d had in mind for a while and, whilst working this up, things fell back in to place. It was as if I re-established my own relationship with Lydia. That re-modelled ending to the story opened up a line to the woman that I hadn’t previously known.
So, the next time you are reading a book, you might like to consider how close the author might have come to carrying out a character assassination of their own, because I know I won’t be the only author to ‘enjoy’ this kind of experience. I just hope it’s a long time until I go through that again.
For the full version of this post please see http://www.benwesterham.com/a-writers....
Get a free copy of ‘Good Investigations’ here http://www.benwesterham.com/.
Crime fiction with attitude and humour from 1980s London.
I love writing about David Good, climbing inside his head and following him wherever he wants to take me. From the very start, I have felt I’ve had a strong, clear grasp on who he is, his motives and foibles. My relationship with him has rarely wavered and it’s hard to see right now how things will ever be any different.
However, Dave does not live in a world of his own. It is his relationships with other people that sits at the heart of the books. Which means that for each book, I always need to develop a number of characters that he can interact with and these too need to have their own appeal to the reader. Fortunately, most of the time these other characters take shape, if not smoothly, then successfully.
But sometimes, it all goes pear-shaped, I find myself at a point where I’ve lost touch with the character. When this happens, I’m stuck, because I simply can’t continue to develop the story without it becoming inconsistent, even plain wrong. When this unwelcome state of affairs happens, I’ve even gone as far as considering character assassination, bumping off the individual concerned and starting over again. Death by delete button.
This happened recently with the third novel in the David Good series. I was about two-thirds of the way through the initial draft when I lost touch with Dave’s chief adversary, a strong-willed woman by the name of Lydia. It all seemed so clear, her motives, her chief characteristics and the inter-play between her and Dave were all there in my head, rolling out beautifully on the page and then, one day, I had to stop. I’d lost touch with her.
In the end, I found a solution and got back inside the head of Lydia. I had been developing an idea for a slightly different ending to the one I’d had in mind for a while and, whilst working this up, things fell back in to place. It was as if I re-established my own relationship with Lydia. That re-modelled ending to the story opened up a line to the woman that I hadn’t previously known.
So, the next time you are reading a book, you might like to consider how close the author might have come to carrying out a character assassination of their own, because I know I won’t be the only author to ‘enjoy’ this kind of experience. I just hope it’s a long time until I go through that again.
For the full version of this post please see http://www.benwesterham.com/a-writers....
Get a free copy of ‘Good Investigations’ here http://www.benwesterham.com/.
Crime fiction with attitude and humour from 1980s London.
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