New Series! In Conversation with fictional heroes!
Lissa Oliver in Conversation with Marcel Dessaint, the hero of her novel Chantilly Dawns:
Lissa: You were the first star of a novel I ever met, have you any idea why?
Marcel: No idea! I’ve never really thought of myself as heart-throb material, but I seem to come across that way on paper! How old were you at the time?
About 16 or 17. I suppose as a writer, even then I was conscious I could be enjoying your company still in 40 years’ time! Tell us a little bit about yourself and who you are?
I’m currently 26 and, until Chantilly Dawns hit the bookshelves, I was a very successful Flat race jockey based in France. I was lucky enough to get the ride on a good horse in my first season riding, at the age of 16; we won the French Derby and my career took off. I have ridden all over the world, won many of the world’s top races, I’ve been Champion Jockey in France for nine years in a row and I’m the poster-boy for a lot of health and sport-related products.
So how did you cope with suddenly finding yourself at the centre of a drama?
I didn’t. I didn’t cope at all. It was like the only world I’d come to know had vanished overnight and I was back in the place I’d never wanted to return to.
Didn’t you have any idea, the plot awaiting you?
None at all. I’d gone from total lack of self-belief and insecurity as a child, to complete over-confidence, with no learning ground in between. I knew I wasn’t to blame for any of the false accusations, I just swanned in there, to the Enquiry, expecting nothing but a grovelling apology. And I came out without my jockey’s licence, without my career, without my confidence and self-belief. It was life-changing.
Yet you recovered. Was there ever a time when you didn’t think you would?
Yes. Those first few weeks. I had no fight in me; nothing to fight. I did actually believe I was responsible for the malpractice; I wasn’t sure how, but I sensed I was guilty of it all. It wasn’t until I believed in my own innocence that I could fight to prove it. There was the worry then, of course, that I was too late.
Why did you feel guilty, when you must have known you were innocent?
The evidence was piled up against me and I couldn’t disprove it. It wasn’t deliberate, but I had to be responsible. Who else was? I thought I’d just burnt out, lost whatever talent I had as a jockey. It’s a bit like murder or manslaughter, whether intended or not, someone’s still dead. I did feel responsible, that I’d unintentionally done all I’d been accused of.
When you realised it wasn’t you, you must have had suspicions of who it might really have been?
That was probably the hardest part. When it all blew up, I was vilified. Very few people stood by me. I don’t think I would have survived without them. But even so, I found myself having to fight my distrust of even my closest friends. That was hard.
They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. If you manage to get through this, will you still agree with that?
That’s a big if! At this point, we don’t know. But I do already know I’m stronger, without a doubt. I had some demons from my past, I didn’t know they still haunted me, but if this disaster hadn’t come along, something else would have lured them out. I needed to get rid of them, and if nothing else, this new-found fight in me has dealt with that. I’m a changed person, obviously I am. But I hope it’s for the better.
Find out more about Marcel and the accusations that have cost him his career and now threaten his life in Chantilly Dawns
Lissa: You were the first star of a novel I ever met, have you any idea why?
Marcel: No idea! I’ve never really thought of myself as heart-throb material, but I seem to come across that way on paper! How old were you at the time?
About 16 or 17. I suppose as a writer, even then I was conscious I could be enjoying your company still in 40 years’ time! Tell us a little bit about yourself and who you are?
I’m currently 26 and, until Chantilly Dawns hit the bookshelves, I was a very successful Flat race jockey based in France. I was lucky enough to get the ride on a good horse in my first season riding, at the age of 16; we won the French Derby and my career took off. I have ridden all over the world, won many of the world’s top races, I’ve been Champion Jockey in France for nine years in a row and I’m the poster-boy for a lot of health and sport-related products.
So how did you cope with suddenly finding yourself at the centre of a drama?
I didn’t. I didn’t cope at all. It was like the only world I’d come to know had vanished overnight and I was back in the place I’d never wanted to return to.
Didn’t you have any idea, the plot awaiting you?
None at all. I’d gone from total lack of self-belief and insecurity as a child, to complete over-confidence, with no learning ground in between. I knew I wasn’t to blame for any of the false accusations, I just swanned in there, to the Enquiry, expecting nothing but a grovelling apology. And I came out without my jockey’s licence, without my career, without my confidence and self-belief. It was life-changing.
Yet you recovered. Was there ever a time when you didn’t think you would?
Yes. Those first few weeks. I had no fight in me; nothing to fight. I did actually believe I was responsible for the malpractice; I wasn’t sure how, but I sensed I was guilty of it all. It wasn’t until I believed in my own innocence that I could fight to prove it. There was the worry then, of course, that I was too late.
Why did you feel guilty, when you must have known you were innocent?
The evidence was piled up against me and I couldn’t disprove it. It wasn’t deliberate, but I had to be responsible. Who else was? I thought I’d just burnt out, lost whatever talent I had as a jockey. It’s a bit like murder or manslaughter, whether intended or not, someone’s still dead. I did feel responsible, that I’d unintentionally done all I’d been accused of.
When you realised it wasn’t you, you must have had suspicions of who it might really have been?
That was probably the hardest part. When it all blew up, I was vilified. Very few people stood by me. I don’t think I would have survived without them. But even so, I found myself having to fight my distrust of even my closest friends. That was hard.
They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. If you manage to get through this, will you still agree with that?
That’s a big if! At this point, we don’t know. But I do already know I’m stronger, without a doubt. I had some demons from my past, I didn’t know they still haunted me, but if this disaster hadn’t come along, something else would have lured them out. I needed to get rid of them, and if nothing else, this new-found fight in me has dealt with that. I’m a changed person, obviously I am. But I hope it’s for the better.
Find out more about Marcel and the accusations that have cost him his career and now threaten his life in Chantilly Dawns
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message 1:
by
Roy
(new)
Nov 29, 2018 03:38PM
Really like this idea, Lissa. Tempted to try this.
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Excellent Lissa!!! But I'm turning the spot light on you now!! Marcel has a question for Lissa:
Lissa you seem to be very fond of charismatic characters like me, I read your book Nero and I noticed you are from what seems to me almost infatuated with a real life Roman historical character Otho.
So why do you like, it seems to me, charisma so much? As you say I was the poster boy of horseracing. Even so other characters eveh friends were trying to take me down like hunting dogs catching a fox.
In Otho's case he was a young man in Rome who was the epitomy of a man who lives for pleasure and spent much of his time with Nero. Again I can see the charisma you wrote into Otho as a character.
What is it like to discover this charisma in characters such as me, a famous jockey, and the pleasure seeking Otho? How do you take characters like ours, some might find us mundane, and make wonderfully interesting characters which readers can really feel concern for or fascination?
HaHa! Well, it has to be attraction at first, plain and simple. If you are to be in my book, you are going to be in my life for a very long time and I must know you intimately. Therefore, I must WANT to know you intimately. I wouldn't call your life mundane, there's that little bit extra in there that sets you and other heroes and heroines apart, that gives you the strength to survive a thriller and to attract and hold the interest of your readers. As soon as I can identify your weakness, I can also help you find your inner strength. Your weakness is what I will build my plot on, while your strength will shape the outcome.The difference between a writer and a non-writer is that I can have this conversation with you without being considered mentally unbalanced - by other authors, anyway!
Gabriel wrote: "Excellent Lissa!!! But I'm turning the spot light on you now!!
Marcel has a question for Lissa:
Lissa you seem to be very fond of charismatic characters like me, I read your book Nero and I noti..."
Marcel responds:Well when my life was falling apart I needed to discover why . I became very inquisitive.
I must say Lissa you really did put me under pressure, you found my weaknesses and really made the best of that for the plot. But, as you say, I`m a stronger man for it. Maybe you might include me again in your life and write a little about me in another story?
What I meant about characters being mundane was many people might see me as other jockeys who all ride horses, we are almost generic some might think. I read about Otho in your book Nero and he was a hedonist. It would be safe to assume he slept around and drank a lot which he did.
How did you flesh out me and Otho to make us so interesting and so individual?
I didn't need to flesh out any of the people in my books, I just wrote about them. The flesh was there already. You just have to know them. By allowing them to do their own thing, be themselves, their characters come out. The writer's job is knowing them fully, the rest the characters simply take over and do themselves. I suppose the fleshing out is really not telling everything at once. "This is Marcel, he has some childhood issues and some confidence issues that can sometimes come across as arrogance and anger and you can trace this back to..." No writer would ever do that! In just one sentence you've given away things you can slowly allow to leak out over the entire course of the novel. Let the reader slowly work it out for themselves, don't be telling the reader too much. That's flesh. And the one person who never knows is the character. We don't know everything about ourselves, why we react as we do. Neither should a fictitious character. Let the reader do the work, don't be in a rush to let the characters in on it, and when it comes to writing, the less you tell, the more you build character and plot.
Gabriel wrote: "Marcel responds:
Well when my life was falling apart I needed to discover why . I became very inquisitive.
I must say Lissa you really did put me under pressure, you found my weaknesses and reall..."
Otho was hedonistic, but also very grounded. He isn't fictitious, a real man with contemporary biographies written of him, so I had only to get to know him and let him speak and act for himself. With Nero, that aspect could be frustrating, doing things totally out of character or to achieve a means that would clearly not happen. Fictitious characters don't do that; they'd lose their credibility and become wooden. But I could do nothing against the facts - real people are often irrational and stupid! Otho was never stupid or irrational or out of character. He wanted the easy life, with as much as possible for as little effort as possible and he was very easy to work with and to like. As my initial attraction to writing the book was Nero and his politics, being first introduced to Otho, by their tutor, as "birds of a feather" and then the closeness of their friendship, naturally I was going to like Otho at once. He was the straight man, the rational one, to all the madness in that life and those times; but he knew how to have fun and take nothing seriously unless he absolutely had to. From a writing perspective, he was an essential lead character, so thank the Roman gods he was there!
Yes. Thank Jupiter!! Okay that's it from me!!
