Do You Make Your Characters Suffer?

It’s no secret that I don’t enjoy the best of health. Most of it is self-inflicted: too many years of too many cigarettes, too many years of poor diet. Some of it is down to work: too many years of working outside in all weathers.

But all of it is good for the writer in me.

Come again?

There’s an old adage: write what you know. When you’re talking about novelists, we can add a rider. Learn to learn. In other words, if you don’t know something, then learn about it. Nothing, however, can beat personal experience, and when it comes to building characters poor health can be useful for adding that extra dimension which brings a character to life.

For instance: do you know how severe the pain is when gallstones decide to let you know they’re there? I do. Until I had my gallbladder removed in 1989, I have spent as long as an hour curled up in a foetal position on the floor, waiting for the agony to pass.

Have you ever had a coronary angiogram? I have, and I remember the worry as we were coming up to it, and the flood of emotion when they told me my ticker was essentially sound (but if I didn’t stop smoking, they couldn’t extend the warranty).

Like most writers, I make extensive notes as I go through life: things which worry me, things which amuse me, frighten me, fill me with elation, and when it comes to fleshing out characters I can throw all these in, and that includes ill health.

Consequently, Joe Murray’s heart attack that never was at the beginning of Costa del Murder, mirrored my own such event early in 2010. Sheila Riley’s gallstone attack in Murder at the Murder Mystery Weekend was drawn from my own experience of them. Joe’s coughing episodes in The Summer Wedding Murder mimic my own COPD, and the biggest hypochondriac in the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, Sylvia Goodson, is diabetic. By coincidence, so am I.

We Brits are natural moaners, and everyone loves to whinge about their aches, pains and ailments. Am I using my characters to vent my frustration at the way I can’t improve my health? Or am I really giving them that extra something they need to bring them to life.

Maybe I’ll know more when I make Joe’s ankles swell the same as mine do when I sit for hours at the workstation.