When Will There Be Good News? (Jackson Brodie, #3)

by Kate Atkinson

Because I don’t know what the characters are going to do, it’s also a case of: What are they going to do? Why are they here? What am I doing with it? And that becomes not amusing at all, actually, more like a strain. So in a sense the amusement is in the characters—well, I suppose amusement is the wrong word. I am entertaining myself. I am pleasing myself, I suppose. And it’s in the characters, that’s where the pleasure is. The characters are easier to be inside than the plot is to control, in some ways, I think.

The fact that he wants to protect women is the reason women like him. He definitely has that type of sheepdog herding instinct which I think women really value.

I think that’s the kind of paradigm of a guy—the guy who will find you.

when it comes to the book, the necessities of plot and structure are such that they will always dictate what has to be done with the characters. So that you may start with this idea for a character, but it will be changed almost immediately, because you can’t use real people like that. Characters are always either entirely imaginary or they have bits of people or things you’ve observed.

I don’t know how I start. I start with a feeling. Not my feeling, but how I want the book to feel. I have this sense, and I don’t know what it is and I can never describe it, but it’s like

ambience. You know, you kind of know how it would feel if you were reading it. And in a way that is voice. You know, that mysterious thing that people always talk about—“Find your voice”—and you think, what does that mean? But in a way each book has its own voice and it’s finding what that voice feels like that’s important. Once you’ve got that, you’re OK. Sometimes it takes a long time to get the feeling of a novel. But characters come with it.

I never do all those character notes. They just come. It is an act of creation. You know, one minute nothing, the next minute character. I find it fascinating. I find creating characters a really interesting puzzle. People don’t really talk about that much. I’m sure there are people who sit down and think, Well, she’s going to be in her fifties and have green eyes and… but that’s not how characters are. I never really know how they look.

occasionally a character gets a little bit more of a description than another, but generally speaking, to me they’re pretty amorphous. It’s their inter ior lives that are interesting. And once I’ve got the feeling—again—of what they’re like inside, then that’s it. I can slip into them, and I know them, and that makes them very easy to write.

Interior monologue is absolutely my favorite form at the moment, because I find it so easy. Once you’re inside that character’s head you just somehow know. You know what they would do, how they would behave, what they would think. It involves much less authorial thinking.

I don’t look for anything in another novel. No, really. I’m just always amazed that anyone can write. I just think writing is… what astonishes me is that there are so many books. There are so many people who can write, I just find that amazing. I’m delighted by books even when I dislike them.