BEHIND THE SCENES

What’s in a name?

I loved reading recently a post by an author regarding how she picks names for her protagonists. First she browses the internet looking for images of faces that fit with how she imagines/pictures her various characters. She prints each image out and pins them on her wall so she can glance up at them from time to time as she unfolds her storyline at her keyboard. Of course she has given them each an appropriate name based on how she responds to their image and maybe how she wants them to behave as her protagonist. As she works on a scene she is able to look up and imagine what that person might say, or how they might react or how their expression might change AND be inspired from a - scene - creative point of view.

I thinks it’s great!

When you think it’s too hard.

The next time you're feeling down, stretched, editing that second proof is unending, writing is hard, think about the authors that wrote with a pen (or at best, a typewriter) and went to the library to do research. And their editing process? Snipping out from paper pulled from their type writer, new words or sentences , positioning with sticky tape in their manuscript. Remind me never to moan about WORD again !!

Families are an unending source of scenes for a novel.

If you think you are the only family, extended or otherwise, with an eccentric uncle or aunt, maybe one who greets people in rhyming verse, a mother who misplaces her car in the mall parking garage once a year and reports it stolen to the police or you regularly have family dinners end up in a shouting match, think again.

Like the BBC’s character in ‘Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'em’, whether they admit it to themselves or not all families have had their fair share of awkward moments caused by a family member and cringe at the thought of the neighbours finding out.

On the darker side there are the marriages full of stress and if only’s, siblings at each other’s throats and the proverbial son who speaks in grunts and is always one step away from being expelled from school or so it seems.

Nope all families are the same behind the happy façade put on for the visitors, or the other two couples at the dinner table, or the person they are in conversation with on a plane or even for themselves. As a young field surveyor I once had a boss who announced to all in the office, he and his wife had never exchanged an angry word in forty years. What were they smoking?

Can you blame me for finding family drama an irresistible genre? Finding colour in the complex nature of family relationships. Who can forget the family in John Irving’s, ‘Hotel New Hampshire’, not love his Franny? (even if you found the end awkward)

In my new book, recently published, my families are typical, provide colourful scenes for the story line and a departure point for twists to the plot.

Fallingng for your protagonist might result in a “sequel” .

I find I develop a kind of relationship with some of my characters when I write. It sounds weird I know, when you think that you decide what they look like, behave like, what their destiny will be and so on.

How can you grow fond of them, have a desire to see how they develop, how they succeed or fail, celebrate their successes, when they are just a figment of your imagination?

Well you do.

They become real somehow. Well for me they do anyway, and as my first novel came to an end I felt a little sad that the protagonist who became so familiar to me, so enjoyable, so stimulating was parting ways with me.

Yes, Pat in “One Black Ear” was a gutsy women, tough when she had to be, took no nonsense, stood up for herself, and others if needed, but was as soft as butter when it came to things of the heart and her beloved caracals.

As I get to the end of my second book the thought of a sequel to “One Black Ear” keeps coming to mind as a next project. I ask myself, is a sequel really needed or is it just a chance to be reunited with Pat and her two, cheeky stepsons?

The latter, me thinks.

Might this be the reason other authors, in the past, have written sequels?

Making movies, maybe

I like to think I am writing well if I can create images for my reader, or allow them to create the images rather, by putting the right words down in the right way. In a way that will trigger their imaginations.

Kind of like facilitating a movie in their minds. Use my words, that describe the scene, but interpret them anyway way you wish to create the picture in your mind you believe they are painting.

After all, when I am describing a scene I am imagining my characters against imagined backgrounds in imagined situations.

So, I guess, as I write, I am seeing the movie in my mind really, putting it into words, presenting it to my reader and hoping they will see my movie, or perhaps their version of the movie.