Monday 25 April 2011

That Smile


Women can be hard work.
I’m not just saying that because I have an insider’s perspective or an axe to grind, though my preferred weapon of choice at present seems to be oddly shaped daggers, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
Not at all.
When I started writing my first stories, I chose to do them from the perspective of male characters, partly to distance myself from the stories I was telling, partly because I thought that if I hid behind a male persona, it wouldn’t give me away.
Naivety strikes again.
It also felt it would be an easier thing to do.
You how they say the grass looks greener on the other side, well you could also say that the storytelling looked simpler from an opposite perspective, without the emotional baggage and the complexities inherent in my own.
I wanted to be objective.
And if I could tell the story from a completely impartial point of view, then it might be possible to convey everything I wanted to say, without the hang-ups and struggles of the character … ahem, writer … getting in the way.
So I began to tell the story of a male character who was living in a haunted house, coping with a vicious poltergeist and other very nasty things happening to him.   
Okay, so I was reading a lot of Stephen King during my teenage years, and his stories were quite possibly influencing what I was writing.
And perhaps he scared me so badly one night that I wanted to get my own back.
So this male character, we’ll call him Stephen for the sake of argument, has to deal with spending the night in a haunted house, possibly as a test of manhood, but at the time I was more interested in the effect than the cause.
I threw the poltergeist at him within the first page, ostensibly to get the action started, though more likely as an avoidance of long descriptive passages of text.   
Hard to read, even harder to write.
The problem was, I had no idea what Stephen would do.
Try as I might, I could only put myself in his position and imagine what I would do, which kind of defeated the object of writing the story in the first place.   
Who cared what I would do?
But I could change the character into a tomboy called Steph.
It was the best of both worlds for a supernatural story; a girl in danger adds to the element of peril, and one who isn’t afraid of running, fighting and getting dirty, says this is a girl who has a chance of getting herself out of that danger.
And anyway, I was never really keen on characters unable to rescue themselves.
It is far more interesting to examine the depths of a character by throwing them into danger, and seeing how they cope with the life-threatening situations they find themselves in.
And far more importantly than HOW they cope.
Is IF they cope.
For a long time my tomboys seemed to get overwhelmed by the story and its dangerous circumstances.  Then they would end up either in dire need of rescue.
Or dead.
If they were going to survive the horrors of my storytelling, they would have to toughen up somewhat.
So out of necessity they did.
Funnily enough, it made for much more interesting, exciting and, dare I say it, complex stories - the one thing I thought at first I was trying to avoid.
Does that fall under the heading of ‘ironic’?  It does in my book.  Possibly not in the book of Ms Morissette, but then she really didn’t seem to understand it too well.
I think I understand it now.
I was asked at work the other day to explain the difference between irony and sarcasm.  It took me a minute to come up with an example, and this was the best I could do.
I said that telling someone to ‘Drop Dead’ is Sarcasm.
If they subsequently do, then that is Irony.
I think that's right.
Or perhaps I belong to the same camp as Ms Morissette?
I digress.
So it would appear that the characters who cope best within the realms of my hard and fast storytelling world are tough women, with complex emotional baggage, and the capacity to think their way out of a tricky situation.
They can be hard, and they can be hard work.
But it is all worthwhile when they kick-ass.
And give me that smile.

Monday 18 April 2011

Not That Deep


So this guy rides up on a white horse today.
I suppose whether or not you believe me depends solely on what the context is but generally, in the real and mundane world we all inhabit, you would say ‘yeah, right’ or something along those lines.
Okay so not a white horse then.
It’s really not something you see everyday, especially when you work on an industrial estate.  Much more likely to encounter idiots in BMWs.  I'm not saying that all BMW drivers are idiots, just that all idiots seem to be driving BMWs.
Don’t take my word for it, look around.
Moving on.
If a guy was going to arrive in something white its much more likely within the confines of an industrial estate that it will be a white van.  Less likely that he will be wearing a suit of armour.  There again, if he’s not on a horse and exposed to the elements, he probably doesn’t need one.
I feel you frowning.
Did you really not see where I was headed with the guy on a white horse thing?
Okay, looking for a modern day hero to ride up and rescue the trapped princess from the prison she has inadvertently found herself, in a building of torture and pain.
What's that?
As this is a modern day story, why can’t she rescue herself?
Aha, this is the interesting part - she doesn’t know it’s a prison.  She has willingly entered this place because it was shiny and bright on the outside, and offered smiles of sweet wealth on the inside, but once she entered it, there was no escape.
She is even allowed to leave for short periods of time, to make her think that she is free of it and can go whenever she wants, but she must return and pay for her time.
Who could rescue her?
Who could convince her that she needs to be rescued?
Desperate times call for desperate measures and she needs to be shocked out of her inertia.  Guy on a white horse not looking like such a stupid idea now, is it?  Come to think of it, perhaps a white horse is not enough.
Maybe it needs to be something more awesome than that.
And I do mean awesome in the true meaning of the word, not the Americanised version where everything is ‘awesome’ and it really seems to have lost its’ clout.
Okay, how about he parachutes in a-la James Bond style, lands perfectly on the white horse, and then rides up to the front door, entering the building and stunning everyone with a flourish of his mighty sword (ahem, minds OUT of the gutter please), then locating the trapped princess and sweeping her off her feet.
Sounds good, in theory.
But then what?
She says ‘put me down you weirdo’ and goes off with the guy in the BMW, while the hero is left to consider how to carry a parachute on the back of his horse.
So what is the moral of the story?  Well, it could be that …
Nah, don’t do morals.
I’m just not that deep.

Monday 11 April 2011

To Be Scared



Is it wrong to be drawn to something that scares you?
I’m not talking about genuinely scary things like big hairy spiders with far too many eyes and huge monster teeth, or scratching noises in the walls that could be big hairy spiders…  Okay that's enough of that visual image for a while.
I’m talking about the unknown.
As a writer I cannot help but be drawn into the realm of the unknown, whatever it is I happen to be writing.
I can prepare all I want to and have my characters waiting patiently, or sometimes not so patiently, to be called into action, but when it starts to happen I have little idea what will happen.
Indeed, my characters seem to take a perverse pleasure in doing the opposite of what I think they will do, or what I plan for them to do, that I am fortunate if the scene ends up in the place it should be, and if even half of the plot points have been covered.
As such it is a place of the unknown.
This is not entirely new to me.
Every book I have ever written has never ended up where I thought it would.  There are things that were supposed to happen which didn’t, characters died who were not supposed to, and others lived when I had planned their gruesome deaths in intricate detail.
Every time I enter a scene with my characters, it’s a toss-up whether the scene will turn out as planned, but I’ve discovered that if I get to know them well enough, I can plan a little better than when I set things up and let them go.
Like wind-up toys with no direction and little more than surface entertainment value.
If I get to know them too well, though, doesn’t it remove the possibility that something unexpected could happen?
Removing the unknown?
As a fan of the suspense genre, it is those forays into the unknown that cause such nerve-tingling fear (see above re: big hairy spiders in the walls) in us mere readers, ensuring that we have to sleep with the light on and can only drop off once the daylight has appeared from the wrong side of the night.
And yet we keep reading them.
It’s fun to be scared sometimes, to enter a world not under our control and see what happens when we become a willing part of it.  Until things go wrong and then it becomes a choice between the written down fears within the pages, or the ones created inside the mind once the pages are closed.
I thought that once I started writing, I would finally be the one in control of that world, of its' characters and events.
I know, naïve right?
The only thing certain is that I am entering the realm of the unknown whenever I construct a new scene, and it is with a sense of trepidation that I go into that world to see what will happen, what will befall those I have put there, including myself.
I don’t know what will happen, I don’t know who I will encounter there, or what the end result will be.
But that’s part of the fun.
If I knew exactly what was going to happen all the time, what would be the point?  Why would I enter a world where everything was planned out in detail, where I would feel no sense of excitement about going back there?
It’s what keeps me writing.
Once everyone is in the right place at roughly the right time and events are set into motion, it is the desire to find out what will happen next that keeps me wanting to take it further.
I go back to see who will live, who will die, and how they will get themselves out of the trouble I throw at them.  And trust me, there is never any shortage of that.
They never fail to surprise me.
It is the surprise, the excitement, that fuels a desire to return to the land of the unknown and see what lies there, beyond the next door.
It’s why I go back there, as a writer, and as a reader, to face what is unknown and therefore scary.
But is it wrong to be drawn to it?
Not from where I’m sitting.
It’s fun to be scared.

Monday 4 April 2011

But It Helps

They are all around the house - lurking in dark corners as little beacons of light.
Sounds like the beginnings of a ghost story doesn’t it?
The truth is less terrifying than that.
Probably.
I write little notes and leave them all around the house, where they will do the most good.  Sometimes they are there to inspire, sometimes to offer comfort, and sometimes they even work.
Every writer knows how hard it can be to keep going.
It’s not like being the member of a band, where even if it takes them half a lifetime to reach the platform they were striving for, they are there for each other, offering a helping hand when they need it, ready to be the voice of motivation and inspiration.
Writers have something similar.
We have social networking, book events, writers festivals, and the like, but when we go home at night, it’s just us - the empty rooms full of furniture, and the darkness.
This really is beginning to sound more and more like a ghost story.
Hopefully, a good one.
But not too good.  I have to go to bed soon, and do not want to be up all night with the light on.
I digress.
Those empty cluttered rooms are a great place for padding around in while I collect my thoughts, and it’s useful to look around and see something that helps.  Even if it’s just a few words on a battered post-it note to keep me going, or to help me re-focus when my mind is wandering.
Which, you may have noticed, happens rather a lot.
Over the years they have built up into a little collection all their own.  I sometimes wish they had dates on them, but I know better.  Those dates would lead me off down a path of forgotten thought I can ill afford when I'm in padding mode.
The point of having them there is not to send me further off inside my own mind.
And usually it only takes one to bring me back.
Two at most.
Then the other day I began to notice a pattern forming.
Yes, you’ve guessed it.
They had been arranged into a meaningful symbol on the seemingly blank wall, spelling out a message from beyond the grave…
Kidding.
But there is a recurrent theme, and one  I was not consciously aware of until I saw them all together.  Each one was there to reassure the solitary, tangled writer, that she chose this life for herself.  And that she was right to do so.
Taking about yourself in the third person again?
Really?
That’s just weird.
It is true that I chose it, and that I continue to seek a solitary state of being when and where I can, so I can think and write without interruption or disruption.
There is a reason why the solitary, tangled writer lives in the middle of nowhere, on top of a lonely windswept hill, with little more than sheep as her company.
Little much, don’t you think?
You have plenty of neighbours around you, and willing to help you out should you ask, but it is your choice to close the curtains and hide inside your world.
And that third person thing really is weird.
Even weirder than the noises that come in the night, the scratching in the walls, the eerie sounds that pass by in the darkness, the creaking of floorboards in the empty attic above your head…
Thanks.
That’s just what I need.
Yes, what I really needed to help me sleep tonight was another round of ‘Guess the Noise’ when my logical brain has gone to sleep, my overactive imagination has taken control, and sounds that make sense in the light of day, somehow gain a new and unknown resonance in the darkness.
Alone.
But by choice.
That’s what the little sayings and notes scribbled in moments of blind inspiration say to me, from their deliberately random places around the house.
You chose to be on your own because you understood that in order to give yourself the time and space to write, particularly when you have to work a full-time day job to pay the bills, you have to give yourself…
...well, the time and space to write.
The solitary, tangled writer had to see if she really was a writer, with the passion to write her words every day, or if for her it was just a hobby, one that would peter out with the wide open space of freedom for her mind.
Okay, that third person thing is really weirding me out now so I’m going to go and read something nice and calming, then perhaps I will sleep later.
M.R. James perhaps.
Or a little Edgar Allan Poe.
Hey, if I’m going to be up all night, might as well make it worthwhile.
Remember, you don’t have to be alone to be a writer…
But it helps.