Lists and Things

There's something wonderfully personal about lists. Not To Do lists, although they are probably more revealing of character than I'd like to think (speaking as someone who has been known to add things she's already done just for the pleasure of crossing them off the list), but lists of our likes and dislikes.

Lists feature heavily in The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon. Written around AD 995, they are a collection of her writings about life in the Imperial Court of the Heian Dynasty Japan. Here are some of her lists:

Embarrassing Things:

A man whom one loves gets drunk and keeps repeating himself.

To have spoken about someone not knowing that he could overhear.

Parents, convinced that their ugly child is adorable, pet him and repeat the things he has said, imitating his voice.

A man recites his own poems (not especially good ones) and tells one about the praise they have received - most embarrassing.

Lying awake at night, one says something to one's companion, who simply goes on sleeping.

In the presence of a skilled musician, someone plays a zither just for his own pleasure and without tuning it.

Squalid things:

The back of a piece of embroidery.

The inside of a cat's ear.

A swarm of mice, who still have no fur, when they come wriggling out of their nest.

The seams of a fur robe that has not yet been lined.

Things that make one's heart beat faster:

Sparrows feeding their young.

To pass a place where babies are playing.

To see a gentleman stop his carriage before one's gate and instruct his attendants to announce his arrival.

It is night and one is expecting a visitor. Suddenly one is startled by the sound of rain-drops, which the wind blows against the shutters.

Another list maker was Mary MacLane of Butte, Montana at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries. On March 8th, 1901, she wrote a list of

Irritating Things:

the kind of people who call a woman's figure her "shape"

hips that wobble as one walks

persons with fishy eyes

tight garters

insipid sweet wine

men who wear moustaches

unripe bananas

wax flowers off a wedding cake

fools who tell me what I "want" to do

some paintings of the old masters which I am unable to appreciate

people who don't wash their hair often enough

a bed that sinks in the middle

These lists reveal characters vivid enough to reach out across hundreds and thousands of years. Characters with opinions and likes and dislikes. Characters we want to read about because no one wants to read about wishy washy people without anything to say for themselves. Try making some lists for some of your characters, and see how strong their opinions are.

NEW!!! I've finally got round to organising some course dates....

How to WRITE a Novel: London 3rd May/Birmingham 7th May/

Oxford 8th May/Exeter 21st May/Bath 12th June

How to SELL a Novel: London 24th May/Exeter 4th June/

Bath 3rd July Details are on my website

Defining Moments

Can you think of a defining moment? Something from your past that typifies the sort of person you are? I was trying to think of an example for myself and came up with my older sister coming to visit me at uni and spotting a box which I had put newspaper and magazine clippings I thought were interesting. My sister pointed to it and said, 'Typical. We all think of doing that, but only you would actually do it.'

What I think is typical is that although I did indeed tear out the clippings I liked, I didn't go on to do anything with them, apart from throw them away at the end of the year, untouched and unread. Which sort of sums up how I feel about myself - other people think I'm organised, but I know I'm not.

I was inspired to write about defining moments when a friend told me a funny story about their performance in the school Nativity play when they were about 6 or 7. It was so funny and charming and character revealing that I immediately asked permission to 'give' the anecdote to one of my characters in the current book. I don't know yet if I'm going to use it, but that character is now clearer to me than before.

It's an interesting way of honing down the essence of a character. Is there an incident that defines them? You could either show it happening now or, if it's in the past, have them or another character describe the incident, the more specific the detail, the better. Use that incident to show their character.

Stuck for ideas? Think of some defining moments of your own and what they say about your personality and use them as a basis for the fictional characters to remember.

What Characters Actually Say

Another editing tip, one I've found very useful with characters. I first discovered this with Adam in Adultery for Beginners. I couldn't get a grip on his character at all; I wanted him to be kind and sympathetic but I could see he was coming across as simply wet. I didn't got to a purely Method drama school, but we'd had the classes based on Stanislavski's techniques, so one day I tried looking at what Adam said which is the first step a Method actor would take when looking at their role.

I copied all the scenes he was in into a separate document, then deleted everything that wasn't an actual bit of his dialogue. That left me with what he actually said.

Then I repeated the process, but this time left only comments that other people said about him, and deleted the rest.

I discovered that Adam often asked questions, and used a lot of qualifiers in his speech, for example, "I think it's X", or "I've heard it might be" or "Do you think it could have anything to do with...?" According to linguistics expert Deborah Tannen and various other psychologists, men talk in statements, not questions, and use qualifiers less often than women. In other words, Adam was coming across as wet because he talked like a woman.

And what other people said about him confirmed that. He was nice, kind, gentle...all of which are good things, but not exactly butch.

So I rewrote Adam. Not just what he said, but how he said it, and what people said about him. He did blokey things like play poker and go down black ski runs (yes, yes, I know women do these things too but they're more blokey than embroidery, for example). He was still nice, kind and gentle, but was more decisive, more quirky, more self-determined. And he stopped asking all those interminable questions.

At last! I've got my finger out and have committed to running some day courses:

Writing a Novel - 31st July in Bath and 18th September in Truro

Getting a Novel Published - 1st August in Bath and 19th September in Truro

Contact me on sarah@sarahduncan.co.uk for more info...

Take Two Women

Meet Muriel: "A moment later the other came out, the frizzy one. This evening she wore a V-necked black dress splashed with big pink flowers, its shoulders padded and its skirt too skimpy; and preposterously high-heeled sandals."

And Rose: "She was pretty in a sober, prim way, with beige hair folded unobtrusively at the back of her neck where it wouldn't be a bother. Her figure was a very young girl's, but her clothes were spinsterly and concealing."

Two descriptions of women, both from The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler. Nothing has been said about their personalities, yet from the descriptions we feel we know them. Look at the language used for Muriel: frizzy, splashed, padded, skimpy, preposterously. And Rose: prim, sober, beige, folded, unobtrusively, spinsterly, concealing. I particularly like the use of verbs: splashed and folded. They sum up the two women's very different characters, and yet all Anne Tyler has done is describe how they look.

Sometimes, when I'm stuck with a scene, I get out my thesaurus and make a long list of words that sum up how I want the scene to feel. Then I have a go at writing, with the list beside me. I don't use all of the words of course, but it definitely helps to create the mood through description. Try it!

Saturday Exercise

Start by going for a walk (the exercise is good for writers bottom as well as writers imagination). On your walk collect natural objects - right now it might be teasel heads and dried seed pods, snowdrops and old man's beard, glossy ivy leaves and a pheasant tail feather. As you walk and collect, think about how these items feel in your hands - light or heavy, rough or smooth, fragile or sturdy. Think about how they smell and the sounds they make as you handle them...

Back home, write either a list of adjectives describing these found objects, or put it into a piece of descriptive prose. Now, using your list or the description, imagine a character and describe them in the same language as the natural object. For example, if you had found a conker, you could compare the prickly outer shell to a prickly personality perhaps concealing glossy depths or you could imagine a child, whose potential is only just beginning to peep out from a shell of parental protection. Or, 'she had spiky hair, but the brownest eyes you ever saw...'.

Then having invented a couple of characters, put them in a scene and see how they play off each other, trying to keep some of the descriptive language you started with.