Making Story Problems Relevant

Most stories are about characters solving problems. Sometimes they're explicit (the detective must find the murderer before he/she kills again) and sometimes implied (the former lovers must learn to forgive their respective past actions if they are to love again). They might be small problems (your sisters are socially embarrassing) or big problems (the baddie's going to blow up the world unless you find the detonator), but what they have to be is relevant to the readership.

Think of books aimed at the youngest children. They're about problems like bed time, and the arrival of new siblings. A little bit older and the problems are about going to school or losing teeth. A bit older, and the problems shift to friendship groups and independence. Teenagers' problems are around things like peer-group pressure and sexuality. The problems are relevant to their readership - not many teenagers are worrying about paying their mortgage, not many pre-schoolers are thinking about their exams.

It's the same with adult fiction: the problems need to be relevant to the readership. Joanna Trollope's The Rector's Wife, featuring a middle-class heroine who took a job stacking supermarket shelves to make some money, became a best seller in a recession. The Shopaholic series by Sophie Kinsella became popular in a time when the economy was booming, and spending £1000s on shopping was fine. It seems out of date in these more austere times - I expect there are many books in the pipeline where redundancy and financial problems are central issue.

And of course there's the fantasy element, so the James Bond books featuring foreign travel and the high life were written at a time of austerity when travel abroad was expensive and difficult, and I can't help but suspect that the popularity of the Twilight series in part is down to the sexual pressures on teenage girls and young women today.

Problems don't have to be directly relevant - for example, not many of us live in a stratified society with limited life choices as depicted in Jane Austen's novels, but most of us still live with a limited social circle where we hope to make a good choice of a partner.

The more relevant the problem, the wider the readership. Most people aren't going to be interested in how I'm solving some structural problems in my current novel so I haven't said anything to my friends and family about it, but I have written about them on this blog as I think solutions to writing problems may interest my readership here.

Think about the problems your characters are solving in your writing, and work out how relevant they are to your readership. And if they're not that relevant, then now's the time to make them so.

When Infallible Heroes Work (And When They Don't)

The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth's first novel, was turned down by many publishers because - as it concerns an assassin who is after General de Gaulle - they reasoned that readers wouldn't be gripped as they would know the main character doesn't succeed in his aim, and therefore there would be no tension.  

They were wrong - it became an international best seller and a tension-packed film.  Why?  We know the main character won't succeed, because de Gaulle wasn't assassinated.  So why are we waiting to see if he will be?  

The main character in The Day of the Jackal is an exception to the usual rule. He is an Infallible Hero.  Every setback he's already planned for.  He's got lots of passports, knows how to disguise a car and smuggle guns through customs.  He's ruthless about killing anyone who gets in his way.  He runs rings around the poor old police, plodding along in his wake.  He appears invincible.  We know he won't succeed, so instead of the more usual: Will the hero succeed in their quest (the answer usually being Yes), the question becomes, firstly, how can this Infallible Hero be stopped? and secondly, Who is this Infallible Hero? 

We're not stupid, us readers.  We know most stories start at A and end with Z, whether they're a romance (which always ends with a kiss and Happy Ever After) or a murder mystery (the detective finds out who dunnit) or a thriller (the secret is unmasked).  It's how we get to Z that matters, not what Z is.  The more Z appears impossible to achieve (the lovers have a quarrel, the main suspect is murdered, the trail goes cold etc) the more we like it.  

The easiest way to make Z impossible to achieve is to make the main character fallible.  They muck things up.  They get it wrong.  They forget the important gadget.  They go off in a huff.  Or make a bad decision.  Just like us, in fact.  They are fallible, but achieve their goal in the end.  

We often pitch our fallible characters against apparently infallible antagonists, often authority figures like parents, head teachers, megalomaniac bosses or evil corporations.  Think of The Terminator.  Arnie's robotic character is unstoppable but the poor fallible humans have to stop him somehow.  How will they do that?  It's impossible!  But by the end they do.  They get to Z (against all the odds, as the cliche has it). 

If our main protagonist was infallible, and got everything right AND achieved their goal, how irritating would that be?  We'd be utterly fed up with them.  So we need to know that the apparently infallible hero won't succeed a la Day of the Jackal.  Similarly, if our apparently infallible antagonists turn out to be infallible and the poor hero fails utterly, then the story is limp and ends unsuccessfully.  (How to make apparently down beat endings up beat is the subject of another post.)

It's the struggle we like.  We hope that in real life our struggle will be rewarded by success.  If there's no struggle, then we hope the rewards won't follow. Sadly real life isn't fair like this, but fiction can be.  As an author part of our job is to make it so.

Have Aliens Beamed Down Into Your Novel?

Sometimes people write to find out what happened to characters in my novels after The End.  It sounds strange, but I know what all of them have gone on to do - although none of their continuing stories have been interesting enough for me to make into an new novel.  But when you're writing a novel it's much more important to know what had been happening to the characters before the start of the novel.  

Another common problem in the 40 first pages I read at the weekend was that characters appeared to have beamed down from outer space into the story.  They'd been hanging around like featureless homunculi ready for some alien force to dump them into the action.  They had no pasts or presents, only futures.  

I'm a real person.  As I'm sitting typing this I'm thinking obviously about the blog post.  But at the back of my mind I'm thinking about last Saturday's event, and the couple of first pages that had characters that were tabula rasas and how I explained the alien concept to the writers.  I'm also aware that my partner's going to pitch up quite soon.  Later on, I need to make a few phone calls.  Oh, and there'll be some writing to do - I've got a tricky scene to get stuck into. So all this is bubbling away in my head as I type.  If a letter arrived now announcing that I've inherited a million pounds...

Yes, the stuff that's bubbling away now would be put on hold for a bit, but it's still there.  My life exists independently of the exciting bits.  The same is true for characters.  They have to have stuff bubbling away, plans that they're making for the future, thinking over things in the past.  It doesn't have to be on a grand scale - perhaps this is where knowing what a character had for breakfast could come in handy - but it has to be there to make the character appear to have a life outside the story.  

It's this life outside the novel that makes character appear real.  

Anyone in St Ives for the September Festival?  I'm giving a talk on Friday 23rd September at 11.00 am in St Ives Library.  Go to the website for more info.

How Much Vomiting is Going Too Far?

AJ asked : When writing light hearted or romcom style fiction, how does one ensure the light hearted/fun element doesn't get drowned by the conflict/grimly high stakes? Or equally, the issues don't get undermined by frivolity.

In an early version of Another Woman's Husband, Becca the main character has her darkest moment and ends up getting drunk and vomiting in a car park. It's a humiliating experience for her. My editor vetoed it as being too sordid.

The same editor didn't turn a hair when, in Nice Girls Do, Anna after a very heavy night out is also sick. I think the difference is in the tone. I can't give an example of the Becca bit, because I dramatically changed the story line and lost the vomiting, but this is Anna...

"She tottered to the bathroom and washed as quickly as her poor coordination allowed. The skin on her face felt heavy and seemed to have dropped two inches. It was a curious mix of red overlying grey. She bunged some foundation on top. Dracula's bride stared back at her. She looked down and saw I survived Clare's hen party! emblazoned across her chest. She wasn't convinced."

There's quite a bit more but I think - hope, anyway - that the tone is quite perky. There's no question that Anna is going down to the darkest depths - she's hungover, yes, but is taking it in her stride. Becca, on the other hand, was upset and humiliated.

And I think that's partly where the answer lies. How does the character react to the grimness in question? Are they self-aware? Anna knows she had too much the night before and accepts her physical state the next morning. Becca was just miserable.

Marion Keyes has shown that you can go to some dark places within chick lit so long as the character, and the reader, doesn't have their noses rubbed in it. And of course, are we rooting for the characters? If so, we'll forgive them anything.

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

Nice Characters

There's been an article in the Guardian about the need for "nice" characters in novels, and how this is stultifying novel writing, as authors try to ward off the dreaded "I didn't like any of the characters" response from readers.

The writer of the article seems to think that not liking the characters equates to a desire for blandness, but I think that's missing the point. People actually like the sparky, the different, the unusual, the original. They like strong, vibrant characters - the very opposite to bland. Those characters can be seriously unpleasant, if they do it in a interesting or entertaining way.

I've recently read a novel where I didn't like the main characters at all. But not because they weren't nice - oh no, they were relentlessly nice in a rather smug, self-satisfied way. The only character I did like was the difficult, awkward sister, who actually seemed to have some personality about her.

We like to read about characters who are bigger than we are, who do the things we only dream of, who don't conform to the rules. Hannibal Lecter may eat your liver given half a chance, but he's also witty, cultured, intelligent and loyal. Non-confrontational we can do at home. Give us Scarlett O'Hara vowing never to be hungry again, and then going out and making sure it happens.

Nice characters? Not really. Characters we like to read about? Absolutely.

Why Are You Talking?

Seriously, why are you talking? What makes you talk? Think about it...

I'd guess the answer is, you open your mouth and utter when you have something to say. And that something to say is in response to another stimulus - your emotions. Even if it's a simply 'good morning' type of exchange with your neighbour or the postman, that's an emotional response - you want to be friendly or polite.

Of course, quite a lot of our dialogue in real life is about being friendly or polite, and there's also the desire to be helpful, to give information but some of it will be fuelled by stronger emotions. Jealousy. Anger. Love. Fear. Whatever the emotion may be, I'm pretty certain that you're not randomly opening your mouth and letting a stream of consciousness pour out. You have reasons for speaking.

Same with written dialogue. It's fuelled by emotion. Once you know what the characters emotions are, you'll know what they have to say. And because it's fiction, and not real life, most - all? - of the situations we show our characters in are going to be subject to the more powerful emotions. Bertie Wooster may be written to amuse and entertain, but for Bertie the absurd situations he finds himself in are often fuelled by fear. It's funny to us, real to him.

When writing dialogue I find it best not to think about what they say. Instead I think about why they're saying it, what emotion is driving it. And then, what they say just comes.

Writing for the Market?

I always say don't write for the market because there's usually a substantial time delay between you starting a novel, finishing it, getting a publisher and then out on the shelves. Even if you have a contract that process is going to take at least two years (a year to write, a year for the publisher to do their stuff) and in that time the market will have moved on.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be aware of market trends. I was giving feedback on a student's work where the main character is rich. Big house, no need to work, no money worries rich. This worried me. We're in a recession, people are losing their jobs, lots of us have debt...could we sympathise with a main character who didn't have money problems?

Yes, there is a genre of books about rich people swanning about in private jets and jumping onto yachts in the Caribbean, but outside that niche, I think most characters are, well, more like most of us. I may be completely wrong about this - and it's 100% the student's choice on what to do - but my instinct says it's harder to get sympathy going for a character who isn't having at least a bit of squeeze financially.

In Kissing Mr Wrong I thought very carefully about a character who argues against giving money to premature baby units - something which is generally considered 'a good thing' although there are lots of logical reasons why it isn't. He's not the main character though, and I then gave him a personal, emotional, tragic reason behind his logical ones, which the main character is then doubly sympathetic to. But I did - and do - worry about it. He couldn't be too unsympathetic about premature babies or the readers would take against him, and by association, my main character.

But that is, essentially, writing for the market. I'm writing with the majority of my likely readership in mind and I hope they will either agree with his utilitarian views or react as the main character does. But generally I write characters who conform to what I think is the majority viewpoint and I do think about my target readership.

So perhaps I should rephrase it: don't write for the market, but be aware of it.

The Lift Test

Imagine you're going up to the 8th floor when the lift shudders, then stops. You wait but nothing happens. It looks like you're going to be there for some time. You turn to the sole other occupant of the lift and - well, who would you like to be stuck with? Do you want to be stuck with the person who drones on about how hopeless the situation is, or the one who thinks of an escape plan? Would you prefer the person who tells you at length about their very dull, static life, or the one who has plenty of interesting stories? And at a more basic level, would you like the one who is distinctly lacking in attractive qualities, compared to the one who is full of life and energy?

Reading a novel is a bit like being stuck in a lift with a set of characters, if you think about the length of time it takes to read one. It usually takes me about eight hours to read a novel, and that may be spread out over several days or even weeks. So I need the characters to be engaging or I'll put the book down.

When I'm writing, at the back of my mind I'm imagining what it would be like to be stuck in the lift for eight hours with my main character. Life may not be going well for them, but they don't, won't, can't whine about it. Instead, they're busy trying to work out an escape plan. Perhaps because we worry whether readers will like our main character there's a tendency to make them bland, and I suppose it's better to be bland than out and out offensive. But only just better. Instead, apply the lift test. The characters to write about - good, bad or plain ugly - are always going to be the ones who make those eight hours seem like eight minutes.

My next event will be speaking at Corsham Library, Wiltshire with fellow New Romantics Lucy Diamond and Veronica Henry 3rd June at 7.30pm. Come and join us!

I Do That Too!

In class last week one of the students wrote about sucking polo mints and having competitions on who could make them last longest when children. We all recognised that feeling of sucking them down to the finest ring of white neatly speared on the tip of the tongue, that sense of sadness when they broke up unexpectedly, or the hope that everyone else would forget what they were doing and just crunch.

Having a character do something, and for the reader to recognise that it's something they do is an easy way to make characters real. The first time I did it was by accident. I wrote about Isabel, the main character in Adultery for Beginners, trying on clothes to go to a job interview. She's not very confident and at one point she tries on a skirt:

"She sucked her tummy in as she pulled the zip up and looked in the mirror, arching round to check her rear view. No excessive bulges, although her legs looked ridiculous protruding from the bottom hem, two inches of solid white flesh then black ankle socks. Her feet looked enormous, and strangely flat."

At the time I was still doing my MA and one of my fellow students commented, 'I didn't know anyone else felt like that, that's just how I think mine look.' I was pleased, but didn't think much more of it. Now I realise that it was a clue to how to write believable characters: have them think real stuff, that real people think.

It's the basis of a lot of comedy, that feeling of recognition - I once saw a stand up do twenty minutes of hilarious routine based entirely on people's body language at check out queues. It was funny because, well, we all recognised ourselves and our little wiles and secret thoughts and unspoken etiquette. Your characters may be imaginary people, but give them real thoughts and they will become real.

Jane Austen had it Easy II

And another thing Jane Austen didn't have to contend with was keeping her hero and heroine from jumping into bed with each other. Let's face it, most people when they meet someone they like, they kiss pretty soon and if that seems satisfactory, take it further. I'm not suggesting that we all telescope those steps into the course of an evening but there's nothing to stop us doing that if we choose. And then we split up or stay together.

This makes problems for anyone writing romance. Your main characters meet early on, ideally in the first chapter, and then you have to contrive to keep them being attracted to each other while at the same time not developing their relationship. It can be done, but it's much harder when there isn't a reason such as social etiquette, religion, race or class keeping them apart.

With Nice Girls Do, the original version didn't have Will and Anna making love. This was partly because it didn't fit in with the story as it was, and also I had qualms about having Anna - who had so enthusiastically shagged Oliver at the beginning of the novel - sleeping with another man a few hundred pages along, even if he was The One for her. She was a Nice Girl, after all.

My editor said that they had to make love. In her opinion, Anna was an experienced woman, not a timid virgin and it would be unbelievable for Anna to be so in love with a man she hadn't slept with. So I re-wrote the ending, and the book IS better for it but it caused me all sorts of logistical problems that Ms Jane Austen didn't have to deal with, from the mechanics of providing a comfortable location for the event to how to make it plausible that they wouldn't come together relationship-wise until the last page.

Life might be easier now we're more relaxed about these things, but not necessarily for writers.

If anyone is near Chipping Sodbury on Thursday evening, I'm speaking at the library at 7.30pm, click here for further details. I'd love to see some friendly faces. Or any faces, for that matter.

Jane Austen had it Easy I

Lucky old Jane Austen. In her day she didn't have to worry about characters having to do inconvenient things like earning a living, they could, if necessary, just hang around doing nothing except having picnics and interacting with each other. I'm currently in the middle of my new book and oh, it's frustrating. My characters, like most people, have to keep going to work. They can't loiter and dally, except at weekends and in the evenings. And - if they're not working - there has to be a plausible reason why.

Of course, there are advantages if you can find them a good job, but not all jobs are suitable for writing purposes. At Westonbirt Arboretum last summer I stopped and chatted to a bodger about his work - strictly speaking, a bodger is a man who lathe turns green timber to make chairs legs. He ran chair making courses in the woods and said out of nowhere, 'I wish a romantic novelist would come on one of my courses, I think I'd be a brilliant hero.'

So I told him what I did, but decided against having a bodger in my next book. His chairs were beautiful and I can see there are lots of opportunities for sensuously running hands over chair legs, but it's a solitary, static sort of job, and you're stuck out in the woods. I had a similar problem when I made Will in Nice Girls Do a gardener; he generally had to be there. (And writing this, I realise we never see Will anywhere else except the garden.)

Office-based work is even worse. It's difficult to get any novel action going when you're hunched over a computer all day, and it's hardly wish fulfillment for most people. Small wonder that many main characters have jobs in journalism or PR where they can get out and meet people. Then there are jobs that lack a certain something. I'm sure there are lots of fabulous dentists out there, but it's not a very sexy job. Obscure jobs can be fun - Natalie's job in A Single to Rome was a delight to write - but there are pitfalls here. The least sexy job I've come across was in a self published thriller where the hero was a specialist in intestinal worms in pigs. Original, yes, but I could never take to him - I always knew where his hands had been.

So what with the mechanics and sex appeal and originality - oh yes, it would be so much easier if they could all just hang around and intermingle without having to worry about the 9 to 5.

Ooops! I've Done It Again

My first book was called Adultery for Beginners and was the story of Isabel, wife of Neil, who has a torrid and obsessive affair with a man called Patrick. Patrick, I realised quite recently, was an amalgamation of of a couple of men I'd known, but at the time of writing I could honestly put my hand on heart and say none of the characters were based on any real people or events.

Then my sister sidled up to me. Several people had asked, she reported, her eyes not meeting mine, whether the character of Neil was based on her husband. I was astounded: as far as I was concerned the two couldn't have been further apart. I couldn't see why anyone would think that. Well, she replied. There's the moustache. And the job. And the ex-pat angle. And the reading computer manuals in bed (which I naturally didn't know about). And... I was so embarrassed because the points of similarity were there but honestly, it had never occurred to me before.

And I've just done it again. Kissing Mr Wrong has as its main male character a WWI expert called Nick. And my son is a WWI expert called...Nick. My only excuse is that I think it's a nice name and apologies to my son...but if he's divorced with two children, then as his mother I really should know about it. I suppose that's the answer - you give 100 characteristics to a character, and the chances are some of them are going to coincide with those of a member of your family and friends. Still. It is embarrassing. Sorry Nick.

POV and Mega Casts

Yesterday's post made me think about books with huge cast lists and written from many view points. I think we still focus on one main character, and want to follow one main story line. I loved English Passengers by Matthew Kneale, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize. The story is told from twenty different points of view so you'd think it might get confusing, but it doesn't. However, the main focus is the journey of Captain Kewley and the Reverend Wilson to Tasmania, and that's the story we follow. The other points of view skillfully weave their way around the main plot line.

Let's try some of the great C19th novelists. Take War and Peace, for instance. The focus is on Pierre and Natasha. Trollope has huge cast lists, but each novel is clearly focussed on one person, from Septimus Harding onwards. Ditto Dickens. Despite the great sweep of these novels we always know where the focus is.

I suspect it's because as people we're geared up to have intense relationships with only a few people. A large cast of characters without focus is like being at a drinks party where you talk to lots of people about superficial things; you simply can't get deep and meaningful with all of them. That's not to say the large cast shouldn't be colourful - it's best if they are - but that as a writer you should know where your main story lies.

Silent Partners II

I really went into acting for the chance to dress up, and one of my big regrets is that I never got to be in one of those BBC period dramas. But I did do some period work on stage, and managed to play Alithea in The Country Wife twice, once at Leicester, and once at the Theatre Royal York.

Restoration comedies are long, and need quite a lot of cutting to make them work for modern audiences. Part of the reason is that modern audiences come to the theatre, sit in rows obediently and listen to the play. Audiences in the late 17th century were quite different. They turned up at any point, mainly to meet up with their friends. There were formal seats round the edges for the posh, but most people ambled around in the pit. Because of this, Restoration comedies have many acts, and the beginning of each one starts with a quick recap of what's happened so far in the play so all the late arrivals can catch up.

Now think about writing a novel. You're writing the book, it's living with you every day, but a reader might take a month to read it, one chapter at a time. You need to keep the characters fresh for them. Thomas Wycherley did it with a plot recap from time to time, but that doesn't work for the modern novel. So you've got to keep everything going in the reader's head, and make it easy for them to follow what is happening, even though their reading may be disjointed. Keep all the main characters alive and don't 'lose' them. That way, you won't lose the reader, either.

Silent Partners I

Imagine reading a detective novel. As the story continues you're busy trying to work out the murderer. The clues are there, but you can't seem to pin point it on anyone. It's coming up to the final chapters and in desperation you decide that the great aunt must have dunnit, on the grounds that she's the unlikeliest. The detective reveals the answer: it's some bloke you haven't heard of until now.

How disappointing that would be. You'd probably hurl the book across the room and vow to never, ever read another book by the same writer. Part of the deal when reading a mystery is that the clues are there so you can get to the answer before the detective, and that the answer (which you will probably have got wrong) will have been staring you in the face all along.

Even if you're not writing detective fiction it's important to keep all your main characters going. They won't be centre stage all the time, but they need to be present within the narrative - even if it's just someone looking at a photograph or letter and having a fleeting thought about them.

Sometimes, of course, you want characters off stage - within my genre, for example, it's not unusual for a main character to be transferring her affections from one person to another, so it would be natural for there to be fewer thoughts about the past love and more about the new one, and equally natural for the main character to have a 'goodness, I haven't thought about Jim for ages,' moment.

But if the character is a major player then they need to be around. In Adultery for Beginners, for example, Adam doesn't turn up as a major character until the last section, but I put him into several scenes beforehand, even though Isabel (and the reader) hardly notices him. In Nice Girls Do Will goes off-stage for ages as he's stuck at Templecombe while Anna is distracted by Oliver in London, so I had to devise ways to keep him present in the narrative - a phone call, a letter. So, don't cheat the reader. Keep all your major characters to the forefront of the stage.

(There's another, very practical, reason for not losing characters along the way, but as this is getting a bit long, I'll write about that tomorrow.)

Let's Have a Fight, Right Here, Right Now

In real life most of us avoid conflict, but our characters should embrace it. Without conflict there is no drama, and without drama the writing is dull. But because we get brought up to smooth over disagreements there's a tendency to smooth over them in our writing too, even the little conflicts that we hardly notice - who took the last of the milk, where's my pen?

Big mistake. No conflict = boring to read.

So, how to add conflict? First think about the levels of conflict.

Conflict in your head - eg doubts, uncertainty, anxieties, negative personality traits.

Conflict with your body - eg ill health, physical disabilities.

Conflict with your family - eg domineering parents, disobedient children

Conflict with friends - eg rows over actions

Conflict with lovers - eg adultery, desertion, betrayal

Conflict with institutions - eg the tax office, the law

Conflict with individuals in society - eg policeman, traffic warden, doctor

Conflict with the environment - eg floods, cold weather, drought (natural) war, concrete jungle (manmade)

Now think about your main character. Going through the list, how many conflicts could your character potentially have.

For example, just thinking about the school environment a teacher could have conflicts with the rest of the staff from the groundsman to the head teacher, the staffroom tea/coffee rota, the education authority, lack of funding, Ofsted inspection, the school inspectors, exam boards, lost exam papers, marking, the government, nits, mumps, swine flu, poor weather, lack of heating, then there are the students, who may be needy, demanding, physically or mentally abusive, sad, super bright, gifted, challenging, abused, in danger...and I haven't even started on friends, family, lovers and life outside school, let alone the potential for inner conflicts.

Now I'm not suggesting that all these conflicts will have a large place in your writing, but they should be there supplying the grit that will create a beautiful pearl. Make your characters struggle against life, make life hard for them in every way, large or small, you can come up with. Isn't that why characters like Scarlett O'Hara, James Bond and Jane Eyre still resonate today? We follow their struggles and relish seeing them triumph in the end.

Bolt Saves The Day - But Loses His Audience

Recently my daughter sat me down for us to have a bonding session while watching Bolt. The film starts with Bolt the dog and his owner escaping from terrible dangers, Bolt has super powers, and it was all very exciting - baddies shooting guns from helicopters, blowing up bridges, that sort of stuff - but it didn't really hold my attention. Then about ten minutes in, the director calls "Cut!" and it's revealed that actually they're making a film. The real story isn't about thrilling escapes, it's about Bolt discovering that he doesn't really have super powers, but still manages to save the day.

The opening of Bolt demonstrated something that I'd learned on Another Woman's Husband: we need to know characters before we care what happens to them. It doesn't matter how dramatic or noisy or extreme the action is, if we don't know, we don't care. I don't want to sound disrespectful, but while I'm shocked by what's happened in Haiti, and like everyone I've donated money, I haven't lost sleep over it. I don't know any of those poor people personally so I can only care in the abstract.

Originally, Another Woman's Husband started with Becca's mother, June, announcing that after fifty years of marriage she's decided to leave Becca's father, Frank. It's a dramatic moment, and shocking for Becca. But as the reader doesn't know Becca, or June, or Frank, the reader couldn't care less. So the novel now starts at June and Frank's golden wedding anniversary party so the reader sees all the main characters in a happy, normal setting, gets to know them and hopefully cares a little about them before June makes her announcement.

One of the standard 'rules' about writing is to start in the middle of things - in media res - but sometimes you have to start just before then, or the reader is as indifferent as I was to Bolt's heroics.

The Lift Test

Imagine you're going up to the 8th floor when the lift shudders, then stops. You wait but nothing happens. It looks like you're going to be there for some time. You turn to the sole other occupant of the lift and - well, who would you like to be stuck with? Do you want to be stuck with the person who drones on about how hopeless the situation is, or the one who thinks of an escape plan? Would you prefer the person who tells you at length about their very dull, static life, or the one who has plenty of interesting stories? And at a more basic level, would you like the one who is distinctly lacking in attractive qualities, compared to the one who is full of life and energy?

Reading a novel is a bit like being stuck in a lift with a set of characters, if you think about the length of time it takes to read one. It usually takes me about eight hours to read a novel, and that may be spread out over several days or even weeks. So I need the characters to be engaging or I'll put the book down.

When I'm writing, at the back of my mind I'm imagining what it would be like to be stuck in the lift for eight hours with my main character. Life may not be going well for them, but they don't, won't, can't whine about it. Instead, they're busy trying to work out an escape plan. Perhaps because we worry whether readers will like our main character there's a tendency to make them bland, and I suppose it's better to be bland than out and out offensive. But only just better. Instead, apply the lift test. The characters to write about - good, bad or plain ugly - are always going to be the ones who make those eight hours seem like eight minutes.