It’s not surprising that we can learn from actors and their games. Actors have to go onstage wearing more or less well-written constructs and actually make them walk and talk while paying members of the public look on. Actors do what we do at our leisure and with opportunities for rewrites, only with observers and in real time. So look out for books by actors about their craft, for interviews with actors, books of games, or books by voice specialists like Cicely Berry, who deal with the way language translates into physicality. I’m not going to give you specific titles because that’s a great big area of discovery you can enjoy for yourself.
Third. Let’s get back to you. Take a little time to consider what you think of human beings. Do you trust them? Are they all self-serving? Are they lost in a big wilderness? How do you see the world? Are working-class people thick? Are upper-class people thick? Are all women manipulative? Does your character agree with your opinions? It’s unlikely that you’ll write a story with a narrative thread in which you can’t believe, or with which you can’t be comfortable. It’s very unlikely that you’ll even try, unless you’re being held at gunpoint, or being paid a huge amount of persuasive money. I don’t think all people are self-serving, nor do I feel women are especially sly. Threats of mutilation and death might temporarily force me to change my mind, but my fiction will generally reflect my worldview. Still, if my character has other opinions, even repellent opinions, I will have to allow him or her to be true to themselves, to be real. The character may not even agree with my gender – they may arrive and be male and connected with a plot that can best be told from the 1st Person. This means I will have to write ‘I’ and mean a man. I may even have to be a man who thinks everyone is self-serving and hates and distrusts women – so be it. I probably need to be grateful that he’s already well defined enough to be rattling at my boundaries – he is a challenge, not a threat.
Fourth. You may not like your character as he or she emerges, but make sure that this doesn’t mean you neglect him or her. The best idea would probably be to love your character – that means you’ll allow them to be whoever they are. Remember, you don’t own them. They simply came to you to be expressed. If you object to them too strongly, they’ll go somewhere else. Again, this is partly nonsense, but it can be a useful way to think. Let characters outrage you, surprise you, bewilder you, if they have to – these are all indications that they are taking on independent life. And if they are going to convince the reader, that’s exactly what they’ll need.
Fifth. Back to games and questions. We are used to knowing people and to knowing ourselves. If someone asks us, ‘How old are you?’, we can answer, ‘Twenty-one’ rather than ‘About twenty’. Try to push for detail. Equally, if your character is being steadfastly vague, that’s an interesting clue. ‘About twenty’ may not mean that you haven’t focused in well enough yet, it may indicate that your character is shifty/sensitive about their age for some reason. Nevertheless, having specific details to hand does, in real life, tend to imply that you know either yourself or someone else. So look for details. When you ask for them, they’ll tend to appear.
‘Why does Paul have that scar on his forehead?’
‘He doesn’t ever say.’
‘He was bitten by a terrapin – he has dreams about terrapins.’
‘He doesn’t ever say, but as I am his author I know that he was bitten by a terrapin and will seek them out and punish them for ever.’
There are all manner of possibilities. Watch out for blurs, evasions, instances when you behave as you wouldn’t when describing someone you knew well, or had special access to, or who was yourself. Remember that as a writer you have the ultimate Access All Areas pass – that’s great fun, but also a great responsibility – you’re building all the areas. If there are blank patches, fill them in. You can also spend many profitable hours asking questions of what you have for a plot and what you have for a setting – how do they relate to your character? How does your character affect them? And, naturally, there may well be other characters around. Where do they fit in? How do they interrelate? Whose psychology will influence your images and symbols, your way of saying what you have to say?
You may want to take your character as an invisible passenger on journeys, or as a companion in real events. You may enter his or her world by literally going to places that he or she would enjoy, know well or be interested in. Or you may find out about those other places – and other times, for that matter – and then slowly ask enough questions to know how she or he would behave in them, as if you have both gone there. You may, in fact, lay that extra place setting at dinner, if it seems necessary. Remember to have fun with this. It’s not unlikely that to others, you’re going to seem slightly obsessive, if not unhinged from time to time – you might as well enjoy it.
Sixth. Remember that you are making up one other person, a piece at a time. Your character is not all people of their type, they are not a crowd, they are not a generalisation, they are themselves. They are going to be consistent with their own emotions and thoughts, actions and experiences. Don’t pressure yourself with thoughts along the lines of ‘Oh my God, I’ve never been a Russian submariner in the 1970s – I’ll get it all wrong.’ You’re only making one Russian submariner. Or several, but one at a time. They only have to make sense as themselves. Find the details, ask questions, find more details, do your research, hold your breath under water, eat borscht, learn how to sing ‘Korobushka’, whatever it takes. Then you will be in the happy position of being able to forget the research you don’t need and limit what you say, with the help of your character’s concerns and the incidents of the plot. But you will know that you aren’t going to go wrong. You will write like someone who knows who they are writing about – that sense of confidence will infuse what you produce and will relax and persuade your reader.
Seventh. Learn more about people. By this I don’t mean that you should hollow out everyone you meet like a human melon-baller, whenever they give you the chance. I mean listen to people, look at them, read about them in anthropology, or sociology, or – heaven help us – psychology books, if you want to. Above all, be in the world. You’ll discover that if you’re out there taking part, you’ll remember what you can be inspired by later without making notes, because it will be memorable. Inspiration is memorable.
Eighth. I have left this late, because it may make you nervous, but it’s close to being the most important point. know how your character feels. We identify with others because of their emotions. We know that people are important because their feelings trigger feelings in us. When do we know we know someone? When we know about their feelings. What will make your character seem real? Having real, credible feelings. And yet, in order to give a character feelings, we have to reach back and compare notes with our own feelings. We measure them against the only scale we have – ourselves. This means we can feel exposed – very intimately exposed. All manner of writers, myself included, will take all kinds of measures and make all kinds of excuses for why their character does not have feelings. This is because we are trying to run away from writing. We are trying to be there on the page, but not really. We have to bear in mind that all the reader has to do is read us – they see everything. There never has been anywhere to hide and never will be. If we try to hide and try to hide our characters, the reader will notice. Noticing is what the reader does. So we must stand and be seen. We wouldn’t be there if we weren’t going to be seen – pretending otherwise, or avoiding the issue, just wastes time. Allow your characters to feel. They won’t be your feelings, this is not a commitment that is any more intimate than any other; this is just the last stage in knowing your character and allowing him or her to live. Let it happen. Your character may be doubtful and confused (bear in mind that characters sometimes echo their authors, they are our children for a while, after all) – that doesn’t mean that they have no thoughts or feelings. Being confused means you have more than one thought or feeling and you swing between them – that’s why
you’re confused. If your character is confused, the reader needs to know the positions between which the character is swinging. That’s how a reader knows the character is confused, rather than the author.
Let me in, as a reader, and I will add to the person you made, care for them, love them. I will take them far, far away from you and enjoy them as if you had never existed. If you do your job well, you will be invisible – which is the opposite of exposed.
Ninth. HAVE NO FEAR.
In fact, you may well be afraid during your progress towards the finished piece. That’s reasonable and normal. If you’re not, you may not care enough about your work and its quality. But, if you allow it to stay with you, fear will muffle you, make you anxious and self-conscious and stilted. Fear will make you hide. It will stop you writing. If you can examine what you are afraid of and find out why, then you either have new inspiration or a new task to complete. ‘I can’t write about terrapins – and yet I want to – and yet they scare me.’ Then maybe write about someone who is scared of terrapins, or maybe wait a while, or maybe write about what scares you about terrapins – or maybe find out why you’re wasting your time forcing yourself to do unpleasant things and setting yourself up to fail.
‘I’m afraid this story is no use.’
Then make it better.
‘I’m afraid this isn’t interesting.’
Then make it interesting.
‘This bit’s rubbish.’
Then rewrite it. You get the idea.
If you can lead yourself firmly but kindly onwards, you and your writing will benefit. In short, the creation of character relies on many very simple and familiar processes: asking questions, daydreaming, meeting people and getting to know them, being human. These are brought together and allowed to interact and interrelate until they form something which is hopefully complex and apparently capable of genuine, compelling life. The complexity comes from simple elements and the writer’s understanding of how they work together and change each other. With luck and application, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and something that has been fastidious, obsessional, painstaking and occasionally frustrating will seem – to your readers – effortless, inevitable, even beautiful. We can at least aspire to that and see how far we get.
Proof of Life
THIS IS A voice. My voice. And yours also. Together, we are speaking in your head, ghosting in your mouth, firing in your mind: meanings, resonances, memories, the newness and familiarity of words. These are sounds that need never exist beyond the privacy of thought, sounds I might never be able to make as neatly as this in person, but here they are singing, nonetheless. You let them sing.
And clearly this is also writing: not quite literature – an essay. This is marks on paper. For me, this is currently marks on a screen: dark little fiddles walking out in lines across blank space, a code we may both agree to break, understanding in conveniently different ways. But, above all, this is voice.
At this point, I have to relax. I don’t find it easy to relax. I usually suspect that if I give way to relaxation I will become in some way dangerous. In my present context, this belief is unhelpful and so I ignore it. I lie face down and concentrate. When I inhale – as instructed – my stomach presses snugly into the padded mat beneath me. My torso is used to this process now and enjoys it. When I exhale – as instructed – I almostsoundlessly open my mouth as if I am saying ‘Aw’. My mouth enjoys this. I imagine myself as a thing which lives at belly height, which draws in and pushes out breath – my proof of life. I enjoy this.
Although we often use the language of the spoken word to describe its written counterpart – tone, rhythm, melody, musicality and so forth – I have long been surprised by how little attention is given to the reality of voice in writers’ lives. There are clear connections between an individual’s voice on the page, the voice in which they carry on their own interior narratives and the voice with which they address the world. Improve someone’s mastery of one voice and the others also strengthen as they grow, adapt and change. Undermine or muffle one and the others will also suffer. It puzzles me that these interrelations are rarely discussed or explored amongst writers, even though writing is difficult, even though I know I’m not the only one looking for any and every assistance, all possible paths to improvement. The literary and academic worlds seem to prefer a model of writing within which dignified thinkers move letters about on pages – no sound, no breath, no sweat. This appears beguilingly safe, but may constitute a form of suffocation.
The impact of audible failure for a writer can be huge. An author’s ability to read work effectively to an audience has always been commercially useful, but it can also lend a sense of genuine power and confidence. It can root work in the face-to-face reality of human communication. When a reading goes wrong, listeners may not be able to forgive either the writer or their poorly delivered writing. And at a very personal level, hearing one’s own words falter out loud in the real world, knowing them to be badly offered and badly received, can be devastating. One whole element – an increasingly required element – of the author’s life can become a succession of perceived narrow escapes and outright humiliations. The sound of one’s own voice may become more or less definitely linked with nerve-racked acts of public self-destruction. Who wouldn’t want to avoid that? What author, what human being, wouldn’t be interested in establishing a virtuous cycle within which the thought, the spoken and the written word might be able to nourish and support each other? Who wouldn’t be interested in sounding like themselves, but in deeper and more effective ways?
Why wouldn’t finding your voice help you find your voice?
I am breathing in and out. No thinking. No stress. Relax the head, neck, throat – which, of course, immediately tense when I give them my attention, which is a kind of thinking and I shouldn’t think too much here, I should trust . . . So I try to ignore the stresses. I let myself untie myself while I keep on with the in and out and being soft, being a soft thing, and being here and being now.
When we speak to each other, we have to be here and we have to be now. The transaction is uncomplicated. And within it – horrifyingly, beautifully – there is nowhere to hide.
In 1983 I was a Theatre Studies and Drama student. Which is to say, I was hiding. I had embarked upon a three-year course which would be not quite theatrical enough to produce a performer and not quite academic enough to make me feel pressured in any real way. I had committed myself to remaining uncommitted. I didn’t even turn up to my own graduation.
I was already a nascent writer, had many of the tribe’s characteristics: good at English and a small range of clevernesses, often sharper on the page than in person, a loner, and with a growing disconnection between thought and emotion, the body and the skull.
Not that I didn’t have passion. I had fallen in love with words – books lit my childhood, were a kind of blessing. And I adored words when spoken in others, could be moved by the theatre as by nothing else. The sense of words in my own mouth – they never reached much further into my body than that – was fascinating, but I was mainly bewildered by my love and I also knew that if I once genuinely tried to express it, then I would probably fail. I didn’t want to fail.
I was not unaware that, by avoiding failure, I had guaranteed it, boxed myself in. And then something happened: a moment of true education. A voice specialist was brought in to take our class one day. I hated her on sight for no tangible reason, beyond the facts that she was offensively comfortable in her own skin and far too audible. I was generally neither. The specialist stood us in a line and gave each of us one word from a complete sentence. We then had to say our words in order, say the sentence. And we did try. But the sentence fought us at every syllable and won. We sounded dreadful: unintelligible and powerless.
I had already decided this was a waste of time – like poncing about in a leotard had been, like talking to chairs, like spending weeks prodding at my already sparse interior marbles in order to say a
total of ten words during a production of Marat/Sade in a suitably barmy way. I was angry – because I was scared. Here and now was something else I couldn’t do. And yet I did want to be here and now. I enjoyed the security of being given words to say and things to do – being stared at by an audience felt like a relieving lack of responsibility. And in everyday life – unpredictable everyday life – people did speak to each other and this seemed a rather fundamental skill to lack. I wanted to do and be better, but I felt, as on many other occasions, like a balled-up mumble with feet.
The specialist then told us that for the duration of the workshop we would be working with our words – one word each. Three hours, if I remember correctly, for one word. My word was the.
Yeah.
I duly and with bad grace said, shouted and whispered the, lay on the floor with the, ran with the, ran away from the, reinvented the as a sodding movement – oh, spare me. I progressed from furious, to hopeless and then calm.
The.
And finally we lined back up and said our words again – same words – but now the sentence lived and owned us and we owned it and were friends and we were together very beautiful. We sounded good. My voice had just proved it could sound good. And I had learned, entirely against my will, that simply establishing a real relationship with the definite article would probably take me a week. I moved from hating the voice specialist – whose name I regret I now cannot remember – to being in awe of her mystical skills and signing up for what I think were two available extra sessions, along with a few of my equally keen companions. In those sessions I got a tiny idea of the way a voice can lodge in the chest, or the face, or the throat, or the stomach: its sensitivity to confusion and stress. My voice seemed to me like some ridiculously wilful and delicate animal: scare it and it would disappear, feed it and it could make a sense that could even exist without my intellect’s interference. And here I was in a place of safety, feeding it words that I already loved and trusted, words that can baffle you one moment and slot in under your feet to lift you up the next. I was given a piece of Shakespeare writing for Burbage: an author tailor-making a part for a time and a voice, but building to last. Giving the words the small thing that was my full attention – including my physical attention – snapped them into a response, an immediacy that any writer would long to create. In under the layers of meaning was a continuity of breath across centuries, of dense and demanding lines still governing the in and the out long after their author’s death, their original performer’s death, the so many other performers’ rising and falling and fading away.
On Writing Page 28