characters

What Comes First? The Characters or the Plot?

~ ChanAtkins ~ 8 Comments

 

What comes first? The characters of the plot? I guess the answer is different for every writer, and often different for every book. I’ve been thinking about this since one of my daughters showed a rare interest in my writing and asked me what came first; my characters or my plots? My immediate answer was the characters, as this is how it so often feels. But as I went through the novels one by one, I had to admit that it’s different each time. For example, The Boy With The Thorn In His Side was an idea that grew into a character, followed by a more complex plot. The Tree of Rebels, which will be my next release, was undoubtedly plot before characters, more so than any other book I’ve written. I’ve blogged before about how difficult this made the process, and how it has taken longer for me to understand my characters and feel comfortable with them. With Elliot Pie (a book only in its first draft) it was the character first, but his character, in being someone who was intrinsically curious about strangers, was the plot. So they evolved simultaneously.

Having thought about it for some time I realised that my novels, This Is Nowhere and The Mess Of Me both have something in common. They were both written in the same way. I had the character first, and then had to create a plot to go with them.

I’m not sure this is the best way to write a book, but it’s just the way it worked with these two. With This Is Nowhere, I had the character in my head for some time, and with the character came the whole feel and tone of the book. Slightly sombre, dark around the edges, yet gentle, confused, struggling through mystery. I knew the character was a male in his late twenties or early thirties, and I knew he was rootless and aimless, a drifter. He had never grown up, but why was that? I knew he had a bad relationship with his father but the rest of that came much later. I knew he had a recurring stomach ailment, and had turned his back on the religion he had been brought up with. I had images in my head of a boy running across a sun baked field, though running from what I had no idea. The whole thing seemed to evolve in my head through feelings and images. I got the idea for the plot involving his missing mother when I was walking my dogs in the woods one day. I’m pretty sure, though it is hard to recall now, that my daughter had spoken to me about a missing persons case, and that had set something off in my head. What if this drifter was to return to his small home town in order to find out what happened to his mother, who vanished when he was a child?

With The Mess Of Me it was harder. In this case, I would probably not advise coming up with the character before the plot, although in all honesty I had absolutely no control over this!

Lou Carling started talking to me when I was about half way through writing The Boy With The Thorn In His Side. This was fantastic to me at the time. Having had a long break from writing, in tackling The Boy I was giving it all a go again, seeing if I still had the urge and the passion. When Lou started talking and grumbling, I was overjoyed because I had that feeling again. Of fireworks and ideas exploding in my head, of panic and excitement knotting in my belly, of wanting to hurry home to the laptop, of needing to scrawl notes onto scrap paper so I wouldn’t lose a thing. Essentially, Lou let me know that it was back. Writing was back.

I let her babble on for a while, mostly because she really amused me. She had just finished her GCSE’s and had a long summer before A-Levels ahead of her. She was deeply cynical about everything and everyone, and had a rather filthy mouth. Her best friend was a boy called Joe, a lanky, hazel eyed boy whose mother was her mother’s best friend. I could see Lou and hear her. In fact she barely left me alone. She would have constant conversations in my head, really interesting little nuggets of dialogue I just had to scribble down for later. But I had no plot. What was this book going to be about? What was going to happen to her? What did she want? What did she fear?

It took a while, but I got there in the end purely by listening to her, and being witness to the world that started to build around her. The claustrophobic council estate, growing up without money, feeling exasperated and embarrassed by her family. Hating everyone, especially herself.

I’m happy to admit that large parts of Lou are based on me, on my own experiences, on my own views and feelings growing up. In many ways, she is the character closest to me, at that age anyway. But I allowed her more freedom, letting her express herself when I was too shy to. Immensely liberating, I can tell you. The plot I ended up with actually came from a strange childhood memory.

When I was young, my mother had a friend who had five sons. She was a larger than life kind of woman, large in build and large in voice. She would sweep you in for a cuddle and nearly break your bones. She used to make jokes about swapping my mum’s daughters for her sons, and I used to think she was serious, and I was just a little bit afraid of her. I loved going to her house to play though. With her two youngest sons, me and my sister and brother used to trespass onto the grounds of their local school and play games with their pet dog. We would climb and hide in trees and bushes and behind walls and the dog would look for us. I can also remember playing with a huge mound of cardboard boxes in their back garden, making dens out of them, climbing up them and leaping off to crush the boxes below.

Her three older sons were teenagers when we were small. They flitted in and out of the background, and as I was so shy I probably never spoke to any of them. I watched them get the odd clip around the ear. One even had his mouth washed out with soap one day. But they were like mysteries to me. Part of my life, and yet totally unknown. They could have been anyone. They could have had any kind of life without me knowing. I had no idea who they were, where they went to, what they did, or what they dreamed about.

One day we were coming up the front path and one of the teenage boys was sat on the doorstep with his head in his hands looking absolutely miserable. In the cool dark of the kitchen, I overheard my mother’s friend telling my mum he was in so much trouble. They muttered and murmured in there for some time, while he remained on the doorstep. I never did find out what he’d done wrong.

So somehow, for some reason, this all crept into Lou’s world. The house full of boys. The mother on the warpath, driven to distraction by her unruly brood. Having these people you’ve grown up with, and yet never really know. Mysteries that unravel just out of reach and over the heads of young children who are told to go out and play.

The drug running storyline was of course utterly fabricated. It could have been anything really, the trouble the boys were in. Everything else from here on was pure imagination!

In many ways the drug running activities of Joe’s older brothers, and the way both Joe and Lou get pulled into it all, is a sub-plot to the main one, which is simply Lou’s journey over that summer. Her determination to lose weight and get skinny. Her finding herself, without it sounding too much of a cliche, was central to it all.

So that’s the story of The Mess Of Me. Where it came from and how it happened. It is probably my most character driven book, with the plot almost taking a back seat to the characters.

What about you? As a reader, do you ever wonder what came first, the plot or the characters? Can you ever tell?

What about you writers? Is it always the plot first, the characters later? Or the other way around? Which way does it happen for you, and does it make it harder to write if it happens in a way you are not used to?

Feel free to comment below!

 

 

 

 

 

Untold Stories

~ ChanAtkins ~ 7 Comments

I’ve blogged recently about the amount of stories and characters I have in my head. I have also blogged about my struggles with the final draft of my YA novel The Tree Of Rebels, and how I have been constantly distracted by voices from untold stories. In order to keep some of these voices at bay, so that I can finish each project I am on, I have been writing the odd short story for these characters. Has this worked? Well, yes and no! On the one hand, it does feel good to get something out, to relieve a little of the pressure. But on the other hand, it seems that if I allow these people an inch, they will take a mile, and start shouting even louder.

Anyway, I am making great progress with the final draft of The Tree Of Rebels. I am probably only days away from finishing it. I might have mentioned before that I decided to try changing the tense, to see if that worked, and although I can’t be sure until I read through it all, I think it has! So, the plan is, I finish the draft then re-read the whole thing, checking a final time for errors, typos and so on. Then it will be done! What comes next? Well, I do feel I ought to finish my rough plot for the sequel, as it might be a good idea to not let there be too big a gap between the two books, but this won’t take me long. I will then jump into the second draft of my novel Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature. As you might recall, Elliot Pie was a queue jumper! Jumping neatly ahead of the planned sequels to The Tree Of Rebels and The Mess Of Me! He was too insistent to ignore, so he finally got his story told. Once I have done the second draft I will send it to my wonderful beta readers, as I will need feedback on the structure of the novel, as it is a little bit different. What will I do whilst they are reading this?

Ooh, I’m glad you asked! Well, I recently wrote two short stories for a character that was getting impatient. Bill Robinson is one of the characters in a gritty teen drama I first wrote when I was sixteen years old. I never finished the book, and it had always been one I knew I would go back to at some point! Much in the same way I finally finished The Boy With The Thorn In His Side in 2013, after first writing it when I was twelve! Nightprowler and Bird People are both available to read on Wattpad if you are interested. Nightprowler is really a prequel to the novel, an event that happens before it all begins, and Bird People is really a snapshot into the mind and character of Bill.

Anyway, the point of this blog post is untold stories, and how exciting it is once you finally get the chance to tell them. Maya Angelou was quoted as saying that ‘there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you,’ and I think most writers would agree that this is very true. It does become an agony. The desire to write and share, and the noise created by the characters and their lives, can reach unbearable levels if something is not at last released.

With this in mind I went hunting yesterday, and dragged the old suitcase out from under my bed. This suitcase is very important to me because it contains all my old stories, school work, essays and ideas. Luckily for me, I have never thrown anything away. And thank goodness too, because I found what I was looking for, and what a joyous moment that was. This great big hulking binder full of Bill’s story. It didn’t have a title back then, but the working title will now be A Song For Bill Robinson. Everything was right there. A plot (and how exciting to see that I used to plot at age sixteen, the same way I do no! ie a scruffy notepad filled with ideas with ticks on top of them!) character bios, and a whole load of notes and extra bits paper clipped together. More excitingly there is also a map! I used to draw maps of the fictional worlds I created to help me when moving the characters about. There is even a play list of songs, as one of the main plot lines involves Bill entering talent contests in his local community centre as a singer. He hooks up with some other people who play instruments, and the play list was a rough idea of some of the music they might play together.

How exciting! What a find…I knew I still had the unfinished handwritten manuscript, but I had completely forgotten about all the extra bits! I wanted to go back in time and pat my sixteen year old self on the back! Job well done! I can use all this! This is going to be brilliant! I was also impressed to find scraps of paper where I had written things like ‘by chapter 7 we know that Charlie is hiding something, and we know about some of it. We have suspicions of Laura’s private life, some from what she tells us and some from Bill’s own suspicions.’ Ha ha! Nice to know I had a good handle on the whole show not tell thing back then!

I can’t tell you how happy this discovery made me yesterday. This story still has to wait for me to get around to it, but in the meantime it is going to continue to grow and swell and evolve inside my head. I already know lots more about the characters than I did back then. There have been lots of nice, little details striking me lately.

So exciting!!

 

 

 

 

 

Getting To Know Your Characters

~ ChanAtkins ~ 7 Comments

For me, writing is all about the characters. It is the characters who come to me first, with their lives and their problems. I let them set up camp in my head for a bit, try to ignore them while I am busy with other things, and then, inevitably I can’t drown them out and they get the attention they demand. They get to tell their story. By the time I start jotting down notes about them and their story, I already feel like I know them quite well. In fact I usually feel quite smug about it. I do like character led fiction, you see, and it would not be unfair to assert that The Catcher In The Rye is probably my favourite book of all time.

I’ve read it tons of times, and never get bored, yet my husband couldn’t even manage it once. Boring, he said. Nothing really happens, except he moans and worries a lot. He does concede that there is a plot of sorts, one where the character goes on a bit of a jaunt, escapes his reality for a while and goes a little bit crazy in the process, but it was not enough of a plot to hold his interest.

For me, it was a case of falling in love. Feeling like I knew Holden, because Holden was so like me, and if he was real and we met in real life, we would really get along, and he would stop thinking everyone was phony. Anyway…off on a tangent there slightly, but I was trying to explain how important character is to me in fiction. I love it. Can’t get enough of it. Action, drama, suspense and thrills are all great, don’t get me wrong, but they all fall flat without great characters. Give me a few good characters doing not much, over a page turner with unlikable and unbelieveable ones, any day.

Developing characters, making them speak and act and think, is one of the best things about writing. It’s probably my favourite part of the whole thing. Yes I appreciate descriptive prose and beautiful narratives, and yes I have respect for a page-turning plot, and action that peaks and troughs at all the right times, but the characters are everything to me. Stories come from people, without people, there would be no stories.

With me, it is the people, and the stories that come first, and everything else evolves from there. But even so, I have had to admit to myself lately that I don’t know them as well as I think I do when I get started.

I often stumble along in the first draft, making notes, hitting walls, having great writing days followed by abysmal ones, and sometimes it is really hard to pinpoint what it is I’m struggling with. This happened a lot when I was writing the very first draft of what will be my next release, The Tree Of Rebels. You see, for the first time, I had the plot idea first. Weird. Luckily for me I already had a character in my head, and a name, and she had been lingering for a while, maybe wondering where she could slot in. So I used her and got started. I had most of it planned out, but obviously there were surprises along the way as well. My main aim was impressing my daughters and writing something dystopian in nature that would hold their attention and keep them gripped.

Maybe I focused too much on this. Maybe the waiting character I slotted in was not loud enough in my head. Whatever it was, I struggled. Then I realised something. I looked back on all of my novels, even the ones where the voice of the character had come to me before any kind of plot took place, and I realised that this was normal. Of course I didn’t know Lissie Turner that well yet. That was what I was struggling with. I’d gone into it assuming I knew her, assuming I understood her, and oh how wrong I was.

The first draft, no matter how intricately you have planned and described your precious characters, no matter how many lengthy bio’s you have scripted, no matter how many images of them you have found and pinned on Pinterest; the first draft is all about getting to know them. It’s like meeting a stranger for the first time and going on a little, somewhat awkward journey with them. Do they take sugar in tea? You don’t know, so you ask. Which way to they tend to lean politically? You’d like to know, but you’re scared to ask. Do they swear? Do they have a loud, or annoying laugh? How are they going to react when you start throwing hurdles and dilemmas at them?  You think you know, but you don’t.

Realising this really helped me to relax with that awkward first draft. I decided to just get it written, because I had the plot all in place, and that was the main thing to get done. All the themes and ideas and images and so on would work themselves out, would pop up and blend in, and tie up as they often tend to do naturally. And the same would happen with Lissie, and the other characters. By the end of the first draft, I knew them better. We had formed a friendship and would definitely be travelling together again soon. But things were still a tad tense, a tad clumsy.

I jumped into the second draft and saw it for what it was. It was going deeper, getting under the skin, revealing the flaws and the fears and the motives. I had to accept that Lissie was really a stranger to me, and then allow the following drafts to entice her to become known. I had to have faith that this process would happen, and that I would feel I knew her better with every draft I completed. Looking back, this is also what happened with my other books, although admittedly it was definitely easier because the characters started shouting at me before I thought up stories for them… but more and more of them became revealed to me with each draft, edit and rewrite. Now I could easily tell you exactly how any of those characters would react in any situation. I could tell you what they would do, say, think, what their facial expressions would be and so on. To me, they are real people. That is what needs to happen before characters can make the reader believe in them too.

I am just about to dive into the final draft of The Tree Of Rebels, and I cannot tell you how excited I am. It has been a challenge, this book, for many reasons, not least the issue I just explained. I have decided to make some major changes, so the final draft may actually become more of a rewrite, than a last edit.

I am wary of the process and scared I will fail. But one thing I do feel better about. One thing I do feel confident about now. I know Lissie Turner. Finally, truly, I know her inside and out, and that is going to help make this thing work more than anything else!

 

 

 

 

The Gloriously Ugly First Draft

~ ChanAtkins ~ 11 Comments

Two days ago I finished the first draft of a new novel I have been working on. This, as you might imagine, felt wonderful. Finishing a book, albeit a scruffy, clumsy first draft, is a feeling like no other. It completes the circle, from the moment that idea first crept into your mind, to the moment you write the last few words of the last chapter, knowing it is done.

Writing a first draft is not new to me. I have written and published various other books, so I have been here before and experienced this before. But to be honest with you, I have never really taken the time to sit back and think about what it means. To savour, or appreciate the moment. I did celebrate, of course. Several glasses of wine were consumed as I hurtled towards the finish line, not daring to look back. I announced the good news on social media, danced about the house a bit and went to bed feeling really pretty pleased with myself. There was an undeniably satisfying feeling of relief as I got into bed that night. I had done it. It was over, at least for now. I had got the idea from that tiny seed stage, through to its completion, its realisation, its finish. Ahhh, it felt good.

First drafts are a funny, terrible, frightening and beautiful thing. They almost sum up the act of writing itself. The first draft is the start, the tender, doubtful beginnings. It is full of hope and promise and potential. Even when you are half way through, it still feels so new, so unknown and could change at any moment, becoming something else entirely. First drafts are lovely and ugly. They tease and torment you. As a writer, you are forever wondering if the book you are writing will ever live up to the expectations of the book you have in your head.

So what is the story of a first draft? I will tell you the story of mine, of this particular book anyway, as they all have different stories, different beginnings and came from totally different places. Quite often I can’t remember where the idea for a book came from at all.

This idea came about a year ago. I had just started writing the first draft for a YA novel called The Tree Of Rebels. As usual, this was another idea I had played with for a year or so, and now its turn to be written had finally arrived. Phew. Ready set go. I had my notebook, my ideas, my timeline, my goals and my characters. I couldn’t wait to start and I knew it was going to be real challenge, mainly because I have yet to write a dystopian novel set in the future. I knew I had a lot of work to do. A lot of serious research.

And then, out one day with the dogs, and thinking, like you do, about people, and the world, and how awful and cruel it can be, and wondering how we are ever meant to make sense of it or learn to live with it…I heard a little voice. At first I thought she was a girl, but perhaps because the main character of The Tree Of Rebels was a girl, eventually she became a boy. Elliot. Don’t ask me where his name came from either, as I do not have a clue.

Elliot was at his bedroom window, looking out at his world. It was a small, neat world, made up of small, box-like houses, and full of busy, stressed out people who scurried past his house and his life, living theirs. He watched and he listened and he was quite alone. I told him to go away. I ignored him, because I had this very important dystopian to write, you see, I had Lissie Turner’s story to tell now! But he kept coming back during that walk, and by the time I came home I had the first few paragraphs of the novel, his novel, all ready to be written. And I ran in and wrote them down. I didn’t know really what the book would be about, or what would happen, or what the themes would be, or anything, but I was getting a glimpse of him, and what he was seeing and feeling. It was annoying, I have to tell you. I had written and released four novels, and The Tree Of Rebels was next. Why did this kid, whoever he was, have to barge in now? With his comments and his statements and his character already shining through? God, it was annoying.

But how can you ignore something like that? Within days, Elliot’s character and Elliot’s world had overtaken mine, and he was in nearly all of my thoughts. I knew what his problem was. His mother was developing agoraphobia. I knew what his other problems were too. A bully at school and no father figure in his life. I knew who he was, what he looked and sounded like, how he dressed, that he was a mad Doctor Who fan, that his precious Uncle Liam was missing, presumed dead, and that he had this strong and beautiful and innocent desire to just connect with people. To just know people, talk to people, laugh and chat and spend time with people. But this would be a risky thing to do, would it not? It had to be strangers, you see. He wanted to branch out. He wanted to prove his mother wrong. And now I had her too, Laura. All the shaking layers of guilt and rage and hatred that had piled up on her over her life, and why, I knew why. And I knew that as she became more desperate, cutting herself from a world she could not bear to be part of, her son, Elliot, would do the opposite.

And then something would happen. Elliot would go missing.

A year ago, just about to start writing The Tree Of Rebels, I knew all this about other goddammn book. I can’t really complain. I am privileged to have these people invade my mind on a constant basis. What would I do without them? So I did all I could do. I made notes and character profiles, jotted down dialogue and loosely plotted the story. And then I pushed it to one side and wrote The Tree Of Rebels. Which I then had to rewrite. Then rewrite again, and so on.

Elliot just had to wait and wait. There was one point when some beta readers had an early draft of The Tree Of Rebels, and I thought, well I’ve got nothing to do until they’ve read it and got back to me! So I grabbed Elliot Pie and started writing. Of course this then got interrupted and it wasn’t until around June of last year that I could really dedicate the time to it.

And as with all my other first drafts, the process went a bit like this;

‘This is the best thing ever, I am such a good writer, I am so glad I finally have the time for this, this happens next, now this, on we go, yes, yes, yes, oh now hold on, that beginning was a bit slow wasn’t it? Let’s go back and change it a few hundred times. Okay let’s move on, it’s shit, I see that now, but it will be shit, it’s the first draft, just let it be shit and accept the shitness and just get to the end, get it done! Okay, okay, averaging half a chapter a night, always leave it hanging, so I’m excited to get back to it the next, no real blocks, just shit writing every now and again but just ignore that, and keep going, very clumsy, very clunky, ugh, don’t look, don’t look back, don’t read it, just get to the end, get to the finish line, oh my god this really is total shit, even the idea is shit! The message, what message? What am I even trying to say here? Do I want to say anything? It’s all getting confused and messy. Ugh, ugh, torture, yuk, don’t look, really this is very gross but keep going anyway, because you know what happens so just get the bare bones down, the basics, the skeleton then worry later, and oh, here we go, yes, yes, this is all making sense again now! Whoop-eeeee! Yes, because yes, because she did that because that happened and that’s why he does that, but no one knows, and this comes out later and oh yes, of course they would do that, and yes, yes, yes, this is wonderful actually, this is perfect, better than I thought it would be..oh no crap city, just stop, just give up now for the love of God! Okay I’m done. Oh shit. I did it!’typewriter-751566_1280

The best thing is knowing you didn’t give up. Knowing you did your best and didn’t get sidetracked, climbed over the walls and the humps and got around every corner and raced on to the end. Yes it is shoddy. Yes it will need sooooooo much rewriting and reworking and messing about with, just like all my other books. The first draft is just the baby. It’s really still so small and new and helpless. I’ve got to pad it out and make it grow, help it to shine. That’s when the real hard work starts! Now I owe it to the story and the characters who came to me to really, really make it as good as it can be.

But not yet.

It has to do its sitting and stewing and breathing now, just like The Tree Of Rebels did. Because I thought that book was done, and was just waiting patiently for me to whizz through Elliot Pie before I gave it its final shine. But no, not quite. Things happened to it while it was sat alone. Things changed and grew and evolved, and oh how glad I am I made it wait this long. Waiting is good. I know more now. I have seen the light!

Time to dive into the final draft of this one and make it work.  I cannot wait to see what happens to Elliot Pie’s first draft while it’s waiting though…