Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Using Real People in Fiction

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I recently read a well-reviewed crime novel called American By Day, by Derek B. Miller, in which a Norwegian detective travels to America to track down her estranged brother, who’s implicated in the death of his girlfriend. He’s hiding in a forested wilderness beside a lake, and to get to him first, she sabotages the local police force’s boats and sends a SWAT team, run by a shoot-first-ask-questions-later knucklehead, to the wrong address. They break their way into the mansion, only to be confronted by actress Sigourney Weaver who’s staying at her director friend Ang Lee’s home while he’s away making a movie. She was the perfect strong female character to prick the ego of the arrogant SWAT team commander. In the Thanks To credits at the end of the book, the author apologises to Sigourney Weaver for using her in this way. I wonder what she made of it.

Of course, factual historical novels interpret the lives of real people, imagining what their lives were like. I enjoyed Alice Hoffman’s The Marriage of Opposites, about the life of painter Camille Pisarro and his mother Rachel, and Lamentation, the sixth novel in C.J. Sansom’s excellent series about the life of Matthew Shardlake, a lawyer who interacts with the Royal household of King Henry VIII. George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo about the mourning of President Lincoln for his dead son was a tremendous feat of storytelling and unlike anything else I’ve ever read, for its unusual structure.

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These novels feature historical characters as protagonists, but what about mentioning real famous people in a novel set in modern times? There are potential problems to do with defamation of character, that could lead to a charge of libel.

This tends to happen with newspaper stories, rather than fiction, but there have been cases of famous authors being clobbered with a libel lawsuit.

More recently, Scarlett Johansson won a lawsuit against a French author, who portrayed a character similar to her as wildly promiscuous. The payout to her was so low, that it hardly looks like punishment!

In writing a contemporary novel, it’s pretty much impossible to not mention what’s happening in the news—and that could include naming names and your characters’ reaction to what politicians, Royalty, famous actors and musicians and mere celebrities have said or done. How could a novel set in the U.S.A. in 2019 not allude to The Orange One who is currently President?

These days, so many lines are crossed when it comes to personal privacy, what with social media, hacking, sales of personal data and CCTV surveillance of our lives, that it’s as if we no longer care very much about preserving our dignity. There’s a pervasive sense of entitlement that has developed in modern times, that we have a right to know about someone’s life. It’s something that we, as authors, need to consider when it comes to wording the bio that appears on our blogs and websites, our publisher’s profile of their clients and even the mini-bio on the cover of our book.

I freely admit that while I resent the idea of becoming public property, to promote my own books, I still enjoy finding out about the lives of authors. I’m always puzzled when I find a novel that doesn’t have a photograph of the author on the cover flap. What are they—hideous?!

Given that it’s unavoidable that we’re putting ourselves up for grabs—as citizens and as authors—should we have a conscience about using real people in our stories? Famous people can be touchy about privacy. It surely depends on how much detail we go into. In one of my Cornish Detective novels, I peripherally referred to the British Royal Family, when the Princes were visiting Rock, a favoured playground of the wealthy, as a loss of police personnel to guard them and control public access to roads, affected the action in my plot, allowing an offender to escape.

I’ve also used a couple of ordinary people as a basis for fictional characters, friends who gave me permission to use details of their lives as a social worker and visual artist. I haven’t had their fictional doppelgängers say anything that’s contrary to their own viewpoint—I always send them extracts to check.

Have you placed real people in your stories?

Do any of your relatives, friends (or enemies) appear on the pages of your novel?

Have you read any stories where a famous person made an unexpected appearance?

Writing

Colophons

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A colophon is a publisher’s emblem, usually printed on the title page of a book. In olden times, it meant an inscription at the end of a book or a literary composition—often naming the author and scribe (who copied it) and the printer, with the place and date of execution, etc.—as happens on a title page today.

A logo is a modern way of describing an emblem—a visual representation of a brand. A company’s trademark includes a logo, slogan and the font used. Some of the best-known publishers’ colophons or logos are the birds of Penguin Books and its imprint Puffin Books (children’s non-fiction) and Pelican (adult non-fiction)

Puffin Books logo.png

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Of more recent publishers, I’m fond of the Galley Beggar Press demon:

I’ve seen colophons used to mark chapter and section breaks, such as this:

In modern times, with the rise of self-publishing, it makes sense for authors to add a logo to their brand. After all, think of how musician Prince used a visual image, or glyph, to defy his record company Warner Brothers and to denote his identity.

There are some great examples of designs for author colophons in this article.

I’ve already got an emblem, which I intend to use when I return to self-publishing. It came to the Whybrow family courtesy of our Wyber ancestors, who were among the invading Norman army in 1066. Wyber means ‘mighty castle’ in the ancient Norman language, and curious about this, in the 1970s I traced the location of the original castle in Normandy—which had been reduced to few scattered stones covered in poo in a field of sheep! I also traced my forebears’ family crest, which was the commonly found castle turret, sheep and bags of wool (a source of medieval wealth), one sack of gold and a strange red heart with a devil’s tail.

I don’t know what happened to the sack of gold, but I’ve used the demonic heart as a symbol on motorcycle crash helmets for 40 years. I briefly self-published under the pen name Augustus Devilheart, but reverted to my own name, as it was too much fuss to remember who I was!

What symbol would you use for your books?

Writing

Migrating Characters

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Having fictional characters wander from one book to another, isn’t that common, but it does take place. I’m not talking about a series of stories, but standalone novels.

In 2018, I enjoyed reading David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks which requires a high level of attention from the reader, as the novel takes the form of six loosely interlinked stories dating from 1984 to 2043.

As some links connected and other elements fell away, I found myself remembering one character doing things that weren’t in this book, but I figured he resembled another character by a different author. Then, I read the afterword by Mitchell on reappearing characters, in which he justifies using the same person in different books. The doctor in The Bone Clocks I recalled had already been in his The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I read a few years ago.

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There are examples of wandering characters in classic literature. Falstaff is seemingly killed off in Shakespeare’s Henry V, but reappears in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, Kim Newman, Isaac Asimov and Thomas Pynchon have all used this crossover device. If a character is popular, then it makes sense to do so, and also, there are universal characteristics shared by professions, so if an author has already created a fully-rounded portrayal of, say, a psychologist, why not have them see more than one patient in different books?

In the world of television drama, there’s been a detective character called John Munch, who’s appeared in at least eight different series. Played by Richard Belzer, Munch first appeared in Homicide: Life On The Street, but has turned up in shows as diverse as The X-Files, 30 Rock and The Wire.

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Crossover characters are common in comics and graphic novels, where superheroes assist one another. Film studios have fearsome characters meet and fight, in such movies as Alien vs Predator and King Kong vs Godzilla. Cartoon characters from different series frequently encounter one another—look at the number of guest appearances that have taken place on The Simpsons by characters from other shows.

Once a character has left copyright protection and is in the public domain, they can be abducted and used for whatever purpose an author devises.

I was pondering all of this, and wondering how I could use it as a writing technique when I realised that I already had! In 2013, when I returned to creative writing, I penned a novella called Is It Her? which was inspired by fuss in the media over assisted suicide. There was much debate about the morality of voluntary euthanasia, but what no one mentioned was how the partner and family of the dead person carried on with their lives. I decided to write a love story where a widower is eased into singledom by measures his terminally ill wife took before they journeyed to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.

One of the things he agrees to do is visit a counsellor, to talk about his feelings, and inspired by this he decides to visit a Shiatsu massage therapist. Alex turns out to be a stranger from his past, who offers a second chance at romance. The story was written with an eye on the women’s magazine market, so is maybe more sentimental than my normal style, and it gives the reader what they hope will happen—a happy ending.

While writing my fourth Cornish Detective novel, my protagonist is troubled by a stiff back—a result of being kicked by an offender while making an arrest twenty years before—so, he seeks treatment. As I already had Alex operating in the same town, why not use her again? In another crossover twist, my copper rather fancies Alex, but then her boyfriend, the widower from the novella arrives to collect her from work.

Have any of you ever used a fictional character from one book in a separate standalone story?

Do you have any favourite crossover characters or mashups of genres in fiction, film or television?

I’ve long thought that having clueless Beavis & Butt-Head meet the anarchic kids from South Park would be a riot. How about Homer from The Simpsons and Hank Hill from King of The Hill as neighbours?

Writing

When the Baddies Win

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Traditionally, fictional heroes win out over villains. Imagine how traumatised children would be if the wicked witch succeeded with her evil spells or the dragon dined on the knight in armour.

As we grow older, becoming ambivalent about life and what is right and wrong, we look for stories with a double edge. It’s truer to life if the hero is flawed and the baddie isn’t all bad: with protagonist and antagonist showing their humanity there’s more at stake in the outcome of their struggle.

Nonetheless, having the bad guy win, or at least seem to win, is one hell of a shock for the reader—especially, if they’re expecting a happy ending in the latest of a series of novels. But then, the villain of a story usually doesn’t consider himself to be a bad person and believes that he’s justified in doing what he does, even if it’s against the laws of the land or normal social rules. He is his own hero. He has supporters or at least fans who are interested in his fate. It’s criminals who are remembered through the ages, not the law officers who captured or killed them.

If anything, the antagonist justifies their actions more eloquently than the hidebound protagonist, who’s essentially trying to maintain the status quo. Think of the rousing speeches of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, with his “Greed is good“, Colonel Nathan Jessup in A Few Good Men declaring “You can’t handle the truth”, and Harry Lime’s ‘Cuckoo clocks’ dismissal of the Swiss in The Third Man.

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Perhaps the best speech given by the villain of a story is the dying lament of Roy Batty, the replicant who shows his humanity in Blade Runner.

It’s worth remembering a couple of things about storytelling when deciding the role of your villain:

Story as such can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely, it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.

E. M. Forster

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

Robert Frost

The baddie drives the story, providing the surprises. There’s no progress without friction—a slippery road leads to wheelspin and loss of control—bad guys are the rock salt that thrusts the action forward, gripping the reader.

Antiheroes are a convenient way of combining the good and the bad. Dirty Harry springs to mind, as do Hannibal Lecter, Dexter and Walter White.

Pure villains sometimes win….Dutch author Tim Krabbé wrote a novella called The Golden Egg, in which the hero obsesses over the mysterious disappearance of his lover years before, after she was abducted. He traces the kidnapper, and willingly pays the ultimate sacrifice to discover her fate, by being sedated then buried alive. That such an evil criminal gets away with his crimes is breathtaking. The story was turned into a brilliant French-Dutch film called The Vanishing, and a dire American remake, despite having the same director!

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Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men was turned into a successful film, and once again the main antagonist, a psychopath assassin called Anthony Chigurh, survives after killing multiple times.

Jason Webster has his detective hero Max Camara seemingly killed off by a corrupt colleague in Fatal Sunset…on the very last page! It made me eager to read the next story in the series. Moriarty apparently killed Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem, but public outcry forced Conan Doyle to bring him back to life nine years later for The Hound Of The Baskervilles. Dennis Lehane has shock deaths at the end of his three Coughlin series novels which made me quite angry when I finished the first one, and I read the two sequels with an eye on which of the good guys was going to get the bullet.

While planning my last Cornish Detective novel, The Dead Need Nobody, I came across a quote by Robert Louis Stevenson, that influenced the plotting:

If you’re going to have a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.

Accordingly, I’ve written several foreshadowing incidents, hinting at my protagonist’s doom, which an alert reader might notice, though, he’s blissfully unaware of how malefic they are.

Having the baddie succeed, and remain alive and uncaptured, means they live on in readers’ memories. Think of The Wicker Man, Rosemary’s Baby and Gone Girl that all received critical and public acclaim and which continue to haunt us.

In my own Cornish Detective novels, the baddies are usually arrested, but in The Perfect Murderer, which had two killers operating independently, both escaped justice. One committed suicide after leaving a full confession, the other disappeared into a sinkhole—eaten up by the earth in what felt like divine retribution—I may resurrect him.

The Dead Need Nobody features four petty criminals and one homicidal mastermind. Two of the minor villains get arrested, while two evade detection, and the main baddie almost kills my protagonist detective, who violently defends himself. Both lie at death’s door in the final chapter, which feels like a hollow victory for the police.

Have you ever written a story where the baddie wins…even if it’s only temporarily, perhaps as part of a series? It could be some temptress stealing a friend’s husband away, or one colleague betraying another to grab promotion at work.

Do you have any favourite fictional villains, who always win?

Which baddies stalked your dreams as a child…and give you the creeps as an adult?

I recall a vivid nightmare involving the Daleks, who were killing everyone they’d locked inside a cathedral.

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I was trying to hide among the dead, terrified of being exterminated—which was something I’d read about survivors of Nazi concentration camps doing—in history books that were far too gruesome for youngster me to be reading. These days, my nightmare monsters tend to be anonymous, sometimes having clouded faces, but they still represent right-wing oppression.

Writing

T.M.I.—Too Much Information

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It’s very easy when in the throes of writing to give too much information away. In structuring my crime novels, I frequently need to adjust the order of events, altering where I tell the reader something crucial—even if it seems unimportant at the time.

Writers like to write, so it’s tempting to dump too much detail into the narrative, much of which needs hacking away during editing. A newbie writer throws everything at the page: an experienced author is merciless in judging the worth of what they’ve penned, destroying most of it to improve the flow.

Good storytelling never gives you four; it gives you two plus two….Don’t give the audience the answer; give the audience the pieces and compel them to conclude the answer. Audiences have an unconscious desire to work for their entertainment. They are rewarded with a sense of thrill and delight when they find the answers themselves.

Bob Peterson (Co-Writer of Finding Nemo, on what he calls The Unifying Power of Two Plus Two)

Think, for a moment, about how a comedian tells a joke. There’s the setup, the premise of the situation being described, with a bare minimum of detail—only what’s relevant—and this is often includes misdirection (red herrings), before the punchline brings the joke to an end…providing a sense of relief or surprise for the listener. Humour is often based on things that we’re afraid of happening to us, so even short jokes contain suspense. The plot of a story should do too, which can partly be done by the withholding of information and directing the audience’s gaze elsewhere, before the grand reveal. Standup comedians and magicians do this.

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

Christopher Morley

When describing a new character, I tend to avoid doing it up front as soon as they appear—listing their height, build, hair colour, complexion etc, like in a passport application or criminal record file. Instead, I spread information out, as they talk and do things—retrieving something from a high shelf for a colleague, which indicates their height, putting their spectacles on to read fine print or having someone notice that she’s stained the skin of her forehead with hair dye. This means my readers need to pay attention, but I hope that this drip-feed technique is stimulating.

One of my favourite crime writers, Walter Mosley, does just the opposite in his Leonid McGill series. His private investigator protagonist is self-conscious about his height, and compensates for his shortness by being a snappy dresser, and also working out at a boxing gym—which has given him a stocky, muscled physique. Whenever he meets someone, be they strangers or old acquaintances, Leonid mentions their height, their clothing and build. It’s unusual for an author to poke fun at his hero in such a sly way.

In my last novel I slid incidental details into describing my Cornish Detective protagonist, to build a fuller image of him as he ages. For instance, while prowling Saint Ives, questioning artists on a hot summer’s day, his forehead is smarting from the heat, making him realise that his hairline is receding—he resolves to buy a sunhat—then worries that he won’t be take seriously by witnesses.

Withholding too much information will irritate a reader, but they like knowing things that the MC doesn’t, which gives them a feeling of power, a personal involvement in the outcome of the story.

Do you keep information back in your plots?

Have you dropped any surprises on your reader?

Do you use false clues to mislead them?

How do you avoid information dumps? This is a tricky predicament for me, when including forensic details about an autopsy. Some readers might get a macabre thrill from the gore, but I don’t want to obscure essential clues that alter the course of the investigation.

Writing

Being a Writer

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This New Yorker article made me smile, as I recognised myself in many of the traits of what it means to be a writer.

I particularly related to, ‘The lines blur between the Writer and the characters he creates on the page. At times, he is unsure where his life stops and theirs begins.‘

I sometimes wonder whether my characters are haunting me—or am I haunting them, by blundering onto the pages of the story I’m creating to direct their actions? We follow one another around, that’s for sure.

Writing

Shock Horror!

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In classic literature there are shocking incidents that stand out, being more memorable than the rest of the novel. Things such as Sherlock Holmes seemingly dying during a fight with his arch-rival Moriarty, after plunging from the Reichenbach Falls in The Adventure of The Final Problem—though Conan Doyle resurrected him for The Hound of the Baskervilles. Unexpected death is a great way of scandalising the reader—and it can happen in horrific or matter of fact ways.

As a child, I recall being appalled by the death of the kestrel in A Kestrel for a Knave, by Barry Hines.

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The death of Piggy towards the end of the William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies was unpredictable. Roald Dahl was merciless in the fate of his narrator hero in The Witches, a boy who gets turned into a mouse by the witches, before having part of his tail chopped off—although he defeats the witches, he’s still a mouse at the end of the story and even with his grandmother to look after him, he faces an early death. Unsurprisingly, the Hollywood adaptation saw him transformed back to a boy—outraging Dahl.

I recently read James Lee Burke’s Robicheaux, the 21st story in his series about a Louisiana detective. Although I’ve read all of the series, I was still shocked at how Dave Robicheaux descended into alcoholism after the accidental death of his wife in a road accident, after being clean and sober for years. Suffering a blackout, he’s implicated in the death of a loathsome criminal, who likely caused the collision with his wife. This scumbag is also abusing his own son, but he ends up dying from a horrific beating and torture with a drill. Robicheaux can’t remember if he did it, so there was a lot of dramatic tension: I couldn’t believe what I was reading, and roared through the 464 pages in a couple of days.

Image result for James Lee Burke's Robicheaux

It’s hard to be shocked at what I’m writing in my own crime novels, though putting a manuscript away for a couple of years, before reading it as a reader certainly helps. It’s satisfying to catch the reader out with a bombshell, but sometimes a surprise can be telegraphed well in advance, giving the reader the pleasure of having guessed what will happen before my protagonist detective does.

In my Cornish Detective stories, I’ve included some shocking incidents, including:

*The murder of the deputy detective by a serial killer they’re hunting.

*Incestuous twin brothers, who are part of a human trafficking and gunrunning operation.

*Cannibal murderers, a husband & wife team with pagan beliefs, who consume their victims to gain their strength.

*A mummified corpse, that has been sitting undiscovered for five years in a remote farmhouse.

*A sinkhole opening up which swallows a serial killer hiding in a prehistoric burial chamber, just as he’s been cornered by detectives. (My two readers both called that a ‘WTF moment!’)

In my last story, The Dead Need Nobody, there was another shocking ending, when the protagonist detective is stabbed; he’s in a coma in the closing chapter.

Do you have any favourite shock horror moments from literature?

Have you ever been outraged by an author’s plot twist? This happened to me in one of Dennis Lehane’s novels (I won’t say which one), in which he casually killed off the heroine on the last page, someone who’d strived to be with the hero for the whole story. I felt like punching the author on the nose!

Have you written any gruesome and upsetting scenes? Things that shocked your readers….

Writing

Animals as Symbols

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Last year, I read a crime novel by John Hart called The Last Child, which is a grim tale of child abduction, paedophilia and murder; the sexual abuse is skated over, but the violence isn’t. I previously enjoyed the author’s Redemption Road which was very dark, so I knew his style.

Incidentally, The Last Child is now being touted as the first in a series featuring protagonist 13-year-old Johnnie Merrimon, who rather hijacked the story, making the lead detective look like a plodding irrelevance. My British copy doesn’t mention that it’s the first in a series, so I’m guessing that reader feedback prompted this move, for Johnnie Merrimon is a believable and charismatic character. Any writer of MG/YA would do well to read about his search for his abducted twin sister and missing father—even if they don’t normally read crime novels.

Image result for John Hart The Last Child,

The cover shows two menacing crows, which initially made me groan, as it seems as if every other crime novel has a cover with crows wheeling around the sky, even if they don’t feature in the story. John Hart does include crows as a symbol of dread and death, as well as a false clue in how an antagonist mispronounces the word ‘crow’.

As a creature crows have appeared in myth, legend and literature countless times. For one thing, they’re eerily intelligent birds, able to remember peoples’ faces and how they were treated by them, but reading The Last Child made me contemplate how to handle the animals who appear in my crime novel series for their roles as symbols. For a start, my protagonist detective shares his life with a feral silver tabby, a cat he rescued from a crime scene. Bastet has similar characteristics to his host—something that cat owners might appreciate more than the detective does at the moment.

I’ve also been using seagulls as symbols, for the last story was set in the art colony of Saint Ives, which has a notorious colony of thieving gulls. The antagonist is a murdering art gallery owner, who’s haunted by one gull in particular, which nests on the roof of his property and appears to be following him around, as he sees it all over town. Sinisterly, its yellow beak has a huge blotch of scarlet, instead of the usual small spot, as if it’s been dipping it in blood. Sailors have long held the belief that seagulls and seals are the reincarnated souls of drowned sailors.

It’s always surprised me when authors don’t include any animals at all in their stories, especially if it’s located where there’d be flocks of birds and herds of wild and domestic mammals. Some writers frequently mention wildlife, such as Henning Mankell in his Swedish Detective Wallander series, in which his hero often sees hares around the town of Ystad, sometimes hitting one in his car. The behaviour of the hares reflects the detective’s state of mind.

Have you used animals as symbols in your stories?

Are there any books you’ve read which use creatures well?

Writing

Are Authors Arrogant?

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Hilary Mantel reckoned that:

The most helpful quality a writer can cultivate is self-confidence—arrogance, if you can manage it. You write to impose yourself on the world, and you have to believe in your own ability when the world shows no sign of agreeing with you.

Wise words indeed, after all, why the hell should anyone want to read your book? You’re an unpublished nobody—how dare you think you’ve written anything good enough to be enjoyed by readers? When submitting queries to cloth-eared literary agents, the whole world of publishing is one big question mark, forcing the author to become an exclamation mark of cockiness! Damn, I’ve just infringed someone’s copyright (see below).

I recently stumbled across a word new to me, which sums up the characteristics needed to be an author who doesn’t give a damn for the opinions of others—menefreghismo.

As a word, I doubt it’ll enter common usage in English…which raises another point—are authors being arrogant by using long words in their stories, or are they demonstrating their love of language, which they hope will be shared by their readers?

As an example of supreme arrogance, in 2018 an author applied to trademark the word ‘cocky’, to protect her romance novels, which include it in the title. To my jaundiced eye, this is more of a clever ploy to gain free publicity, rather than genuine concern about readers buying other authors’ books.

The thing is if you don’t believe in your story, why should anybody else?

I don’t think that’s arrogance. It’s more self-confidence. Quite where delusion fits in depends on the ambition of the author for their story.

Being a writer is lonely and bruising to the soul. Writing guru Steven Pressfield summed it up well: The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell. whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt and humiliation. (From The War of Art)

To counter such misery, he gave this advice (which mentions that word again!)

I’ve no way of knowing the fate of my Cornish Detective novels, but if they have any success, attracting readers who like them, then it would inevitably bring me a certain amount of attention. I’m too stoical to become arrogant from being in the public eye, which is largely a hoopla of marketing, trying to flog books.

If people love my books, then great, I’ll be glad to have given them a few hours of entertainment—and maybe make them think about things in a different way.

This poem describes the sort of fame I’d like:

Famous

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,   
which knew it would inherit the earth   
before anybody said so.   

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds   
watching him from the birdhouse.   

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.   

The idea you carry close to your bosom   
is famous to your bosom.   

The boot is famous to the earth,   
more famous than the dress shoe,   
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it   
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.   

I want to be famous to shuffling men   
who smile while crossing streets,   
sticky children in grocery lines,   
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,   
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,   
but because it never forgot what it could do.

Naomi Shihab Nye

How cocky, self-confident or arrogant do you feel about your writing?

Are there any arrogant authors that you can’t stand the sight or sound of?

(I find Martin Amis, Jonathan Franzen and Salman Rushdie hard to tolerate)

Have friends and family members ever treated you as being big-headed, for being a writer?

Writing

Talking to Myself

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Living alone, I talk to myself a lot. If I haven’t said anything for a while, I’ve even made myself jump on hearing human speech! We all have internal conversations with ourselves, for that’s how we work out what things are, but actually saying things out loud apparently has value too, according to a scientific study.

It seems that vocalizing the object you’re searching for, helps you to find it, for speech focuses your consciousness on the task in hand. I suspect that all writers do a form of this—I know that I do when searching for a word—I prefer exhausting the options in my mind, before turning to a thesaurus, in the hope that it will better fit the mood of the writing.

Talking to yourself used to be considered a sign of madness, where lunatics were hearing the voices again. These days, with people connected to invisible entities by mobile phones, it’s common to see someone walking along having an animated conversation with no one else in sight. A separate scientific study found that one’s inner voice helps self-control, preventing us from impulsive behaviour. This partly explains the idea of an angel on one shoulder trying to drown out the devil on the other shoulder.

Authors chat to themselves and their characters with familiarity. Edward Albee observed: “I write to find what I’m talking about.”

Dorothy Parker was less modest: “Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.”

An author needs to find their ‘voice’, which establishes their style of writing, revealing their attitudes and personality through the characteristics of word choice, punctuation, dialogue and character development. In finding our voices, it sometimes helps to read our stories aloud, and while we’re bringing them to life, is it any wonder that we also give birth to a doppelgänger, who’s part creator, part reader and part critic? That might sound spooky to someone who hasn’t attempted to write a story, but writing techniques include such things as how the tale sounds:

“Rhythm. A play of syllables and even sounds. I hear sounds in a sort of indescribable way as I write.”

Don DeLillo

It’s normal that we talk to ourselves. I’m not claiming that my solo chattering is in any way profound, and I’m sure that if I carried a voice-activated tape recorder, that I listened to at the end of the day, there’d be a load of gobbledygook punctuated with swear words!

Do you ever get funny looks from family, friends and strangers, when you realise you’ve been talking to yourself about your story?

Have you ever achieved a breakthrough in your WIP by talking to yourself?