Alma Alexander

(…yes, I’m in the middle of it. Why do you ask?)

Here’s the thing. First drafts are supposed to be awful. HTat’s what they are FOR. You simply give yourself the permission necessary to WRITE BADLY if you have to, for the purpose of getting the bones of the story down on the page. There will be time for fixups later. So you do this thing, and the story comes out, and there it is, staring at you. And yea, verily, in your mind’s eye it was ever beautiful – and it’s still marginally lovely – but now that it is outside of you it begins to be glimpsed in its true shape. And there. Are. Imperfections.

Let’s see. THIS can be tweaked. THAT can be fixed. THIS OTHER THING needs to go, really. SOMETHING ELSE needs to be written, and added in, to add clarity.

You know the drill.

For most of us, the architecture of the town of FirstDraft is familiar, and I have no real doubt that we’d probably recognise one another’s FirstDraftTtowns fairly easily. But a strange thing happens when each individual writer leaves the city limits, en route for the wilds of SecondDraftia. It’s a sort of dimension portal, and it sends everybody to a different place, unique to themselves, full or peculiar traps and difficulties that are never quite found in the same shape or form in any other writer’s world. To paraphrase a well-known bon mot, all First Drafts are kind of rotten in a similar way. Every Second Draft has its own unique problems.

Different writers react to the art and the craft (and it IS both) of rewriting in their own peculiar ways. Some tell me that they enjoy the act of rewriting and editing far more than they enjoy the actual storytelling – because for them the telling of the story is the hard part, and now that they have that, in however awful a shape, for them the real fun begins, and that is actually chiselling this raw and barely recognisable slab of marble into a real Michelangelo’s David, chipping away one tiny flake of marble at a time until it is all perfect and polished. Others, – and oh dear GOD I fall into this category – want to tear their hair out at the roots at this point. Because the story, you see, it is TOLD, and yes we who feel this way can SEE that it isn’t without flaw (NOTHING ever is) but in some senses it IS perfect, it has a shape and a form and a balance inside our heads, an changing ANYTHING tends to have consequences everywhere, and you are faced with continuity issues from hell itself, and AAAARGH.

It’s the difference in tone – having a character say something as simple as “I’m sorry” in a different tone of voice, an inflexion that might change it from an empty phrase of cold indifference (I’M SORRY but I couldn’t care less really) to a genuine and sincere sympathy (I’M SORRY that your goldfish died. I REALLY am.) – well – it changes that character. And it changes the way other people respond to that character. And THAT changes other conversations. And that changes what people might have known, and when they might have known it. And THAT changes the flow of the story. AND that…

Well, you get the idea. Before too long, you pull out one thread and you realise that you are suddenly hip deep in the Big Muddy and it’s all falling apart around you and you’re scrambling to hold together in a coherent whole something that looked perfectly solid just a moment before. It’s like the cement holding the story together suddenly turns to jello on you and the edifice starts tottering precariously and oops, there goes a piece you really didn’t want to lose but argh it doesn’t fit any more, and dammit, there’s all those words on the cutting room floor and wasn’t tehre something important there that you absolutely need to salvage – or rephrase – or do something constructive with…

 

Pardon the mess.

I need to go back to my own reconstruction now. There is a glaring piece of continuity error that I need to address right now.

And you know what the worst of it is? It’s that if you’re good enough you’ll end up with a seamless piece of prose that doesn’t look like it’s been tinkered with, that looks like it’s always been perfect, that it was born this way. A reader who never saw the original will NEVER KNOW. And they shouldn’t, that’s part of the point, but while you’re in the throes of working as hard as you know how,trying your damndest to change your beloved tale from passable to good or maybe even from good to great, you know that THIS part of your job is always going to be done alone and in the dark and without reward. It’s just a hard slog. Yes, knowing that there is something worthwhile at the end of it all helps but in the meantime you’re working on your own in the dark with a flashlight held between your teeth and with the right tools ALWAYS just out of reach in the shadows.

I am hoping that this thing I am working on now is going to fledge very soon, and that it is going to be an eagle, soaring high and powerful up there in the open skies. I’ve got a good story here, I know that much. I am trying very hard to make it better, and it can always be better, I know that. But still – this is one of those things that I will be glad to HAVE DONE and that I am far from happy to BE DOING. With luck those of you who might read it one day will never know what I changed, how I tweaked, what I had to lose and what it was necessary to graft on. And please, for the the sake of everybody involved… if you should happen to see a little dust on the floor, or a stray broken bit of a past imperfection littering the floor at the feet of the completed story statue, be merciful, and forgive. And kick it discreetly someplace out of sight.

Chisel in hand. Back into the fray. See you on the other side.

Just the other day an editor I like and respect – and have sold several stories to – wrote this on her blog:

“Some good stories but not good enough to send up the line. Most stories start too slow to catch my eye. More than one, if I’ve past the first or second page, I think, “This would’ve been a great story if it started here.” In other words, get to the point already.”

And I know what she means. I do. I do, really. But in one sense she conflates “slow” and “badly paced” – and I have to take a step back here, and speak up in defense of “slow”.

Yes, a story should have a point. Tales that meander all over the place – tales that go no further than internal angsting of the characters – tales that basically consist of a beautifully described setting (yes, Author, we know you love the place, but be done, already…) – these are stories which I have never personally been able to engage with at all.

At some point I christened them “New Yorker stories” because every time I’ve dipped my toe into the waters of New Yorker ‘literary’ fiction I’ve kind of found myself swimming with these myopic literary sharks, taking random bites out of anything because they can’t seem to focus hard enough or long enough to actually be dangerous. Don’t getme wrong, I’ve read stories labelled as ‘literary’ before and some of them were deeply brilliant. But on the whole, I do prefer my stories to be, well, you know, GOING somewhere, and taking me there with them. So yes, a point would be good. A point is essential. A story has to have something to TELL me, and something within it to change the characters who inhabit it to the point that I can tell that this has actually happened.

In many cases it is a purely beginner mistake, made fairly often when you are starting out on your writing life. You kind of wander into your story through a side door and poke around the place for a bit until you find yourself comfortable enough to get on with telling the story which you came here to tell in the first place. You grow out of it; experience soon teaches you to recognise when you’ve started a story in the wrong place, and confidence born of writing and writing and writing more will let you make the hard decisions – to abandon the side-entrance and the lingering in the back corridors, in favour of coming in through the front door with verbal guns blazing, as it were.

But this is a fairly specific problem, and “strating in the wrong place” is not the same as “slow” – because slow can be beautiful, and a story that is all point and nothing else is just as awkward and uncomofrtable as one that has no point at all.

Slow is depth. Slow is taking the time to know your tale. You take your story out and ply it with wine and roses by candlelight, you don’t slam it against the wall in a back alley and have your wicked way with it without first asking its name. Slow is waking to a perfect tropical day in a beach resort, wandering out to the verandah and stretching languorously as you watch the sun glitter on perfect pale-blue waters… and then remembering that you came here with the love of your life, that he wasn’t in bed when you woke this morning, and that he said that he might be wanting an early morning swim before breakfast, and that you’ve just caught a glimpse of something thrust under your door and half under the rug, a note from resort management which, when you pick it up, warns you that a hungry shark has been seen close to shore and that you should not go into the water until the problem has been sorted out. Cue ominous music.

But without that slow – without that first glimpse of paradise – the point of the shark is kind of lost. Unh, yeah, sure, there’s a predator in the water. But far more importantly than that, there’s a PREDATOR in PARADISE – and without the slow, without the establishing shot that gives you that paradise to begin with, all you’re left with is the monster.

Think of all those horrible B-movie slasher films, with bucketloads of fake blood and monsters killing for no particular rhyme or reason except that, im, it’s Halloween or something. There is no “slow” there. No subtle. Nothing but the bucketloads of fake blood and the teenage scream queen who’s about to become hamburger. Now think of some of the more subtle Stephen King efforts, where you are lulled by slow, where the small and pretty and innocent and innocuous Maine towns which King loves to set his stories in hide some ghastly horror beyond imagining – made all the more horrifying because of the way that it comes in and leaves bloody footrpints of Point all over the carefully and painstakingly manicured lawns of Slow.

In other words, it isn’t the slow that the problem. It’s a lack of proper pacing, a lack of sense of just enough “slow” to set up “sharp”. Give slow a chance to catch you, because it is the slow that will hold you in the end. The point, however brilliant it is, is sharp and swift – it stabs, and is gone. The slow, it lingers, and twists, and prolongs the pain and the pleasure, both.

Speaking for myself, I build worlds with a loving touch – I like to think I am the kind of writer who can make a reader forget for just an instant that the story that they’re in is really just a stage play and all that surrounds it just stage scenery, painted plywood. To make the reader forget this just long enough to start believing in the truth of it all, to make that reader look at a painted forest and begin to feel the breeze picking its way between the trees, just barely stirring the leaves, lifting strands of the reader’s hair as though with tender fingers, to hear things rustle in the undergrowth.

I am a slow writer, a writer of slow and subtle. I’m kind of proud of that.

We’re going to take a step back this month, harking back to a question left at the feet of the “Eternal Questions 1” essay at the end of March.

In that piece, I wrote:

“It’s the WHY that centers them. And it’s a WHY that has to remain overtly silent – because if the reader is putting the book down and asking, frustrated, “But WHY did he do that?” you’ve lost the battle for that reader’s willing suspension of disbelief and the fabric of your story falls apart. The trick to the WHY is to supply the BECAUSE which your reader never realised they were asking for, or thought they needed to ask. A good writer poses the WHY question in the form of the BECAUSE answer, and the reader is given all the building blocks of that necessary bridge within the narrative framework itself.”

Then a comment asked, “The part that seems tricky, though, is where you talk about providing the “because” while leaving the “why” unstated. Any chance you could talk on that some more?”

So here we are, at the Why Fork, figuring it all out.

When we are very little, “Why?” is the ultimate question. (Oh, come on – you’ve all met the three-year-old who can keep it up for an hour…) And it’s legitimate – we need to know. We’re new on this world. Inexplicable things happen every day, and have to be questioned, and let’s face it, adults are sometimes sadly lacking in the explanation department. “Because I said so” leaves a lot to be desired. It isn’t enough, when we are young, to know that the sky is blue – it’s brand new to us, that sky, and for all we know there IS no real reason why it shouldn’t be burnt orange or lime green, hence “why?”

But that is the beginning of the question, the shallow end of the pool, the very start of the road just before you come to your first Why Fork. It’s explaining the fundamentals, defining the parameters of a world. However, once you’ve taken your first turn down that first fork in the road you discover an interesting thing.

Answering a question may not satisfy you at all.

An answer may merely lead to another question. And another, and another, all the way down. And the deeper you go, the more complex the questions get and the harder it is to understand the answers.

“Why is this so?” is a basic building block of the scaffolding one needs to build a world, any world, because this is an empirical why, and there are usually answers which are cogent and to the point and can be used in a relatively scientific manner. But “why” is a multi-purpose question, and it’s when it dips its toe into the pool of philosophy and human motivation that things get really interesting.

Because – and this is important – there are NO EMPIRICAL ANSWERS when it comes to a human being or that human being’s motivations. There is no such thing as a right answer or a wrong answer. There is just an answer which is appropriate for the context and the timing of a patricular question, and this answer may change in time as the parameters of the question do.

Understanding this is important in building characters in fiction. The character and their story, you might say, are the brick-and-mortar, the stone, the shingle on the roof, the support beams, the great cathedral ceilings, the windows, the passages, the arches, the gates. You are bulding that story, brick by brick, stone by stone, slowly and with care – you are an architect of an edifice of dreams. But what you really have to have in order to build this solid thing… is a scaffolding of glass.

You will ask many questions on your way. Each answer you receive, or find out, or fight for, will provide you with a piece of scaffolding on which you can stand in order to build the next layer of your story. But these answers are not PART of the story. They must not lodge into the brickwork and spoil the patterns you are trying to achieve. They support your edifice while it is being built. Your reader will know when your next brick has been placed properly and with care; they will see that brick being cemented in, THROUGH the glass, and in an act of literary alchemy they will be able to discern the correct motivation for a character’s action because they’re seeing that motivation through a layer of support which is not in the actual story at all.

It’s hinted at, implied, you can feel its presence and you know its sturdy support is what’s holding the whole thing up – but you aren’t thrown out of the story by tripping over its rubble on the floor and stopping to examine each individual piece of the evidence. A great character is partly transparent, so that the reader who encounters that character may see the inner workings of a mind, but not so transparent for every action to be utterly predictable and boring.

The best kind of see-through scaffolding is to portray an event which doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything at all… and then use that event to shape a character in a manner which provides an answer for some action of that character’s some way down the line in your story.

Spoiler for one of my books here – and yes, I have used this example before, but it just FITS here –

I did something like this in “The Secrets of Jin Shei”. In the beginnings of the book, establishing character, I described one of my eight protags (who is still a child here) as someone who is so enamoured of the tenets of honour and courage and a sense of noblesse oblige that she takes on superior numbers and a superior force in defense of something weak and unable to defend itself. She didn’t defend that weak and defenseless object – in this instance, a kitten – because she was particularly attached to the object itself; it was the principle of the thing that mattered.

It is the principle of the thing that explains to that particular character, and the reader, why it is acceptable for her to lay down her own life, much later in the book, in circumstnaces which do not remotely resemble that first scene… until they suddenly, savagely, do. Until that scaffolding falls away at last and you, the reader, realise that you know precisely how and why that character is going to respond to a certain situation – because the scaffolding has built her in a certain way and there is nothing ELSE that she can do and remain herself. You, the reader, have NEVER asked the question “why” at this point. That’s because the scaffolding has already supplied that. What you get, in the story, is the answer, not the question which you never knew that you were really asking.

It’s this art of second-guessing a reader’s questions about a character and then providing the answers to those questions already built into the story itself, giving the reader those answers before they have the chance to be stopped cold by a question which pops up cold at an inconvenient time, that makes a story flow, a character become an intimate acquaintance about whose fate and welfare you as the reader passionately care about and are invested in. In its most fundamental form you will hear people pontificate to new writers: SHOW, DON’T TELL. And that’s part of it. Because you are SHOWING the answers, one little bit at a time, letting the reader piece together themselves what their original questions might have been.

Yes, this is a hard one to grasp, and tougher still to explain. But trust me, if you getit right… you will know it. These are the moments where you stare at your page with a frisson of astonishment and you wonder how on earth your story was clever enough to weave itself into this particular pattern.

But you wove the pattern. With the questions never quite asked. And the pattern is all the answers that your readers need.

The deeper you go, the more complex it gets.

Have a care, heading off the Why Fork. It might lead to deep and dangerous places. But you go there so that your reader does not need to – and if you tread gently, and know how to sidle past the traps and the alligator pits, the road will take reader and writer, both, to a destination that’s nothing short of breathtaking.

Did you ever see the moment when individual people poured into a city street, channelled by houses and parked cars and city intersections, tributaries flowing in from side streets, fallling into step with other people and joining in, then suddenly changing, re-forming, giving voice to something that has a thousand hearts but no conscious mind, the metamorphosis of a handful of people into a crowd… and then into a mob?

I have. It’s frightening. Human beings who lose their humanity and turn into a multi-headed hydra monster capable of most anything, with human conscience silenced and hidden away and even the memory of things done under such hypnotic mass action often blurred and changed and twisted and buried afterwards. People who turn into nothing more than a voice, a roar, a fury, a release of chaos and a desire to burn and destroy and find something, somebody, to be a target for their anger.

Mobs – the blurred beast of many faces, the roar of a thousand throats that changes from a human voice, a human shout, to the thunder of a wounded lion-god about to exact its vengeance for its spilled blood.

I’ve looked at crowds that way.

Did you ever find yourself at a crowded picnic on, say, the Fourth of July, or a packed crowd on New Year’s Eve somewhere like Times Square or Trafalgar Square, or part of a jubilant heaving mass of people at a victory parade throwing confetti at heroes and ready to kiss a stranger walking by out of sheer overflow of joy? At Obama’s election night rally in Chicago?

The kind of gathering where two people who do not know one another might catch each other’s eye and nod and smile, and hug for no reason, and squeal with joy and sheer enjoyment at some spectacle or at the prospect of some person’s advancement or victory, and share something that is a visceral happiness, something wordless and yet utterly and instantly communicated by a quick grin, or a thumbs-up, or the waving of a flag?

I’ve looked at crowds that way.

Did you ever watch a realistic movie depiction of a battlefield? The kind where people scream and clash and fall and are trampled in the mud and the blood – the ring of steel on steel, the stench of powder and the smell of human sweat, human blood, human fear? The utter chaos of the melee, or the complete waste of charging from trenches into the mouth of enemy machine guns? The scream of dying horses? The hiss of arrows, or the whine of bullets flying past? The panicked rout of the side which is losing?

I’ve looked at crowds that way.

Have you ever looked at a crowd through the eyes of a single character in a story – sometimes not seeing the crowd at all, just seeing the reaction on a single person’s face to something that he is watching? Can anyone remember the expression on the face of Dr Zhivago as he watches the slaughter of the protesters in the square from his balcony, appalled, helpless, unable to do anything at all but bear witness…?

Because that is what you are, as the writer. The one who bears witness.

It was Stalin who said that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. This is true, and there is no way that you as a writer can adequately convey the magnitude of a massacre, or of a genocide. But somewhere in those million deaths which are a statistic there are a handful of characters whose deaths are your tragedy, and they exemplify your statistic, they make your statistic horrible in a way that you could never do if you simply tried to go global in your description.

We are individuals. We connect to individuals. Newbie actors or public speakers are often told that to combat stage fright they should find a single friendly face in an audience and speak as though addressing that person alone. We seek out other individuals whose stories we can share – stories that are part of some greater whole, but which are easier to grasp, to understand, to hear, to mourn, to condemn or to reward. The key to writing a main protagonist’s interaction with any kind of crowd is picking a few key players in that crowd and making the entire crowd matter because THESE people matter.

It’s the trick of concentrating on some of the people, all of the time – when you aren’t talking about all of the people some of the time.

Even that mob of which I spoke, the single-minded avatar of destruction which flows like lava and is just as unstoppable – even that has individual components. Your protagonist might be caught up in the mob or watching them from the safety of a second-floor window but even while understanding the immensity of this new monster which is many-people-at-once there will be a face here, a rolling eye there, a raised fist somewhere else, that will catch the eye – that will exemplify, bring into clarity and focus, the things that the mob stands for, has gathered for.

Often it’s a few exchanged words that will help. Not necessarily with a full-fledged or even named secondary character. Just somebody – somebody in a crowd, someone whose voice, for just a moment, is heard saying something individual and focused, something that the protagonist might hear, be listening for, or may nearly miss because of all the other things going on but which is utterly important anyway.

If it were possible to take a photo with both a fish-eye lens and a telephoto lens at once, this might be what you are aiming for with a protagonist interacting with groups or crowds. You take a fish-eye photo, giving the big picture, giving the global overview, giving a sense of numbers and of mood and of the chaos inherent in any gathering of human beings – and yet you are also looking straight through that wide angle shot and seeing an individual face here and there, focusing on a twist of the lip, a gleam in the eye, a gesture of the hand, the way the light falls on an upturned face, the sound of a single word.

Have you ever looked at the crowds that surround your protagonist? They are many. They are one. It doesn’t matter whose the single voice is when you need one from out of the mutltitude. Just make sure there IS one.

Watch out for the POV. You cannot know the thoughts of a thousand people. Your protagonist can never quite completely comprehend the things that swirl around him or her out in the world. Part of the story you are telling consists of the misapprehensions and misunderstandings between human beings – and the more of them there are, the more misunderstandings are possible, even probable. But you cannot speak with a thousand voices at once – because then you pass from misunderstanding to incoherence.

Think of it in terms of the song (paraphrased):

“I’ve looked at crowds from both sides now

from pain and joy

and still somehow

it’s crowds’ individuals I recall

I really don’t know why

At all…”

One of the proudest moments of my writing life occurred when a friend from Florida phoned my new home in the Pacific Northwest of the USA at midnight my time (3 AM hers) and screamed, “You KILLED HER! How could you kill her? How could you do that?”

She was talking about a main protagonist, and I would have hoped for a reaction like this for the demise of a character of that ilk, fully fleshed out and lovingly helped along the way to becoming as “real” as any flesh-and-blood creature ever encountered by the reader. More real, in fact, because this character was someone who, over the course of a novel, became an intimate, a friend, someone whom the reader cares about deeply – with far more passion than they would care about the identity, fate, or motivations of an arbitrary commuter with whom they might briefly share a few moments on the bus and then probably never see again. The degree of realness is not a variable of physicality. Novels depend on their success, to a huge extent, on how “real” their characters are to their readers.

But those are protagonists, the carriers of plot and story, and if the reader does not respond to them (or responds to them in the wrong way) the entire novel is at risk of imploding. There is nothing worse for a novel than the application of the Eight Deadly Words by the reader: “I Don’t Care What Happens to These People”. The readers have to care. They have to care with a degree of passion. Otherwise… it’s all just wind turning pages.

There are other characters who inhabit a story, however. On a recent convention panel, this kind of character was referred to in a cavalier manner as “The Third Spear Carrier On The Left” (or TTSCOTL for short); those who have a certain background might know some of them as Red Shirts; for the rest of the readers they might get lumped into a general corral which is labelled “secondary characters”.

Well, but that isn’t quite there, either. A true Red Shirt is a throwaway, possibly a character with no lines at all, somebody who plays the role of a witness in the crowd or a piece of cannon fodder, depending on circumstances. But a true secondary character has a little more weight than that – more engagement with the reader, despite being on stage for a very limited time in an extremely limited role.

And apparently I’m remarkably good at engaging heartstrings for a non-major-protag character only to have them shuffle off the mortal coil and out of the novel just because I’m, like, totally heartless and without feeling – at least according to an Australian friend, a devoted reader of my work, who has a perennial quibble about me and such characters. She and I have occasionally discussed what these secondary characters owe their creator, the story in which they appear, and the readers who encounter them in those stories.

I said that sometimes what such a character owes the story and the reader is… perhaps unfairly… a poignant demise, a manner of death which drives a story forward and builds the character of the protagonist in some way.

I look at that concept – “a poignant demise” – and kind of feel like a bloodthirsty Aztec deity waiting, slavering, for the human sacrifice which will ensure my power (or my survival). But there’s more to it than that, as always.

Secondary characters can sometimes be utterly essential, even pivotal, with an entire storyline turning on a word or a deed which was uttered or performed by a character who NEVER had center stage, nor wanted it. They can make things easier, or make things harder. But the most important thing about them is… that they have their OWN stories. Those stories are just not the story being told right here, right now.

There are a couple of secondary characters in my “Changer of Days” books who exemplify this idea, and they fall neatly into two convenient sub-categories – the under-hero(ine), and the under-villain. If you have not read the books and wish to, and don’t particularly want spoilers, now’s the time to look away…

Okay.

The one character whom my Australian friend has never quite forgiven me for is Queen Senena from “Changer of Days”. Senena enters as someone who is almost a non-entity – she is the replacement for a barren first wife, for an usurper-king who desperately needs an heir and a bride to produce it.

All he sees in Senena is a barely-budded, biddable child, old enough to bear him the needed heir, young enough to be cowed and bullied into being a compliant companion when wanted and relegated into seen-and-not-heard when the King had better things to do. And a lesser creature, an ordinary woman, a throwaway child-bride character, would have done just that, and faded away into the background. But Senena is made of sterner stuff, and she has a mind of her own, and a spine. When she finds out the unspeakable things that her husband has done she does not crumple on the floor and whimper – she steps up to the problem and grasps its thorny vine with both delicate hands, defies her husband, countermands his orders in his absence.

When the cruel King returns she will inevitably pay for all this – but at the same time she is finally pregnant and at the very least the punishment will have to be delayed, and his temper might cool with time. So she takes her chances, the little Queen, showing unexpected strength and moral convictions and taking control of something that she ought never to have even had any knowledge about – and yes, she pays for this dearly. She commands the release of an important prisoner – the novel’s protagonist – from the King’s dungeons, in order that said prisoner might have a walk under the free and open sky. The friends of the prisoner – the character whose name has been mine ever since I entered the cyberworld, Anghara, the rightful heir of the throne which the King has stolen – know this is their only chance to free her from the King’s clutches. They take it. There are inevitable casualties. One of them… is the little Queen who made it all possible.

Senena is a light in that novel. When that light is extinguished, the darkness is, for a moment, overwhelming. But she will ALWAYS be a light. Her memory will remain a light. Her spirit will shine like a star in the night, guiding others to try and aspire to be like her. For a secondary character, she has achieved a great deal.

The second secondary character of note is a young man by the name of Ansen. Heir to his father’s estate, a young aristocrat with a severe sense of entitlement, he sees it as his absolute right to take what he wants because it is due him. When one such act results in appalling consequences – he loses the sight of one eye – he becomes deeply embittered, and focused on only one thing: what he sees as his rightful revenge.

This takes the form of betraying his cousin, the same Anghara whose escape from the King’s dungeons caused Senena to meet her death, to the King who has long been seeking her – knowing that the King seeks Anghara for no pleasant purpose and that only her own demise might finally clear his own claim to the throne.

Ansen goes seeking the King, thinking only of how his news of Anghara and her whereabouts might impact on his own future – how the King, whom he idolises, will be grateful for the information that Ansen is bringing, how his reward will be status and power and a place at the court. Unfortunately, he reaches the King in the aftermath of a choice which, once made, has irrevocably scarred the King’s own soul. The King is not interested in Ansen, or in his news. He makes an instant and arbitrary decision and sentences Ansen himself to a traitor’s death – he is to be hanged at dawn.

Unaware of this – locked up by himself in a room overnight but expecting to be able to see the King in the morning – Ansen is happy, excited, to see the King’s minion in the morning, and asks for a comb, for a washcloth, so that he can make himself presentable to the King. Slowly the reality of it all sinks in, though, and the last we see of him is a frightened child – which, after all, is very much what he still is – being led off to his execution.

The King glances at the procession through his window, and looks away – and Ansen never knew that he had had even that much of the King’s attention.

“Who was that?” one of the King’s companions asks curiously as the King turns away from the window.

“Nobody,” the King says, and forgets.

Outside, a young man’s wasted life, filled with slaking an aristocrat’s appetites and the simmering resentment and fury when that ability was taken away, is over as a new day breaks. It seems that he had done nothing, achieved nothing, that even in his death he had no more status than being called a nobody by the King whom it had been his desire to serve.

He might be a villain… but in the end he is pitiful, and his despairing death manages to pull at a reader’s heartstrings even while they’re satisfied that he has finally got his comeuppance. And he does not die entirely in vain. His life, after all, might be taken… as a lesson to others.

That’s what secondary characters do, that’s why they’re there – good secondary characters DO have entire lives of their own, lives hinted at in the narrative where they are not the primary plot carriers but lives which could nevertheless fill their own books if they were to focus on such individuals.

In other words, the way I write, the way I see a story, there really are no “secondary” characters, no character who is unimportant, who does not matter at all. Lives touch in unexpected ways – and a “secondary” character in one novel is no more than a protagonist of their own story who happened to wander into the current tale just long enough to make their presence felt. It is important, to my mind, to have such characters exist because they are the eyes and the souls through which a protagonist measures him or herself; they are the history through which the protagonist’s own story is woven.

Guy Gavriel Kay uses this concept to wonderful effect in “Last Light of the Sun”, where he weaves in the histories of people you meet only briefly and in passing – who barely touch the lives of his protagonists, if at all – but whose presence in the book enriches and deepens the narrative, gives it a context, gives it soul, gives it a sense of not being “just a novel” but instead being a window into real lives and real troubles and real joys, something that happens in a real world, a world full of “other” people whose effect on the POV characters can sometimes be only that they exist, and that by their existence they prove that there is a true world in that novel, a world whose boundaries are not defined by the covers of a given book, and which lures the reader further in and deeper in and invites the total immersion which defines a sense of wonder and a willing suspension of disbelief as they step into a world created by a mind different than their own.

Protagonists – primary characters – carry a story on their shoulders.

Secondary characters make the story possible, believable, real. Yes, sometimes they die. But sometimes… their very death within the story makes them immortal.

Senena still has a hold on my Australian friend, years after she has finished and laid down the book in which the little Queen made her appearance. Senena was not, never tried to be, a protagonist – but in her own way she caused just as much drama when she died as the main protag whose own demise caused my Florida reader to call me at three in the morning in outraged disbelief.

And in some ways… Senena’s may be the greater achievement

“Here there be dragons”. Words written on maps in ancient times, to indicate places where no humans had been, which were unknown, unexplored, dangerous, magical. The places where real magic might really dwell.

“Here there be dragons”. I’ve chosen the fantasy genre because of that very thing. It’s freeing to me to know that even if I don’t, personally, know the lay of the land in the places where the dragons lurk – well – neither does anyone else, and therefore I am free to create my own geography, my own history, my own world.

I’ve always loved the worldbuilding aspect of the fantasy genre, the part where I get to go wading out into the dark unknown with nothing but a tiny flashlight in my hand and it is by that light alone, MY light, the light that I choose to shine and the spot I choose to illumine, that determines what anybody else who might be following me is likely to see, understand, remember.

All the worlds are a blank page before a writer’s eyes fall upon them.

But I cannot seem to get that dictum to stick with stuff that is supposed to take place in the “real” world, our world, the mundane everyday days that we all inhabit routinely. For some reason I can write lush, rich, penetrating prose about characters who can never exist – who live only inside my own head, who cope with dragons or their equivalent on a daily basis – but present me with a cast of characters who are living realistic, mundane lives in the common shared reality with the potential reader, and I freeze.

Read more…

The classic writing advice flung at the feet of the novices is the catchy “Write what you know” dictum. Those four words have generated more discussion and frustration than possibly any other piece of advice ever proffered. I don’t have to wade through all that again, not here, it’s been said so many times, so may places, and by so many people, it’s like the water table in low-lying lands, dig just a little and it’ll come pouring out to fill the hole. Its merits or lack thereof I will thus leave to others to continue discussing.

So what I propose to do here, instead, is a series of articles illustrated by things that I myself “know”, the lessons I’ve taken from events in my own life… and see where that takes us.

There are many different kinds of writers and they gravitate by instinct to different kinds of story. There are writers who find it easier and more organic to approach stories as being plot-driven, as a series of events leading from a causative effect to a given conclusion, with the journey between these two points clearly signposted by plot developments, with Things That Need To Happen Now for the story to move forward. I suspect these writers are the kind who find it easier to write outlines and synopses than I do – because I’m the OTHER kind of writer, for me the story is what happens to the characters, the thing that makes the characters change. The drama of the story – the laughter and the tears, the joy and the tragedy, the triumph and the failure – is not the basic building block. The thing that drives me is how my charaacters respond to a stimulus of a given kind, and it doesn’t matter precisely what kind of triumph and disaster befalls them so long as it’s the KIND of thing that will make htem change in a given way. I am an emotional writer, not necessarily a “logical” one in the sense that all my ducks have to be in a row before my story can be written – I write to seek an emotional truth, and often the road I take to my destination can be a surprising one.

Books and movies often come with the disclaimer that the story is wholly fictional and that the characters resemble no people living or dead – which is of course almost impossible to achieve because every character that a writer sketches on a page is to some extent based on people that (s)he knows. Write what you know – here is where that comes in.

Let me tell you a story now, and see if you too will “know” the emotion behind it.

When I was about sixteen years old, I was living in South Africa, studying towards my A-Level examinations (those, for my American readers, are what come after O-levels, the school-leaving examination; it is the A-levels that take you on to University, though, that final extra step between school and college). Because the only school that offered the A-levels – a British qualification and not a South African educational system requirement as such – was a boys’ school, they only admitted a select small number of girls into this post-matriculation senior class. Therewere, I believe, seven of us, all sixteen or so, and believe me, you don’t know what paranoia is until you walk down the halls of a school filled with pre-pubescent boys whose whispered conversations abruptly cease as you come within hearing range and who then follow you with carefully schooled expressions until you turn a corner and move out of sight at which point you hear the sussurus of the conversation begin again… but I digress. My point is that of the seven of us, four were from out of town, and needed boarding facilities. It was obviously not feasible to carve out a boarding environment for four sixteen-year-old females in a school packed with young males – there would have been a riot. So we boarded at a nearby girls’ school, not precisely a part of that school in the sense that we didn’t actually attend it but quartered there in a special wing, with our own little rooms in an eyrie in a wing that took up an entire side of the main entrance quad, and accessed from it; another side of said quad housed the administrative staff and their quarters, including the Headmaster’s office (bear with me, this becomes important background info in a minute). The quad itself was a beautiful little garden, with pathways surrounding a central grassy square which housed a bed of fragrant roses, and the quad was redolent with their scent in the summer.

During the year that I was there, one of the other four A-level candidates and mydorm-mate and next-door-neighbour in our little senior wing was a Greek girl who had ripened early in the manner of Mediterranean womanhood. At sixteen, this girl – let’s call her S – had all the curves of a grown woman twice her age, with rounded hips and an eye-popping bust which was an all too frequent subject of those falling-silent conversations between the younger boys at our OTHER school. She was pretty, but not stunning, not a head-turner in a goddess-come-to-life kind of way.

When S announced the imminent visit of a cousin, the rest of us in the boarders’ wing expected something much like her.

What we got, instead, was Apollo.

The cousin in question turned out to be a young man, some 19 years of age, tall and with the kind of muscular athletic build that was the perfect frame to set off the bad-boy black motorcycle leather jacket that he wore… to go with the motocycle on which he roared into the parking lot while we all hung out of the windows to watch his arrival. When he took off his helmet and shook out those golden curls, we were all lost, and S introduced him to us with a proprietorial air, with her arm linked in his. He had an easy smile and huge blue eyes to match that vivid spun-gold hair – and dammit all, he was a NICE bad boy, to boot. He was pleasant, he flirted with all of us and smiled at all of us and had a way with us that made it easy to relax and not turn into a gaggle of giggly schoolgirls fawning on him with tongue tied adoration. He was, not to mince words, flat-out gorgeous, inside and out.

When the girls school where we boarded announced their annual summer dance that year, something gave me the courage – and, having somehow (I don’t even remember how) come into possession of D’s phone number, I called him from the public phone in the main hallway of the school, with practically no privacy and blushing scarlet and glad he wasn’t there to actually see me do this, and asked him if he would like to come as my date. He accepted. I subsequently had to deal with a week’s worth of sulks from S, my dorm-mate, who had planned on asking him herself but just happened to be a little slower off the mark.

The night of the dance was a perfect balmy summer evening, the sky full of stars, the roses in the school’s entrance quad lending their own scent of enchantment to the occasion. D turned up on time and stripped off his leather jacket to change into a jacket and tie. He was a perfect escort. He danced, and danced well, which was by no means a given when it came to gangly adolescent boys – and in point of fact he stood out from the rest of the pimply boyfriends paraded around by the fact that he wasn’t a gangly adolescent boy any more, he was an enchantingly poised young man with more charm than seemed fair for a single person to possess. In between dances he made sure I was supplied with whatever drinks were on offer. He excused himself once to dance with his cousin, which was only polite, and which served to mollify S somewhat to the point that she could go on and enjoy the rest of the evening.
It was a magic night.

The dance was nearly thirty years ago, and details of the evening have long vanished from my mind – but I do remember, vividly, the finale.

The boarding school’s curfew was usually midnight but because of the dance this had been extended by special dispensation until 2AM. Sometime around half past twelve D and I began to drift back from the hall where the dance was held towards the main quad and its atmosphere of attar-of-roses; we were in no hurry to go anywhere or to say good night, we were deep in conversation, and when we reached the quad we stood there on the pathway and talked some more. The Headmaster, apparently working very late that night, emerged from the administrative wing as we stood chatting in the quad and passed us with a nod and a fairly loaded “Good night”; we said, “Good night, sir”, and watched him round the corner of the quad and move out of sight.

We were still there when the Headmaster came back, about an hour later.

I remember this scene because it seemed to me that I had somehow slipped out of my own body, and I was watching the events from across the sleeping roses. There I stood, leaning with my back against a red brick pillar, my hands folded between me and the warm brick and one foot resting lightly against the pillar base tucked behind the other. There D stood, leaning in over me slightly, one of his hands in his pocket and the other leaning flat-palmed against the pillar right next to my shoulder. We were smiling at one another. The Headmaster came round the same corner which he’d vanished behind earlier, saw us, did a beautiful double-take, glanced at his watch, raised his eyebrows. But it was still not quite the witching hour of two o’clock and he had not even caught us holding hands let alone anything beyond that. But although he said nothing the set of his shoulders and the slight frown on his face spoke volumes – “It is time this ended.”

He vanished, again, and I found that I had dropped my eyes and could not, for the life of me, lift them again to D’s face. Somehow all the easy familiarity of the moment had fled, transmuted into a vivid tension that left a coppery taste of what was almost fear in the back of my throat. Up until this moment, I had not thought beyond what would happen next, how this evening would end. Now, I could think of nothing else. And it came, his hand, just as I was expecting it to, landing gently on my cheek, cupping my chin, lifting my fact until I had to look at him again. His blue eyes were laughing, but in a good way, in such a good way.

“I suppose he’s right,” D said. “Good night. Thank you for a lovely evening.”

And he kissed me.

I honesly don’t remember if that was my first kiss or not – if anything had come before that, it was obviously not memorable enough to stick in my mind.

But perhaps what made this one stay with me for so long was not this night itself, magic though it had been, but what came after.

About a week after the dance S came stumbling into my room, her usually warm ivory skin bleached white with shock. She blurted the news – D had been riding his motorcycle when he was hit from behind by a learner driver who accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake and slammed into him with sufficient force to skid the bike sideways and send him flying forward across the handlebars… straight into the path of another car coming from the opposite direction. They took him to the hospital, a broken doll with multiple fractures and a slew of internal injuries. All of this, they fixed with a series of eye-wateringly long and complex surgeries.

S relayed the developing news as it happened – the surgeries, the aftermath, the recovery at home. But she did not tell me that there was one thing they did not fix, they did not know how to fix.

I phoned, after he was home, to speak to him, to wish him well. I spoke to someone friendly, polite… but with no memory of who I was, or, not too long into the phone conversation, of who he had started talking to at all. His mother took the phone and told me that he had suffered profound psychological consequences as well as the physical trauma of the accident. He had simply ceased to be able to hold any long-term memories at all.

He was nineteen years old. He had been gorgeous, bright, kind, with a life full of promise stretching into the future… and now the future was gone.

I never saw him again. I don’t know what became of him. I had no time to fall in love, not really, but I might have done, if given a chance – and I still remember him with a quiet happiness. But I also think of him whenever some senseless tragedy falls into my path. For thirty years I have carried the memory and the presence of a boy who had had my name, my face, my very existence erased from his mind.

Write what you know. This is part of my emotional truth, the taste of the bitter with the sweet, the sense that the world is wonderful and unfair all at once, that viciously bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it. When I write characters who love, or cling to a fading faith, or yearn, or are struck with a sudden paralysing shyness in the face of a magic moment – it is this that I come back to, this scene in the album of the pictures of my life.

Love, and loss. And life. As always was, as always will be. You know this.Writing what you know doesn’t mean taking a scene or a character or a sequence of events or a setting absolutely verbatim from the fabric of your own existence. If we all did that, then we would have but one story to tell – our own, and nothing else would matter or could impinge on that. But our stories are never just ours. We touch so many other lives, so many other stories – and every one of those touches us back. All of this, we know. And can write about.

Here endeth the first lesson. Go you, now, and write.