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Archives for March 2011

Creating Convincing Characters (The Archive Series)

March 31, 2011 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Character, Inspiration, Technique, Writing Exercises 1 Comment

As I launch the new Writing Coach website, I thought it would be a good idea to also celebrate the history of The Writing Coach by beginning this series of blog posts and articles from my own archive. In coming weeks I’ll be sharing some of my favourite archive articles.

This image of the author John Fowles inspired the character Harold Bliss in my novel Bluethroat Morning

This one “Creating Convincing Characters” is more a series of notes than an article.  I prepared the notes for a talk I gave at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 2005.  I hope you find them useful.

Creating Convincing Characters

When we write fiction in an organic way, we do not need to begin with a plot. We can begin by creating our characters.  The plot grows from the characters and not vice-versa.  For example, my novel Bluethroat Morning grew from a fragment of a rejected novel; from a single image of a Victorian woman in a bustle dress walking along a Norfolk beach, side by side with her elderly uncle who was wheezing for breath.

Characterisation includes aspects of character we may consider when first building characters, including:

  • Physical appearance
  • Dialogue & narrative voice
  • Self-perception of character and the perceptions of others
  • The character’s history
  • The character’s conflicts and desires
  • The thoughts and actions of the character

Yet character emerges through the difficult choices a person makes.  In other words, if you are an organic writer, it is discovered only in the process of writing.

So we can begin with a visual image, we can do writing exercises to begin filling in the gaps (for example using lists like those in the list below – a common method).  But real character goes deeper.  It emerges when you put characters in situations and conflict with other characters, when you begin to dream about them and build on the characterisation.  Characters develop and grow.

They may at first emerge from a fragment

  • A phrase that intrigues you
  • Visual images – paintings, photographs (I’m a huge John Fowles fan and his picture inspired my character Harold Bliss in Bluethroat Morning)
  • Composites of people we know
  • A face on a bus or a fragment of conversation

We then build these characters – by journaling, writing or dreaming about them. Maybe we’ll pin pictures above our desks:  the novelist Deborah Moggach (author of Tulip Fever and more recently In the Dark) once told me she likes to use Michael Gambon’s face as an inspiration because she feels it is so open to interpretation.

We may set ourselves an exercise – for example – ‘write your character’s obituary’.  Or we may write a scene about a central childhood experience, to begin to understand the character’s past.  I did this for Harold Bliss, when I felt I didn’t know him well enough and the scene I wrote became a vital passage in the novel.

As we write our characters, so they begin to build in our imagination.  Only through regular writing do they begin to live and act in unexpected ways…

If we keep notebooks, where we scribble ideas about our characters, we are giving them room to grow.  They must never be static.

Character is about more than a set piece description.  It is dynamic: a vital life force within a work of fiction.

And characters develop through conflict.

Where do your characters experience conflict?And how do our characters develop?

My experience is: it comes partly through writing partly through dreaming.  It’s like getting to know a person.  First you simply see them, then you see them in a certain situation, then they start to tell you their life-history, you notice their habits, you begin understanding their habits, their turn of phrase becomes familiar and you start to be able to anticipate how they will behave.  You may wish to experiment: utilise different narrative methods to explore them such as playing with a first person voice, writing their dialogue, an internal monologue or a third person view of their life.

I suggest you be playful in your approach.

Try putting a character in a situation that is likely to cause some distress or difficulty, and write the scene using close observation. Think about what that person wants.  What spurs them on?  Desire and conflict are vital.

I once heard Iris Murdoch speak in a lecture at UEA.  She said that we must like our characters – even those who appear on the surface to be abhorrent.  If we do not ‘like’ them (for which you can substitute ‘understand’)  then your reader is unlikely to want to be drawn into their story.  Every character has their own justification for acting as they do.

Aim not merely to describe, but rather to illustrate character through action and dialogue.  Don’t tell rather show.  Let that character be revealed to us.  Showing involves putting your character in a situation and seeing how he/she reacts.  Describing the action in some detail, using dialogue.  Taking it slowly.

Your own curiosity is vital too. If you have a genuine desire to understand how a particular character works, you are half way there.

Use this list of questions to inspire a journal entry about your character:

  1. Write down two random facts about this person
  2. What is their most important life event to date?
  3. If they could change one thing about their life so far, what would it be?
  4. Who do they love?
  5. Who do they hate?
  6. What is their favourite item of clothing?
  7. What is their greatest desire?
  8. Is it a secret or a public desire?
  9. How do they envisage their life ten years from now?
  10. What was their first sexual experience?
  11. What makes them angry?
  12. What is their earliest childhood memory?
  13. What frightens them?
  14. What does their voice sound like?
  15. What is the texture of their skin?

I look forward to hearing what emerges from these questions and ideas for you.

An Interview with Voula Grand, Author of Honor’s Shadow

March 28, 2011 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Interviews, The writing life 1 Comment

Voula Grand, Author of Honor's Shadow

Voula Grand has been a client of The Writing Coach since September 2010.  Her first novel Honor’s Shadow is about to be published by Karnac books in July 2011.  This is the first in our series of author interviews.

Voula, you describe yourself as a novelist and psychologist.  Are the two related?

I believe they are.  I’ve practiced as a business psychologist for the last twenty five years; and I’ve been reading novels since I was three. These are two different ways of doing the same thing: reflecting on life, ourselves, others, relationships, emotions and thoughts.  The two subjects come at this from different angles: psychology is a science that observes, studies, analyses, and concludes.  Fiction, an art form, presents the lives of others in stories, and leaves it to the reader to take what they want from it.  Both provoke us into thinking more deeply and that commonly results in the development of new insights and ideas: then we have more choices.

Honor’s Shadow is your first novel, about to be published by Karnac in July this year.  For so many of my clients, finding a publisher is the ultimate goal. How did you find yours?

Happenstance.  My publisher is Karnac books, and they had asked me to write a book on Executive Coaching, something I spend a great deal of my professional time doing.  I agreed initially, though I was also writing a novel at the time.  Eventually I realised I couldn’t do both, and when I explained to Karnac that I couldn’t write their book because I was writing a novel, they asked to see it, and that’s how I got my contract.

When did you first think you might want to become a writer?

When I was around 8 years old I moved schools and the headmaster there loved my compositions.  He told my mother what a good writer I was, and she, a great reader herself, was very excited and encouraged me to read and to write.

I used to buy exercise books from the newsagent and write on the front, A Book by Voula Tsoflias, and then write stories in it. When I went to university, as a mature student aged 28, I planned to study English literature, but got diverted by my interest in psychology.  During my long career in psychology, and my child rearing years, writing became an ambition for my retirement and later years.  Once I turned fifty, I thought I’d better get on with it if I was to have any chance of realizing this ambition.

You did an MA in Creative Writing.  Was that a key turning point for you and would you recommend it to others?  What did you learn from your MA course?

Yes it was a turning point, because it gave me confidence to formally study my craft to the highest level currently available.   I had attended writing courses for many years, keen to learn. I wanted to write as well as I possibly could.   Completing an MA seemed the ultimate: a hallmark of excellence, of quality.  I learned a lot, definitely: how difficult it is to write really well; how my professional work had got me into habits of business writing, not creative writing.  Most importantly, I learned that whilst theory is important, until you practice, practice, practice, nothing will change. I would recommend an MA to others, provided you are clear what you want to get from it – it’s demanding, time consuming and costly, but I’m glad I did it.

Tell me briefly about your novel – and what attracted you to the themes that you write about?

Honor’s Shadow explores themes of secrets, revenge and betrayal, through the lives of two women who, as young women, were love rivals for Thomas.  Honor moves away from her home town and she and Madalena lose touch, until twenty years later, when Madalena’s daughter appears in a national newspaper, reminding Honor of the past and re-awakening painful memories and old grief.  How Honor, now a psychiatrist, deals with this old injury is the subject of her story, along with her struggle to contain the vengeful impulses of Tisi, a strange new client.

Madalena, living a life of luxury with her wealthy partner, has everything she ever thought she wanted in life.   An anonymous letter jolts her: somebody thinks they know something about her past that could destroy the life she loves.  She is desperate to find out who wrote the letter: she must stop them from taking further action.

The stories of Honor and Madalena weave together: how do they both resolve their difficulties?

The themes of revenge and betrayal are primitive and universal, causing suffering and distress for many people.  The betrayal of infidelity in marriage, the betrayal of friends, of children, the way we betray ourselves: these experiences can be character shaping and life changing, depending on their resolution.  So for me, these themes are fundamental aspects of psychological development: what do you learn from suffering? About yourself? Other people? Relationships? Life?

Totally fascinating!

Which writers do you most admire?

My all time favourite writer is Doris Lessing.  She writes about profound themes in accessible ways.  The Fifth Child and The Cleft are two of my favourites of hers.  Other writers that I hugely admire are Margaret Atwood, Margaret Forster, Toni Morison, all older writers who have demonstrated their commitment and talent repeatedly.

In recent years, some of my favourite books have been “We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Lionel Shriver; “The Life of Pi” by Yann Martel, “The Secret River” by Kate Greville and “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro

What advice would you give to fellow authors who have finished novels and are currently seeking publication?

I think you need to pay attention to two things: your manuscript and yourself.

The manuscript is the easy bit: edit and edit and edit, get others to edit, perfect, perfect.  Do not make a submission till you are completely and utterly happy, particularly with the early chapters you are submitting.

Now the hard part: yourself.  As my soldier son would say, you need to MAN UP!  Whilst you may hit the jackpot and get an agent and publisher straight away, if you don’t you will have to get used to being turned down repeatedly.  In other words, rejection.  Tough one, and the temptation to give up after repeated rejection must be resisted at all costs.

Has the process of being published been what you expected thus far?

I’m not really sure what I expected… I was focused for so long on finishing the novel, I hadn’t really thought about the next stage.  The most engaging and exciting part so far has been selecting the cover image!

We’ve been working closely together on the marketing of your novel.  It’s early days, of course, but what do you think is working for you – and what strategies would you recommend to others?

The most helpful thing to me, as a novice, was to understand the three key areas around marketing: 1.  All the stuff you can expect your publisher to do  2.  Developing a following using a technology platform and 3.  Personal publicity – visiting book clubs and book shops.

I was pretty ignorant of the technology platform stuff, but you quickly downloaded to me all the key things I needed to do and provided advice and guidance that must have saved me months of painstaking research and learning.

My advice to is, don’t be precious about marketing.  It’s part of your job as a writer.  Promote yourself, shamelessly, in every way you can!

Like many writers, you continue to juggle a demanding professional life with being a novelist.  What do you think are the real keys to doing that successfully?

I’m sure this will be different for everyone.

Much of the received wisdom around writing is to discipline yourself to write every single day, even if only for a very short time.  That doesn’t work for me.  I find my professional work all consuming, so if I’m having a working day, which is most days, it is not possible for me to switch my mind from work to writing.

I have dedicated writing days, whole days when work can’t intrude.  When I’m writing intensively, I have one writing day a week, Mondays, so I can spend the weekend forgetting about work, and tuning in to what I’m going to be writing next, and maybe do some preparation for that, so I can be ready for a good day of writing on Monday.  That doesn’t mean writing non-stop all day… I usually get up in a leisurely way, and then take a couple of hours to orient myself to where I am in my writing and what I’m trying to do.  Then I go to the gym for an hour to let my thinking stew a bit.  Then I have a light lunch, and write all afternoon, aiming to draft out whichever chapter I’m working on, and if time allows, do some first editing of it.   I consider 3000 words a good writing day.  For me the key to success in this area is to become very conscious of my own process, what works for me.  I make friends with my process, I don’t struggle against it.  I take the advice of other writers lightly, as ideas that I might want to experiment with – but I focus on finding my own writing rhythm.

What do you consider the greatest challenge in your writing life at present?

Making sure I do everything possible to promote Honor’s Shadow, make it successful to ensure I can publish a second novel.  I read an alarming piece recently – as a debut novelist, you can find a publisher who will take a risk on you.  As a second novel writer, you are now a known quantity – and if your first novel didn’t sell enough you are unlikely to get a second chance.

Finding more time to write continues to be a huge challenge.

You are a psychologist and coach yourself.  Why did you choose to work with a writing coach and was it what you expected?

I am very committed to the usefulness of coaching, because I am a coach, and I know how constructive and positive it can be. However smart you are, you can only get so far on your own – you need someone else to provoke your thinking, to ask you questions you wouldn’t think of yourself.  And to point things out to you that are in your blind spot (good and bad things).

The process of coaching is, in general, what I expected.  The outcomes, the usefulness of it has far exceeded my expectations, both in terms of the practical outputs, and of the personal experience of it.  Writing is essentially a lonely pursuit, so coaching is a great source of support.  The feeling that I have a partner in it frees me to be bolder, and more experimental: I know you will steer me away from ideas that are unlikely to work, or encourage me to develop the ideas which have potential.

What is your next writing project?

A sequel novel to Honor’s Shadow, called Honor’s Ghost.  This novel is going to be a major re-structure and rewrite of an existing manuscript that I worked on over a ten year period, before writing Honor’s Shadow.   I am so looking forward to starting it, but I won’t begin until I have done the final proofs on Honor’s Shadow in a few weeks time.

Thanks Voula, I’m looking forward to reading…

Welcome to the Writing Coach Blog

March 28, 2011 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: African Revival, The writing coach 11 Comments

I’m delighted to announce the launch of the new Writing Coach website and blog. I’m Jacqui Lofthouse, founder of The Writing Coach and in future weeks and months I’m looking forward to sharing regular updates with you.  Those of you who have followed The Writing Coach since the early days (we began in 2005) will know that we are unique in our approach. From the beginning we have had a strong coaching focus, with an emphasis on confidence, productivity and career success for writers.  So whilst we do offer literary consultancy, our emphasis is on the whole person, not just the writing work.

The Writing Coach is now an international mentoring and development organisation for writers, with clients on four continents.  As a novelist and a coach, my aim, when I set up this business, was to work with writers on a one-to-one basis, sharing my own insights into the writing life – but also, importantly, listening to the needs of the individual writer.

There is no “one size fits all” philosophy here.  I like to see myself as an innovator and you’ll find me both responsive and interested in your views.

I’m particularly proud to launch today the Writing Coach’s support of the charity African Revival. I’ve decided to pledge 10% of all revenue (not just profits) from all product sales (that’s the ebooks) and 20% of all Membership fees (for The Completion Club) to a charity that I really believe in.  African Revival is a UK based charity, who believe passionately in the power of education to change lives.  By building schools, training and supporting teachers, and overcoming barriers to education, African Revival help break the cycle of poverty and offers inspiration and opportunity to Africa’s future generations. My aim is to raise at least £20,000 for African Revival and you can find out more about my aims here.

If you support The Writing Coach via our ebooks or by becoming a member, you are also contributing to African Revival’s mission to build schools and increase literacy in the developing world. I’ll be writing more about this new partnership in future posts, but for now I want to emphasise that what makes this partnership possible is that this charity is local to my home, so I’ll be building a personal relationship with the director as I continue to figure out how we, as writers, can support them – in the long term.

Of course, in future weeks, you can rely on this blog to provide you with regular inspiration and motivation to write.  If you are new to The Writing Coach – welcome!  And if you’re an old friend – welcome back!  If you subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog (the black button on the top right for non-techie types), you’ll get updates sent directly to your in-box.  Our posts will include: sound advice on technique for fiction and non-fiction writers; interviews with authors, agents and publishers; advice on submissions; time management tips for writers; news and events in the publishing world; ideas to get you writing; book reviews; information on epublishing and gentle encouragement to pick up your pen each day.

Whilst you’re here, do sign up for our newsletter to be sure you don’t miss a single thing we have to offer. And whilst you’re waiting for this blog to build into a full library of information, why not check out our Articles page too, to find archive articles and articles written by our clients?

I’m looking forward to getting to know you. Why not leave a comment to introduce yourself today?

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Jacqui Lofthouse

The Writing Coach was founded in 2005 by the novelist Jacqui Lofthouse. An international mentoring and development organisation for writers, it is also an online home for writers, somewhere you can find advice, information, motivation and most of all encouragement for your writing work ... read more

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Anna Bright never wanted to write a novel. At least, that’s what she tells herself. But a chance encounter with a famous novelist and a surprise gift of an art book cut a chink in Anna’s resolve. The short, tragic life of Modigliani’s mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne, becomes an obsession and before she knows it, she has enrolled on a creative writing course, is writing about a fictional Jeanne and mixing with the literati.

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