Writing Skills

This piece discusses the process of tracking down character. I explain how I build relationships with character by rituals of attachment to particular images and words. I explain how I follow my characters around as I begin to build scenes. In my first autobiographical novel, GIRL WITH DOVE, I mine the word-life of the books I read: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, the Miss Marple stories by Agatha Christie and Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. My characters emerge through a series of moving scenes and pageants which I see in my mind’s eyes as a series of moving word-pictures. I attach my narrative voice to the textures of words such as ‘drapery’ in Jane Eyre which provides me with a visceral word-life and energy. I conduct words as sorts of life-forces which lead me toward the form and shape of my characters. I follow the red velvet curtains in Jane Eyre and then Miss Marple’s handbag.

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Charlie takes you for a walk with a ball of string and discusses the possible uses of geometric form to help you shape your writing.

I admit to stealing literary characters and moving them about in order to serve my purposes. I position these characters inside doorways and windows in the tradition of Virginia Woolf and then - thinking through visual traditions - in the mode of the American painter, Edward Hopper. 

This piece discusses how we learn to imitate spoken discourse by listening in to chitter-chatter, a method T.S. Eliot follows in his plays and Woolf also produces in her novel, Mrs. Dalloway; what we might call party-chatter. I discuss how I produce my own character chatter from spoken and written discourse. I continue to explain my relationship to Jane Eyre as a second self and kin through the word-life of Charlotte Bronte’s novel. This is a process of transposing words and cadences, often passing through the transparent surface of glass, as Jane Eyre does at the beginning of Bronte’s novel to look out upon ’the drear November day'. In doing so, Jane Eyre turns herself into a spectre and so becomes a character haunted by other lives and voices. The sound of words usher in my characters as forms of sound-spectres I once heard as a child. And so begins my own process of self-haunting.

I discuss my method of generating character by turning details of a character into a living object: an organic form.  This method relates directly to my latest project, THE GREEN LADY, which is an imagined biography of my mother and grandmother’s life as it is attached to an historic character, Mary Neal, a suffragette and educational reformer from another era. 

This particular exercise was designed to help me draw close to mother as a young woman - a person I never knew - by attaching her to the material life of her handbag. In this way I can draw in other characters and build a setting. And so I pull from my mother’s bag an entire lost history of my mother working for Mr. Bald, as I call him; her patterns of thought and behaviour as she develops her sense of self in the world through the character of her precious handbag. All this is purely imagined, but it begins with one real and magnified - helpfully expandable - object.

In this recording, Charlie reminds you that miniscule details can have powerful effects. Why did Charlotte Bronte deploy sugar tongs in her novel Villette? What happened when Ali Smith used a punctuation mark in an unorthodox way? Why did Theodor Fontane repeat a single phrase at the start and end of his novel Effi Briest?