CONTACT ME:
Writing from Alter-Space
  • Home
    • Free Read: An Angel in the Mirror
  • Books
    • The Nightmarist and Other Stories
    • Exodus Sequence >
      • Wired
      • Reflected
      • Walked
      • Spooked
      • Suicided
      • Crashed
      • Woken
      • Experienced
      • Caged
      • Drowned
    • Exodus Sequence 2 >
      • Shattered
    • Fleet Quintet >
      • Transference
      • Flesh for Sale
      • V. Gomenzi
      • Commences
    • A Doorway into Ultra
    • Diamonds on the Moon
    • Clarendon House Anthologies
    • Microfiction
  • Blog

Looking for Character Diversity in Fiction

5/31/2019

0 Comments

 
It isn’t hard.  Take a trip on a tube or a train.  Open your eyes.  If you really start to look at people and see beyond their façade, you begin to realise just how weird and wonderful they are. 
Sometimes it’s just in the way they look. 
Today I stood behind a guy in the tube lift who was about 6’3”.  I could judge his height because he was about the same height as my late stepfather.  Near us was a young woman who was at least three inches taller.  And her boot heels were lower than my trainers.  This meant she was at least 6’5” or 6.  This is really unusually tall for a woman.  She was quite splendid, too.  Very slender, wearing tight black leather trousers on the longest legs I’ve ever seen.  As we all surged towards the turnstiles, a short, round, brown man went through at the same time as this tall girl.  The contrast was fantastic.  You couldn’t make this up.  At 5’7”, I came up to this young woman’s shoulder.  The short man came up to her waist.  Put the four of us together and it would have made an hysterical photograph (I’m the, er, older one with the silver-gold pixie cut).
The richness of human diversity is hardly a new idea.  Diversity itself has been a serious topic for quite some time now, particularly on the political stage.  I’m thinking about it more in fiction.  Is there enough diversity in writing?  I don’t just mean diversity in writers themselves:  I mean in actual characters.  My demographic is never, ever represented.  This is, no doubt, because my demographic is considered to be utterly boring.  All middle-aged women are, apparently, conservative;  are married/divorced/sexually frustrated;  have growing up kids;  are caring for aged parents;  have a mortgage and a career;  are juggling a thousand things on a daily basis;  are struggling with weight, menopause and/or some or other illness;  like foreign holidays;  would consider an affair with a younger man;  read literary fiction;  have an educated opinion;  think Fleabag is funny.
But what if you aren’t like this?  Oh, right, in that case, you are a bit funky, smoke dope (my generation does not say weed) and would consider an affair with a younger man/woman.  If you’re a middle-aged female artist type, then you’re a hippy.  A different class?  Then you’re a drudge. 
None of these stereotypes are me.  And yet this is the only type of middle-aged woman I can find in fiction.  At least, this is the only type I’ve found so far.  Diversity isn’t always about race or age.  Physical diversity is probably quite easy to do – superficially, you can come up with all sorts of variations.  But the problems are always the same.  It’s this lack of diversity that drives me nuts in fiction:  no one ever seems to think/do/act any differently to anyone else, no matter who or what they are or where they come from.
It’s true that the mark of a good author is one that creates a character which you can identify with, even though they aren’t like you at all.  This isn’t really the kind of diversity I’m talking about, though.  Everyone my age in a story (whether in books or television or film) is always a “mom” character.  Much as I like being a mother, this isn’t the only thing that defines me!
 
I’m quite sure, though, that for every divergence from the norm, there is someone who never sees themselves represented in fiction.  No matter how original an author might be, characters can invariably be categorised in some way.  And if you can show me an author who doesn’t do this, please, let me know, because I’m so unutterably bored with “normal.”

Diary of a Bloomsbury Writer also appears in my WordPress blog which you can follow HERE.


Picture
0 Comments

Finding your main character's voice

5/15/2019

0 Comments

 
It's taken me all the way to chapter 12 to find my main character's voice.  And now that I've found it, it's funny and clever and brilliant.  Scenes are rolling from my fingers.  I'm writing twice as much each session.  The novel itself has come alive and feels exciting.

But why did it take so long?

Several things hampered this novel's progress:
  • It's the second in the series.  The first in the series was exciting, not only for the protagonist, but for me as a writer.  It was all about discovery.  My heroine was discovering the thrill of hidden magic.  I was discovering the delight of writing a novel that was lightweight, funny and magical.  I was afraid I wouldn't be able to recreate the tone of this novel and was proven right.  It's going to take some hard work to recapture the magic (during edits).
  • It has a different narrator.  It's a feature of this series that each book will have a different narrator.  And they won't all be teenagers or girls, either, which removes the YA tag at once.  This means I have to find a new voice for each novel.  The teenage girl in Book 1 came to life at once.  I got inside her head and no problem with her.  She was alive from the first page.  The narrator in Book 2 is this heroine's mother.  The reader has already met her and knows she's funny and interesting.  So how did I lose her voice?
  • It has a new point of view (POV).  While Alice, the mother, was easy to create in Book 1, by changing the POV to her POV meant that something was lost.  She worked less well when I was looking through her eyes.  This has proven to be excruciating for me as a writer.  I can't recreate her humour, her cleverness, her quirky opinions.  It all seems to have died in the switch.  I wonder:  if I hadn't created her so well in Book 1, would I have had less problems in Book 2?
  • The MC knows nothing.  In Book 1, our intrepid heroine is on adventure of discovery.  The reader goes with her and the discovery is mutual.  Alice, however, knows nothing.  The reader is thus left in the frustrating  position of knowing everything while the MC is blind to the facts.  This is intensely frustrating to write.  It's also hard to create any excitement when the MC is being so thick-skulled.

There has been no secret formula in finding Alice's voice.  I couldn't tell you how I did it.  I had planned to just chug away to the end of the first draft, knowing that my work was going to be cut out for me in the second.  The resurrection process was going to be huge.

Then two things happened:
  • My MC Alice had an extraordinary experience which basically freed her as a human being.  I'd had no idea that this sequence was going to affect her in this way.  In fact, in my notes, it appears that she was to have remained untouched and that the change was to have happened later.  But later was too late.  And her experience, once I began to write it, took on a life of its own.  Thus Alice was freed from the shackles of her character.
  • My MC left the location of the book's setting.  By leaving it, she becomes exterior to the village and her experience there.  She is (briefly) thrown back into her old life (she attends a funeral) and the changes in her character become apparent.  Because she is free and unaffected by her horrible family, the real Alice emerges:  funny, clever and brilliant.


At the same time as these revelations, subtle changes to the plot have occurred to me as well.  It seems that by understanding my MC, I am now able to write her story properly.

I still don't understand, though, how some characters arrive fully formed and blaze through a novel, while others are dead on the page.  On the other hand, some of the characters that I've struggled with the most turn out to be the strongest, most complex, and fully formed characters I've ever invented (V. Gomenzi, in his eponymous novel, is one.)

So if a character doesn't work, take heart.  Battle on.  His or her secrets will eventually be revealed as long as you're prepared to work for it.


Picture
0 Comments

    Author

    I live in Bloomsbury.
    I write.
    Sometimes it goes quite well.

    ​

    FOLLOW
    You can follow
    Diary of a
    Bloomsbury Writer
     
    on ​
    ​wordpress.com
    where it's called
    Writing from
    ​Alter-Space

    ​​

    Archives

    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015

    Categories

    All
    Commences
    Everlast
    Lent
    Life
    Life In Bloomsbury
    My Coronavirus Diary
    New Novel
    On Editing
    On Publishing
    On Writing
    Review
    Second Draft
    The Difficult Novel
    The End
    Writing Tips

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
Photos used under Creative Commons from Markus Trienke, eflon, Larry Smith2010, __MaRiNa__, elminium, InvictusOU812, PaulBalfe, Rina Pitucci (Tilling 67), ANBerlin [Ondré], Sumriana Babyana, stevecadman, Darling Starlings, Saku Takakusaki, Rubén Díaz Caviedes, Ric Capucho, aquigabo!, Key Foster, Mrs Airwolfhound, my little red suitcase, Joe Le Merou, freestock.ca ♡ dare to share beauty, bluebirdsandteapots, the bridge, Flower Power girl, Sharon & Nikki McCutcheon, chakchouka, archer10 (Dennis) 85M Views, this lyre lark, Secret Pilgrim, Hunky Punk, waaanderlust, takkle K, michaelmueller410, paweesit, Rick Camacho, Gidzy, J.J. Verhoef, Honza M., HDValentin, kthypryn, Pfauenauge *back to school...on and off*, diana_robinson, indigoMood, enrico.pighetti, Maria Eklind, timsackton, docoverachiever, Sharon & Nikki McCutcheon, bjpcorp, matty_gibbon, katya_alagich