It was when I was listening to Herman Koch in interview that a truth appeared to me in all its simplicity. Colm Toibin had, in fact, appraised me of the same truth in a similar styled interview, but at that time I hadn't thought of it as some sort of universal truth; rather a fact about his own mother and no more than that.
The more I hear novelists speak the more apparent it becomes that we all tend to do, more or less, the same thing. We observe people, very closely. Observing closely as we tend to do, characters for stories form. In my own case, the starting point is a name. The character simply must have a name and I spend considerable time on that, sometimes changing the name somewhere into the story because I didn't get that right in the first place.
A character is, generally speaking, a composite of a few different people, but not always. Sometimes, someone fascinates us so much that we more or less steal that person's personhood for our book character. I've been in endless discussions about the morality of this behaviour but in the end the consensus lies in the fact that it is fiction. When writing fiction you can get away with an awful lot.
However, I have been plagued with doubt at times at the correctness of this position and my main fear is that I should hurt that person. I had a small character for a chapter not yet written based on a real person but was being held back by that thought, until I discovered she had died and this opened the door, I felt, to write the character as I wanted to write her.
It was Koch together with Toibin who made it clear that scruples are entirely unnecessary, for this one reason. You can write the real life person just as they are, all the nastiness in full glory, and guess what? They won't have a clue that you have written about them. People often don't have the vaguest insight into their foibles and downfalls and won't pick them up in your novel. Now, maybe someone who knows them might wonder, might point it out to them, but in all likelihood even then they won't see themself in the character. Isn't that absolutely fascinating?
In Toibin's case, his mother came to him to register her complaint that he had used a habit of hers. Instead of setting the table for the family as all good Irish mothers did at the time, she had a habit of throwing the cutlery into the middle of the table and the children would fetch their set from the pile. She was most upset that he should have a character do this. Colm's response: 'And in the whole novel, in which you abound, that's what you noticed???'
It tickles my fancy. It terrifies me that we have so little self-awareness.
The more I hear novelists speak the more apparent it becomes that we all tend to do, more or less, the same thing. We observe people, very closely. Observing closely as we tend to do, characters for stories form. In my own case, the starting point is a name. The character simply must have a name and I spend considerable time on that, sometimes changing the name somewhere into the story because I didn't get that right in the first place.
A character is, generally speaking, a composite of a few different people, but not always. Sometimes, someone fascinates us so much that we more or less steal that person's personhood for our book character. I've been in endless discussions about the morality of this behaviour but in the end the consensus lies in the fact that it is fiction. When writing fiction you can get away with an awful lot.
However, I have been plagued with doubt at times at the correctness of this position and my main fear is that I should hurt that person. I had a small character for a chapter not yet written based on a real person but was being held back by that thought, until I discovered she had died and this opened the door, I felt, to write the character as I wanted to write her.
It was Koch together with Toibin who made it clear that scruples are entirely unnecessary, for this one reason. You can write the real life person just as they are, all the nastiness in full glory, and guess what? They won't have a clue that you have written about them. People often don't have the vaguest insight into their foibles and downfalls and won't pick them up in your novel. Now, maybe someone who knows them might wonder, might point it out to them, but in all likelihood even then they won't see themself in the character. Isn't that absolutely fascinating?
In Toibin's case, his mother came to him to register her complaint that he had used a habit of hers. Instead of setting the table for the family as all good Irish mothers did at the time, she had a habit of throwing the cutlery into the middle of the table and the children would fetch their set from the pile. She was most upset that he should have a character do this. Colm's response: 'And in the whole novel, in which you abound, that's what you noticed???'
It tickles my fancy. It terrifies me that we have so little self-awareness.
No comments:
Post a Comment