Last week’s post asking for your character dilemmas is still open, if you’d like to put forward any problems you’re having.  I was looking mainly at the balance between likeable, realistic, and interesting.

This week I’ve read two novels, THE FALL by Claire McGowan and HOUSE OF SILK by Anthony Horowitz.

THE FALL is by a debut author (who came to my submissions masterclass a couple of years ago) and tackles two very different women.  Charlotte is a wealthy, engaged, pampered young woman, and Keisha is on the margins of society, her daughter has been taken away from her, and her boyfriend treats her appallingly.  Their lives intersect in one dramatic moment.

I won’t give away any more of the plot, but the author has given herself a difficult job here, because both the women she writes about are somewhat cliched.  We think we know all there is to know about spoilt bridezillas, and we think we don’t need to know about disenfranchised women that excuse violent behaviour in their boyfriends.  Claire McGowan proves us wrong – and goes on to give us an insight into two very interesting people whose motivations drive forward a good plot.

Anthony Horowitz has a different problem – he’s writing about characters that we know so well – Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson – that we can’t believe he can do anything new with them.  Again he proves us wrong, with a gripping addition to the Holmes canon that builds on but doesn’t duplicate Conan Doyle’s work.

Louis de Bernieres‘s Captain Corelli made a brief updated appearance on Radio 4′s Broadcasting House this Sunday – reacting to the modern-day Greek crisis.  This results in a fantastic example of what authors are often told to do – place their characters in different situations and work out how they’d behave – well worth a listen (it’s towards the end).

And ending on a visual note – this website of character composites takes well-known characters and puts their descriptions into police software to show what they’d look like.  This only works if the author has given some description – the blog’s author says there will be no Holden Caulfield as his amounts to ‘I have a crew cut’…

Have you read any good characters recently?  What problems do you have in your writing with characters?

When starting to write, a lot of authors fall into the trap of the Perfect Protagonist.  They like the idea of a person who is better than them, slimmer (often), smarter, more beautiful – and whose talents make the plot easy to work.  The trouble is as readers, we slightly hate characters like that.  The other danger is that your villains become the heros of the piece, which may not be your intention.  If that happens, you’re in good company, it’s universally recognised that Milton’s Devil was his best bit of writing.

So if your character needs to be a bit more – well – real than perfect, what about if they start becoming unpleasant?  You’ll often hear editors telling writers that they need to make their characters people the reader can connect with – but does that mean the reader needs to like them?

The short answer is no, examples of not-so-nice characters that make the grade would include the narrator of LOLITA, but what is vital is that the reader is interested in the character.  Lovely, lustful, louche – just don’t let your main character be dull.

How are you getting on with your main characters?  Character clinic is open – ask any questions and we’ll see if we can help!

This caught my attention because of Elle’s snappy plug ‘A teen time traveller accidentally takes her secret crush back in time.  Awkward.’  It combined an interesting hook with a typically teen scenario, and sounded light and maybe a touch funny.

The main character, Casey, is a typical teen, on the edges of the cool kids, gangly and with a stroppy older brother.  What makes her atypical is her ‘tripping’ – she suddenly finds herself back in the 1860s, and anyone she’s touching at the time, comes back with her.

I won’t spoil the story by giving any more away – but it’s a strong read, mainly because Casey comes across as both likeable and believable.  My only quibbles would be that the plot involving Casey’s father’s origins stretches things a little far, and that the parents’ marriage doesn’t seem entirely plausible.

I would recommend CLOCKWISE, and the author has realised that the plot lends itself  to a series, including a tantalising opening chapter of CLOCKWISE-R (not the best title) within this book.

The Alliance of Independent Authors – as described in this Bookseller article – is for authors who have self-published.  Their aims are to have a joint presence on the publishing stage.  

Only, say, five years ago, a self-published author would have been regarded with a fair degree of suspicion and disdain by traditional publishers.  As gate-keepers of the printed word, it was felt that anyone who had bypassed them had done so by creeping below a permitted standard.

With the advent of print-on demand, and the growth in e-books, that view has shifted.  An author that self-publishes may have decided to bypass the traditional publishers, rather than have been rejected by them.

Authors self-publish for a variety of reasons, and I hope the new Alliance will help them vocalise those reasons, and help them understand the task of self-publishing.

Ending on a note of warning – anyone can write a book, but not everyone can write a book worth reading.  Along the same lines, anyone can self-publish, but not everyone can act as a publisher.

If you’re a self-published author – what are your thoughts on the subject?  And if you’ve decided not to go down that route – why not?

I will review the most interesting title over the following week.

All comments (and plugs) will go live on Saturday 4th February so come back to see who is writing what!

UPDATE – actually – I’m going to let the comments go live now – no reason not to except to ramp up the suspense!

Any plugs received by 10am Saturday (UK time) will be entered into the competition.  Review winner named by the end of Saturday..

Quick disclaimer – please don’t start either book without having set aside enough time to finish it.  One cost me a night’s sleep, and the other had to be squeezed around various deadlines, doctor’s appointments and the like..

Close to home, a friend has had her first novel published, the excellently creepy TIDELINE by Penny Hancock.  I’ll try not to give too much away, but the central character – Sonia – is somewhat detached from reality, and becomes more so.  Penny has written the novel in the first person – and also in the present tense, and in doing so, sucks you so thoroughly into Sonia’s mindset that the occasional interludes by Sonia’s friend Helen (3^rd person, past tense) feel like an irritating distraction.

Interestingly she doesn’t set up a dichotomy of ‘Sonia deluded’ versus ‘Helen sane’ – rather she allows for Helen’s equally individual take on reality to be part of what the reader picks up on.  If you’ve not read a copy yet – put it to the top of your list.

Jonathan Frantzen’s FREEDOM has been widely acclaimed (and shortlisted amusingly for both the Good and Bad Sex writing awards last year!) and he breaks all the rules when it comes to points of view.  The novel’s events are described from the point of view of several of the main characters, at least six of them in fact.

Again this multiplicity of views gives the lie to the idea that one is the ‘correct’ version.  He moves the plot forward, so no one event gets repeated directly, although they are often alluded to.  The main premise of the book  – again – trying not to give too much away – is that no-one can really tell what a marriage’s dynamic is from the outside.  I enjoyed the sections where a neighbour or neighbours were gaining clues on how the Berglunds operated through the usual neighbourly interactions, something we are all guilty of.

So what have these rave reviews got to do with your writing?  If you’re struggling with points of view, you could do a lot worse than read these two books to see how these authors have tackled it.  And they’re such good books to read, it’s like doing homework you enjoy!

2. ‘The man walked down the street, he looked preoccupied, as if he was thinking deeply about something, or someone.’

3. ‘I walked  down the street, thinking of her, always on my mind despite our slight history.’

4. ‘Jeff walked down the street, idly musing on the girl next door, indulging in a little harmless fantasy.’

5. ‘You walked down the street, thinking of her, drifting on a sea of maybes.’

I’m often asked about points of view, and which works best for a particular style or genre.  It’s good to have a clear idea of what points of view options there are when writing, and how they interact with your reader.

The examples above are:

1. Omniscient narrator –  the narrative voice knows what’s going on, even when the character doesn’t, and is both aware of the man’s thinking, and able to see what is coming next.

2. The narrator here doesn’t know what is going on, and is just an observer of this particular character.  They have an idea, but they could be wrong, or don’t have all the details.

3. The most common for writers, this is a first person narrative.  The narrator is the character, and can express feelings and motives, but is not likely to know what is coming next, unless they are looking back on events.

4. Third person narrative, here the author is inside the character, but there is an element of greater distance between the character and the reader.

5.  Rarely used as it can quickly become pretentious or irritating – the second person narrative is hard to pull off, and hard to read, but can be used to great unsettling effect as it draws the reader straight into the action without asking permission.

There are advantages and disadvantages to all of these different points of view.  When looking at your own work, take a moment to consider what depth of relationship you’d like your characters to have with your readers.  Remember what information the characters will have to be involved in or witness, in order to pass on plot details.

The most important thing to remember about points of view is that the more you have, the more you’re asking of your reader.  As a reader if you’re constantly skipping from one person to another, it’s very distracting and jolts you out of the world the author has created.  For this reason, and to keep your writing tight and focused, I would recommend one or two points of view for most pieces of writing.

Try writing each scene from the point of view of the main protagonist and you should see which characters are dominating the action.

But whatever you do, don’t drift about in a scene, suddenly informing the reader what the bus driver is thinking when the rest of the scene is coming from the point of view of the main character.

So – what are your points of view stumbling blocks?  Ask them here and I’ll do my best to help you sort them out!

More seriously I realised that I could probably write the book (or  that Bloody Book as it’s kind of become) in the time, but I certainly couldn’t edit it, and an unedited book is an undressed salad – just not right.

So this is my confession blog post.  I didn’t manage it.  However I am just over 8,000 words in (about another 42,000 to go) and I’m trying for a new deadline.  It won’t count as a NaNoWriMo (not a novel, not from scratch) but I thought I’d write alongside those of you who are signed up for it.  (NaNoWriMo is a writing project, aiming to get 50,000 words of new fiction out of each participant by the end of November).

30th November anyone?  And in the meantime, if you’d like to let me know if you’re doing NaNoWriMo, or if you have a contribution for the forthcoming book chapter ‘When Good Parties Go Bad’, please comment below.

I’ve doubled my word count (200 to 400 words).

I’ve logged onto Amazon and created an author account.  The account bit is easy, for the bank account details you will need your IBAN number and your BIC number.  Your bank can and will give those to you.

I’ve read through the guide to putting my book up on Amazon and reassured myself that writing it in a Word document in Times New Roman is fine for now.

And I’ve found another madwoman who is also trying to get an e-book up by November.  Here’s hoping we both make it.

In other news, I’ve discovered my so-called friends love to torment me ‘how’s the book coming along?’ – so my next piece of advice is  - never tell anyone you’re writing.

How do your friends support you or otherwise with your writing?

• I am very bad at getting started
• I hate deadlines even the ones I’ve inflicted on myself
• Life (and paid work), children, cats and fish all seem to get in the way.
• I hate planning on a computer – it has to be paper and pen or I can’t seem to ‘see’ what I’m doing.
• Equally I hate writing on paper – has to be a computer.
• I live in fear of formatting a PDF.
• I still don’t have a title.

What are your experiences? What makes you suit being a writer, and what personality traits hinder you?