March 6, 2006

LISTEN TO HARRIET SMART DISCUSS WRITING THE CHARACTER-BASED NOVEL HERE

The Writing Show (WS): This is Paula B. Creating interesting and believable characters is the foundation of good fiction writing, but as anyone who has ever tried to do that knows, it isn’t easy. On this week’s show, author Harriet Smart explains what makes characters compelling and how character can drive a story forward.

Welcome to the Writing Show where writing is always the story. I’m your host, Paula B., and today my guest is Harriet Smart.

Harriet Smart is Creative Director of Anthemion Software. She has written four historical novels and one contemporary novel, all published by Headline. She recently completed an M.A. in TV screenwriting.

Welcome to the show, Harriet. It’s a pleasure to have you here. You’ve said that character-based novels take a well-drawn individual or individuals on a journey, so that by the end the character has got somewhere–either emotionally, spiritually, or intellectually. The events of the story are there to make the person change. I’ve heard J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5 say something similar, like, “Put a character up a tree and throw stones at them.”

Let’s talk about this idea. First, is transformation absolutely necessary in order to build a good story?

Harriet Smart (HS): Now, my first thought was transformation is actually quite a strong word. I wonder if I’ve over-stated it perhaps. It makes me think of a sort of “Paul on the road to Damascus” scenario: The person was X, and now they’re Y, and it’s terribly dramatic. I don’t think every character needs to be hugely transformed, but there needs to be some small change even in the most action-driven story to give it some depth and texture. For example, in a detective novel, it’s nice to have the detective having a little moment of insight, having learned something about human nature along the way, but obviously in that style of book you couldn’t have the detective undergoing a life-changing experience in every book because we kind of want detectives to be reliable. We pick up a Morse because Morse will be the same, so they can’t change that much, so I think that transformation is too strong, but there should be a small change, I think.

WS: Let’s say it’s not a transformation but a change. Does the type of change matter? Now, I’m thinking about characters that change in literature and, of course, some of the characters actually get worse instead of better, although, I guess that’s a bit of a value judgment. But take Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, for example, where the character starts out all right, and then his life gets just worse and worse and worse; and at the end he dies unremarked and forgotten. What about that kind of change?

HS: Well, it’s a question of the effect you want to create and the ideas that you want to explore. If they’re like Henchard, and they change for the bad, and you have to keep reading on through this horrible descent, and you’ve been made to care about them from the start, and they don’t care about saving themselves, that ends up being an incredibly strong story and utterly unforgettable, so I’d say that was a good result. I don’t think unless you’re writing improving tales to give out as school prizes, the change matters. It just matters that there is change of some description because change kind of implies narrative motion, and you want things to happen in a story.

WS: Oh, that’s really interesting. Then, it doesn’t really matter whether they get better or they get worse or even if it’s sort of a lateral change. The change is related to the forward motion of the story.

HS: Yeah, movement, isn’t it? I mean, if the weather’s the same all the time, you don’t have contrasts of tone or emotion or the things that we pick a book up for–to go on a sort of journey through different places, different scenarios, different emotions and that’s… When characters change, that’s interesting. It’s kind of like superior gossip because it’s something to talk about, and it’s something to think about, and it moves the story along, as well, which is what people love, obviously. I mean, they don’t like stories in which nothing happens because they’re not stories. That doesn’t make any sense, does it?

WS: Yes, it’s wonderful. That’s absolutely wonderful.

Now, you can throw stones at any character, but readers and watchers, if you’re talking about movies, don’t necessarily care about every character who gets into difficulty. Why is it that we care about some characters and not others?

HS: That’s an interesting one. I spent a summer once in Ontario, in Lake Muskoka, and in the cottage next door to the one we were staying in, there was a family with two small children. This is going somewhere, believe me. There was an older girl and a smaller boy, and we could hear just about everything that was going on, and one day the boy was whining about something, endlessly wanting to play with the girl, and his sister said, “We don’t really care!” in this horrible soul-crushing way. Now I felt sorry for the brother, even if he was a brat, but he hadn’t been bugging me and whining at me all morning as he had with her, and I think, in a way, she had a right not to care because he was so unattractive to her at that particular moment, and if he had been a character in a novel, whining to get her attention and sympathy, she should have chucked the book down and gone for a swim in the lake instead. So I think you have to give a reader something for their investment, something to make it worth their while spending the time playing with them, and it’s quite a mysterious art that, I think.

WS: Can you give us any examples of things that you would do to make a person care about a character?

HS: Yeah, well, I think you have to make them admirable. I think there has to be a certain ability, but they’re pleasantly flawed, but not in a yucky way. The faults that make us human are endearing, but not things that, in our particular culture, that we find disgusting. To go back to the Colin Dexter novels, it is very interesting that in the novels, the Morse novels these are, set in Oxford, Morse is extremely interested in pornography, and in the television adaptation they left that out completely, presumably for public consumption. But when I actually read the novels and discovered this about Morse, I felt extremely uncomfortable, so I think that’s an example of a flaw that didn’t really work, and the fact that it was phased out of the television adaptations suggests that they realized that lots of people were going to have a similar reaction to that, that it’s a yucky flaw rather than an endearing flaw.

I think sympathetic characters are in adversity that we can identify as adversity, but they don’t whine about it. They kind of get on with their lives, but you can see that they’re under pressure. I think a marvelous example of that is Mr. Knightly in Emma. He is incredibly human, and yet noble at the same time. He gets tetchy at the edges, but he apologizes afterwards. You can tell he’s getting annoyed, yet he’s polite at the same time. Then you get marvelous little details. Although Austen never goes into his viewpoint, you just get tiny little details about what he’s like, what he’s wearing. It’s very subtle, but it builds up into this incredibly real human being that you feel very drawn towards, so it is all down to this idea that a character has to be very subtly drawn and tiny things can make all the difference, I think.

WS: And can that work for villains, as well?

HS: Oh, well, yes. I think it does, and I think villains should be very well developed, even in a sense more so than the hero because, as a writer, you need to work out where they’re coming from and why they’re doing what they do, and the sort of generic, “I want to take over the world,” “But why do you want to take over the world?” You have to be strongly motivated to do something like that. Also, a villain who has things that you find interesting and subtle is a much worthier opponent for your good characters because it’s hard to defeat someone you actually like.

WS: You know I was just thinking of some villains while we were talking, and you have someone like Dracula for example. You have Hannibal Lecter.

HS: Oh, yes! Because in some respects in the right environment, he would be a very interesting person to get to know. If you were at some very formal dinner party, he would be a quite interesting person to have sitting next to you. You wouldn’t want to marry him, but he’d be worth a couple of courses. Maybe by the pudding you’d be thinking, “Can we have that thing where the women leave now?” Yes, I think great villains are compelling. It’s much more scary that way if they’re fully rounded people.

WS: You talked a moment ago about little details. How else do you build a well rounded and believable character?

HS: I don’t think I build in a conscious way. I think I spend a lot of time just sort of processing stuff in the lower regions of my imagination. I kind of start with a name and then I just acquire information about this person, not through any conscious process. I suppose I’ve been doing it since I was a child, that I think up, well, I know what sort of clothes they would wear or what they’d order if they were having lunch or what newspaper they might read, and little scenes from their past that, you know, would never, ever come into the story sometimes flicker in my mind. You know, it’s almost spontaneous, but I don’t suppose it can be. It just happens at a low level, and I’m so in the habit of doing it, but I think it’s a kind of focused day-dreaming. You may appear to the rest of the world to be incredibly lazy, but, in fact, you are just mulling over the possibilities of a person and what they might do and how they might behave and what they might aspire to and what they might be afraid of and who they are in love with and who they loved or the mistakes they made, what they regret, what they don’t regret. You know all these things that you can just kind of stack up, questions to answer. I feel like a child playing with a doll and sitting there and saying, “You know, this is actually not a doll. This is a real person, and I’m going to give it a whole persona,” and I spend a lot of time doing that. When I’m walking down the street or going round the supermarket or whatever. Then you could do it all the time, and it’s immensely rewarding in a kind of geeky way…well, nerdy way, I figure it’s a bit sad, actually, but I love it. It’s one of the best parts of the job, making up the people, and the more time you spend doing it, I think the better your writing is because you’ve got more material to draw on. It’s like you’ve done a really big interview with somebody. You have all these facts. You’ve done your research, but you don’t even need to go to the library because you make it all up.

We’re all people. We know about being people, so you’re not having to characterize yourself as a butterfly, you know, what a butterfly would think about things, but I think I have a rough idea of what a person I’m making up, and, of course, you mentioned credibility and how credible a character is, I think a lot of that is sleight of hand. The expectation of the reader on the one hand and the writer on the other, and there’s this sort of air in the middle where you put your side of a thing, and a reader picks it up and builds up the details, and if you’ve made the right hints…maybe it’s like leading questions in court. You know, you present the right information, you don’t have to present everything, and the reader will fill in the rest, and that’s what I mean by a sleight of hand. That’s a sort of trick you can learn, well, not learn. I don’t think it’s even, you just sort of do it after a while if you write enough. That makes no sense.

WS: Yes, it does. Let me go with that. Can you give us any examples of what you mean by the right information?

HS: An example of…

WS: What you mean by the “right” information. You said that if you give them the right information, they’ll fill in the rest. What kinds of details about a person or about the situation would you expose?

HS: I think the things that betray a state of mind. I was thinking, again, of Jane Austen. There’s a wonderful scene where Emma, I think, has been talking about Frank Churchill, and how she likes him, or something to do with that, and it’s just like a movie, we cut to Mr. Knightly and he’s fastening up his gaiters, and he’s asking, “Can I leave now? I’ve had enough of this. This woman I love is going on about this other guy, and it irritates me profoundly,” and it’s just a beautiful indication that he’s under mental stress. Maybe that’s not the most obvious example. You probably have to read it a few times.

WS: No, I think that’s a wonderful example. What you’re saying is you’re taking things like gestures and body language and just little signs that you almost can’t write in dialog.

HS: No, I think it’s like, you know, movie acting is all about twitches of the eyebrows, isn’t it, and the very subtle things that a good actor or a good director will bring to a script, and they’re not necessarily in the script. Yes, you could overwrite this sort of thing. Well, the way characters talk betrays a lot about them, particular uses of expression and, not dialect because dialect novels should be put into the great bin in the sky, personally. Who was that awful character in Wuthering Heights? Joseph, the terrible Yorkshire–he’s the steward or the butler or something. He just goes on and on in Yorkshire dialect, and it’s just maddening, unreadable. I think you can do a lot with speech as well as little gestures. Behavior betrays people and signals inner..and speech patterns do, as well.

There must be other things I can’t think of off the top of my head, but I’m sure there are all sorts of little ways you can cue people in to what’s going on in their interior life or attitudes. A book I love is A Room with a View by E.M. Forster, which is full of people saying sort of ridiculous things like in that opening scene about the room, who’s going to get the room with the view, and we couldn’t possibly ask about the room, and why couldn’t we ask about it? That just tells you so much about that group of people and that section of society they come from and where they’ve come from sort of emotionally, and it’s also very funny, which is always a good thing.

WS: It sounds like if it doesn’t come to you naturally, then maybe, if you just watch people and make mental notes, that might help.

HS: Absolutely. I also read a lot of biography, strangely enough. I think that’s a very good way to learn about people, especially these really thorough biographies where they tell you when they blew their noses and this sort of thing, which can be quite boring, but they really do give you, especially when the biographer’s going out on a limb and speculating a lot, you can learn a lot about people and the way the world works, and how people pick quarrels over nothing and think about things or never forgive Aunt Lucy for burning their first poem. I think there’s an awful lot of material for novelists in biography and in family histories and things. Not so much autobiographies. I don’t like those. I think they’re often a bit too self-regarding, but if someone else is dissecting a character for you, you can kind of learn a lot and then put them back together again for your fictitious purposes. Reading other novelists, you know, the classics because that gives you a way… A good novelist will give you a way of watching the world, observing the world. You somehow need the clues of what to look for. I would say observing people. I think Proust is a fantastic writer. I adore him. Nothing happens. I mean, things happen, but he’s not conventionally a good novelist, and often I feel he should be edited, but he minutely analyzes people’s behavior exactly, and he goes into much more detail than you would think possible, but it’s very instructive when you see how he analyzes someone’s behavior in this funny kind of detached but detailed way. He kind of chops up their mind in slices and you put the book down then you go out somewhere, and you start looking at people with the same sort of view of the world. You start thinking, “He’s doing that because…”, and you start watching and speculating, and then you take all that on board, and, if you start doing that to your own characters, I think they begin to take off in your mind, and suddenly they’re real people, which is lovely. That’s what we’re striving for. I certainly am. I want people to worry about my characters long after they put the book down.

WS: OK. I’m going to ask you a question in light of what you just said. I’m not even sure that this question makes sense, but I’ll ask it, and then you can respond. Let’s say you’ve drawn up your characters fairly well, what do you do then to drive them forward? The reason I say the question may not make sense is you actually were talking about qualities of the characters that drive them forward even without thinking about plot just because of the way they are, but maybe there’s more that you can do.

HS: I think there is. I think there’s two strands to that. I think there is the throwing the stones thing that makes life difficult for them once you’ve created these pretty rounded characters and give them a destination. Give them somewhere where they want to go at the end of your story. I mean this is the classic thing. Give them a goal, and maybe not let them go where they thought they wanted to go. You can do external things, but I think the process of creatinga character will throw up the sort of problems that you put them in later.

Just to revert to topic of villains. I’ve been planning a story which has the scheming female villain who will, of course, cause all sorts of problems for the good guys. And I just knew I had to have a villain because it’s that sort of story. And I knew she had to be a force of opposition, but I knew she had to be credible. So I spent a long time thinking about, as I said earlier, about how she became a baddie, and out of that process I got a really good central thrust for the story–a major sort of idea which made the whole thing work so much better and added a layer of mystery, and that was out of her personal experience, the sort of events that the story could move forward on. So I think the deeper you go, the more you get out.

WS: So are you saying that if you go into their background that you will come up with plot points, perhaps, or am I misunderstanding?

HS: Sometimes, yeah, you can create scenarios. I never think in terms of plot points, actually. I’m not terribly sure what they are. Events, things that will make her behave in a certain way and create desires. They really did it in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” in that adaptation with Johnny Depp. That’s not in the book, but they made him the son of a dentist who was denied sweets and had horrible braces, and so then he becomes this sort of weirdo chocolate man who can’t relate to the outside world. That’s a very broad example, but it works in the context of a kids film. Christopher Lee is the perfect dentist. I wouldn’t say specific plot points, but you can get some kind of narrative fuel so to speak.

WS: You’ve come up with some wonderful ideas for building characters using the example of, of all things, “Little Red Riding Hood.” Can you talk a little bit about some of the examples you have come up with?

HS: You mean specifically the the “Little Red Riding Hood” thing or…I mean, I’ve done that since…I did it at a screenwriting seminar where we were all told to come up with different versions of fairy tales. In our group, we got “The Three Little Pigs,” which was absolute fiendish, but we came up with a thriller set in Nazi-ccupied Paris, and each of the pigs and their houses representing a different attitude to the Nazi occupation. For example, the house of straw was was going to be a collaborator. The brick person was going to be the resistance type, and the one in the middle was kind of not quite sure where they were going. That was an amazing example of how you could take a shape and then actually say, “Well, what sort of pigs are they?”, and “What’s the wolf?” “Who’s the wolf?” is such a good question. We go back to the question of baddies. Who are the wolves, and what do they want? You could take the three little pigs again, couldn’t you, and do it from the wolf’s point of view.

WS: There you go, see that’s what I was trying to get at. Instead of writing the story from the little pigs’ point of view, you write it from the wolf’s point of view, or, maybe, the pigs’ mother’s point of view.

HS: Yes, why did she send them away? This is a mystery. What went wrong, or did she die? I think it is a fantastic exercise if you’re feeling blocked if you want to just play around with ideas and see where you can go with them. I think myths and stories like that are fantastic because they have all the basic parts. They have the bad guys and the good guys and the hero and the heroine and the conflicts are there already, and, once you’ve got the conflicts in you’ve got the sparks you need to get the story going. Also, you’ve got a basic shape to play with, as well, which helps. Which I think, if you’re feeling like you can’t get a plot out, if you’ve got someone else’s shape to follow, it can be quite useful. To the whole of Shakespeare you can do that to, as well.

WS: Oh, yes.

HS: But I mean, people are always doing it. What is it? “Forbidden Planet” that’s The Tempest set on a sci-fi thing from the 50s. People are always doing it. It’s an old trick, but it’s a good one.

WS: Wow. I never thought of that that way before. That’s great. “Forbidden Planet” as The Tempest.

HS: Yes, I’m pretty sure it is. Also, “West Side Story” is the other one, isn’t it? It’s Romeo and Juliet. There are lots of them.

WS: You’ve talked also about techniques for coming up with proper structure in your stories. What can you tell us about structure?

HS: Well, it’s a large subject! I can’t do a Robert McKee off the top of my head.

WS: Let me just mention, Robert McKee being a very prominent screenwriting consultant, teacher, yes.

HS: Guru…yes. He’s something of a legend, isn’t he? I believe that structure becomes almost a religious subject in some writing and wanting-to-write circles, and it’s a sort of holy grail. Like the holy grail I think it’s not ever quite what you think it is.

All good stories do have certain core elements. You’ve got characters in conflict, who are heading toward a big confrontation after which nothing is the same again. There is a climax at the end where the truth is discovered, or the bad guys get blown up, or the good guys…and there’s a big thing at the end, and that’s what your story is working towards.

Now if that’s the structure in the simplest way, I think one of the best things you can do is internalize that, so it’s there without you having to worry about it too much. You know you’re working towards that. Once you’ve internalized it, I think you kind of need to get into a state of mind which is not being obsessed with structure. I think people get obsessed with structure and fall over.

It takes time, in my experience, to build a story that works, to put the pieces together, and you just have shape your material over time. There are no instant fixes. There are wonderful shapes in stories that exist, and things like The Hero’s Journey, which is Christopher Vogler’s and is identified as Joseph Campbell’s universal idea of a story and the universal shape of the story. There are very specific points along the journey of the hero, but it’s absolutely fatal to try to write to that shape. What you can try to do is try to make the shape for yourself, and then maybe conform to the analysis later. I think there’s almost too much emphasis on trying to fit your idea into an existing shape rather than trying to come up with a shape anew.

Yes, you have to reinvent the wheel, perhaps, and it’s as hard as that. That’s why structure is the hardest thing because you do have to reinvent the wheel, my point basically being that, if you are trying to create a structure, if you start worrying about things like, “Where’s my midpoint-turn-round?” or “Are we approaching the inmost cave? When do we approach the inmost cave?,” you can’t think about those things. You have to be inside your characters saying, “I hate this woman. I married her. How am I going to get out of this?” That’s what you need to be thinking, not “What’s my midpoint turn around.” Not at that point.

I guess what I’m suggesting is there’s a dreaming stage, which is this kind of conscious daydreaming I was talking about with characterization. You push it around in your head. Then you can move on to a more formal structure, but I think people push themselves into structure too early sometimes, and that’s where they fall down.

WS: Okay. Let’s say you’ve done this dreaming, and you’ve got this draft, if you will. How can you tell if what you’ve done is working?

HS: Well, this is another thing. I think you fine-tune over time. There is stuff I have published, bits of stories that I don’t find credible now. In fact, I wince when I think about how I did it. I’d do the scene differently. I’d set up the chain of events to lead up to that particular event. I’m very picky. I can lie awake at night worrying about coincidence in the novel.

WS: That’s wonderful. I love that.

HS: It’s dreadful! Then, on the other hand, I’ve come to think that there is a degree of artifice in fiction, and we don’t want real life. What we want is something like flipping off the back of a watch. We want to see amazing connections and gears, a piece of craftsmanship. I think that’s part of the pleasure of fiction, and readers, thank goodness, suspend their disbelief and don’t lie awake at night worrying about coincidence. But whether things are working…I think you can walk away from it for a few days and come back and look at it again and then put it aside. Failing that, find a good friend you can trust. We all have the sort of friend we can ask, and who can come up with, “But if he had been in the office building all that time, why didn’t he ring the fire alarm?” That’s the sort of person you want, who has a sort of nose for plot faults. On the other hand, that’s for the strong at heart. It’s very difficult to take that sort of criticism unless you’re feeling particularly robust, so there’s no easy answer to that. I think you just have to trust your judgment, fine-tune your judgment, and be prepared to accept that you’ll make mistakes and then rewrite. I don’t think there’s any easy answer to any of this, unfortunately.

WS: No, well, obviously. If it were easy, we wouldn’t have The Writing Show. I love what you said about, now I’m paraphrasing you, allowing yourself to make mistakes. I think that if we think that we have to be perfect, then we just freeze up. Creativity is very messy, and we have to accept that.

HS: Absolutely, I entirely agree. I think one of the nice things about the world is a pencil with a rubber at the end. You can rub out what you’ve written. You know with all art, if you look at how many preparatory sketches get done for a great masterpiece, or how many times they alter what they’re doing or put another layer of paint or change the color, but the effect at the end is, “Wow!” And in a movie, how much goes on in the editing suite? Things get changed and moved around, and mistakes get made. I think it’s the experimenting and messiness where you do often have the most fun. I mean, it should be fun. If it’s not fun, you wouldn’t do it because there are so many down sides to it!

WS: Does genre dictate anything about your characters? Or should you forget completely about genre and just go with your characters, just dream the way you mentioned.

HS: It depends what hat…I’m a great believer in putting different hats on at different times. Like those management books are always talking about those hats. If you’ve got your, “I do want to sell this book when I’ve written it” hat on, I think you have to think about what genre it is, who your readership is going to be, and what they’re expecting, and you probably wouldn’t choose to write a genre unless you really liked it, anyway, so you can kind of know your way around it a little more. So I would say the deep characterization we’ve been talking about works equally well with genre fiction. But there are probably constraints in each market that I don’t quite know about off the top of my head because I think that the U.S. notion of genre is slightly different from that in the UK. I mean there are so many subdivisions of everything now, aren’t there? I think good characterization can’t ever be wasted. Whatever you do, you should try and make the people appropriate for that sort of story, which means that they come off the page. Basically, I think that you owe that to the reader whatever sort of book it is.

WS: Would you start with a story by imagining these characters, or would you say to yourself, “I want to write a mystery” first? I don’t know if that’s a fair question.

HS: No, I think I come from the characters side. For example, I’ve got in mind a series of mystery stories I’d like to write in the future, but it comes from the fact that I was interested in the idea of writing a story about a policeman and a defense lawyer, who were friends. A criminal defense lawyer and a policeman who were friends, and how a conflicts of interest got in the way of their friendship, their work. And the characters for that came extremely quickly after the idea. But I suppose the moment you say, “I’m dealing with a criminal defense lawyer and policeman,” they’re obviously going to solve crimes, so it’s not going to be a western, or another genre, so that’s quite difficult to say.

WS: I really admire people who can do what you do. One of the reasons I ask such crazy questions is because I have absolutely no talent for writing fiction myself, and I just don’t know where to start, and every time I start I just get stuck. So that’s why I ask these questions that may not seem logical to someone who gets it. So I will proceed with one or two more of these, and then I will ask you about your software. Do you have any anecdotes about how other writers have built their characters or plots?

HS: Now, the only one I can think of is Georgette Heyer, who was the great regency romance…well, she kind of invented regency romance in the UK. And I know she has fiendishly complicated plots, and I know that she used to play patience and knit as a sort of way of occupying her hands and that part of her brain while she sort of let her subconscious deal with the story side. Another thing she did was get her husband, who was a barrister, to think up the plots for her. I thought, “That’s wonderful!”

I’m training up my husband. He hasn’t quite got there yet, but he’s still at the “identifying plot holes” stage, which is equally useful, but I can’t get him to do all the plotting yet. But that’s the only one I can think of off the top of my head. I mean, maybe it’s kind of a state secret or something, not letting on.

WS: Oh, that’s good, though. That’s really an example of collaboration, isn’t it?

HS: I don’t think it was the plots for the regencies, but the murder mysteries she wrote, so he was obviously very interested in coming up with those very complicated sort of 1930s and 40s style. I haven’t actually read any of the murder mysteries, but she does kind of have very complex plots.

WS: I have one more question about plotting and character building, and that is, “Do you think that the way you develop your characters and/or your plots reflects the personality of the writer? In other words, is style–I’m going to group these two things under style–as personal as handwriting and something that you can’t really break out of? Or is it something that you can vary a lot if you want to?

HS: That’s a very interesting question because there are some writers, who write under a variety of names, don’t they? They do different things. I’m thinking of Nora Roberts. She’s quite a successful romance writer in the States, and she also writes mysteries under another name, which I think is quite an achievement. I think in certain cases I’d be very identifiable. I think you go into writing because you want to bang the table and say your peace. I know you’re not supposed to do that. People are always saying, “Don’t preach,” but we are talking about something that’s self-expression really, so you can’t really take yourself out of a piece of fiction because it would be very cold, and I don’t think readers want that. They want a real storyteller by the fire telling them the story. I think that’s why people like memoirs, isn’t it? They want to be told a real story somehow, even if it’s not real, which is the case of certain recent memoirs, but that’s another issue altogether. I don’t know the answer to that one.

WS: Fair enough. I was just curious.

HS: I shall worry about that one.

Some people do change style. They must, to write for different markets, but I think the writers you love, like you can recognize a composer if you switch on the radio in the middle of something. You’ll know it’s Sibelius or Williams or whatever. There are certain chords, certain shapes to things, I think being able to spot that in something you don’t recognize is deeply enjoyable for a consumer of that art form, so music and writing and painting, I think, the consistency and authenticity is to be strived…strove…striven…It’s late! Oh, dear that was just gibberish, so just take…sorry that was totally off the top of my head.

WS: I thought it was just wonderful. Let me ask you about your software. You have designed some writing software, and I have it, and I’ve used it, and I love it. Can you tell us about that?

HS: Yes. It’s Writer’s Cafe’. Like all the best things, it illustrates the processes I was talking about earlier. It took ages for us to evolve it into its present form. Years ago we thought it would be cool, my husband, the techie, and myself, the writer, to collaborate on a piece of software to help writers, and for years we kept various ideas around. We’d get distracted by other ideas, but we had a breakthrough when I was doing an M.A. in Screenwriting. I had an assignment, which was to write a sample episode of a BBC medical soap opera, which was to be called “Doctors.” The standard episode of doctors has three plot-lines in an episode, so you have to have three threads, and I was having terrible trouble planning out the three threads that have to weave together. I was using bits of paper, and the computer, laying things all over the place, and I said to Jules, “Can we do something? Can we make this virtual, put it on screen or something?” He knocked up this little app, which is basically a computer version of the old index card, a plotting tree, which I’m sure your listeners are very familiar with, but instead of writing on the cards, which can be a bit slow, you type it very quickly, and, just like real cards, you can drop them down anywhere you want on the screen. You can either put them on straight lines going from right to left, and you can have as many of these lines as you like, and there’s lots of columns, but unlike real cards they all stay sort of neatly in place on their rows. They don’t fall off the bed or get messed up by a passing cat, and you can fiddle around and futz. You can add extra information. We put sort of a characterization tool in there and various other bits and pieces. Actually, we discovered that it was really rather empowering, and you could come up with ideas. It’s kind of a brainstormer, a slightly organized brainstorming tool, and other writers who bought it love it, and it’s surprisingly effective. You can have an incredibly complicated story with loads and loads of separate threads, you know, say five or six or seven different story lines running together, or you can just have one and sort of simply see how many instances you’ve got before your line and whether or not it goes before, or you need to add another scene, and it’s great for planning anything. I think you could plan nonfiction stuff on it as well if you were so inclined. We’ve also, as well as that, the major, the jewel of the crown (or the package, as we’d say) we’ve added a lot of other useful stuff for writers: a notebook, a journal–I know some people love writing journals, though I’m not a journal person myself. I’m too lazy. I do it all in my head. I know I should start writing things down because I’m starting to forget them. There’s a scrapbook, so you can store just about everything there, and a brainstorming, mind-mapping thing. And the best thing is that it comes in a beautiful box, which we didn’t design, but we wish we had. The box is one of the best things about it. It’s rather fun, but it’s been quite interesting because it’s been something that came out of my philosophy of not trying to tell anyone too much, but just give somewhere where people can play around with ideas. I think that really sums up all the things that I’ve been saying about characterization. You’re playing around with ideas until you come up with something that sparks something else.

WS: I’ve used it, and I found it really easy to use. Thank you.

HS: Thank you.

WS: I have to say we’re having our first ever Writing Show Writing Weekend on March 11th and 12th where we want people who have had trouble finding time to write just to take three hours over that weekend and either plan or write or just brainstorm, and I think your software would be wonderful for that. Not required, but I think it would be wonderful. Can you tell people your contact information?

HS: Yes. You can find out all about it at www.writerscafe.co.uk. Click on that, and you’ll find all you need to know about it. You can download it and have a play before you decide to part with your cash. We ship from the UK to all over the world, and the more exotic the address, the better we like it.

WS: Harriet, thank you so much for being with us today on The Writing Show and sharing your insights and experience and being so delightful.

HS: Well, thank you. Well, it’s been a mental workout for me, so that’s very good.

WS: I’d like to remind everyone that our first ever Writing Weekend will take place this coming weekend, March 11th and 12th. It doesn’t matter what you write. You can participate if all you write is e-mail, as long as you have the desire to write something. You don’t have to show your work to anybody. You don’t even have to write. You can spend the time planning or doing research or outlining, but you should spend at least three hours over the weekend on your project. If you’d like to share what you’re doing, we’d love for you to come to our blog at www.writingshow.com and add your comments to our entry about the weekend. I’ll be participating myself, and I’ll be sharing my experiences, although, at the moment, I have no idea what I’m going to be working on.

As I mentioned before, for those who don’t know what to write, we’re offering some suggestions for exercises or projects, and we’d like to hear your ideas. It’s not too late. You can still submit something. As a matter of fact, you can always submit something because we’re going to keep all the ideas on our Web site forever, and, of course, when the next writing weekend comes around, we’ll have that many more ideas for you. If you’ve got an idea, please, post it on our blog at www.writingshow.com, or e-mail me at paula at writingshow dot com.

Last week I mentioned a few ideas. Here are a few more:

• Write a character description or profile that doesn’t use adjectives.
• Write a historical look back at a current event.
• Plan a new blog. List the first 20 entry titles.
• Write a review of a book you wish you’d written. Be hard on yourself.
• Write an article about something you love to do for fun.
• Invent a place you’d like to set a story. Be detailed.
• Write about yourself in the first person. Then write the same piece in the third person.

And I’d like to mention another new feature here at The Writing Show. We want to hear about your work. We’re going to start with published works and expand later on. Every week we’ll feature a short promotion of two books, articles, or other published works in our show. If you’d like to be considered, please, e-mail me the salient details including your Web site if you have one, a log line or abstract, and either a sample or a link to a sample, so I can take a look at it. We will not use the information you give us in any way except for this promotion. We won’t sell it. We won’t give it away. We won’t publish it. We won’t compile a mailing list for our own use, but, if we do feature your work, we will be giving out your website if you have one. We will not be giving out your e-mail address, so, again, if you want to be considered, paula at writingshow dot com.

For our first promotion I’d like to tell you about a work called Disjoint: 13 Short Works of Fiction and Poetry by Basil Munroe Godevenos. I hope I’ve pronounced that right, Basil. This is a collection of short fiction, poetry, and descriptive prose ranging from middling length to short, and varying from the dark and macabre to the romantic. I’ll just read a few words, so you can get the flavor.

This is a work called Prophecy. It’s quite short, but very evocative:

At the bottom of the busiest escalator in the Garden Hill subway station crouches
a man. His face is washed by a desperate grin; the kind one usually sees under tearfilled, half-frightened eyes. He waves a cup at descending travellers, struggling to meet the fleeting gaze of each passer-by. Sometimes the cup is paper, sometimes it is polystyrene. It is always battered and abused, like its wielder, and rarely holds more than a few pennies, perhaps a nickel.

At the top of that same escalator stood Gregory Merchant, who had just
finished hanging up his phone, looking at his wristwatch and letting out a
great, exasperated groan.

That wonderful snippet really makes me want to find out what’s going to happen with the beggar and the businessman.

Great going, Basil. Wonderful writing. Disjoint is a self-published work. You can purchase it from Lulu.com, just point your browser there, and search the store for “Disjoint,” and it will be the first or the second result. This and the other works we promote including those of our guests will be listed on our Web site as well. We’ll make a new section for that.

Next week, publisher Sue Lutz Hamilton and author Madge Walls hold an author-publisher dialog and explore why publishers and authors don’t always work together as well as they might like.

Coming soon but not yet recorded, Josann McGibbon Temkin, co-writer of “Runaway Bride,” talks about writing the romantic comedy film; Nick Wilson of Performancing.com returns to talk about monetizing your blog; and Melanie Solomon, author of AA–Not the Only Way, whose recording is waiting to be edited, will address writing on a controversial subject.

Thanks for listening to The Writing Show today. I’m Paula B.