My friends know that I don’t sleep very well. Or rather, I don’t sleep very long. I’ve always been an owl rather than a lark, preferring to be late to bed and enjoying the hours of darkness for socialising as well as writing and thinking. And when I can’t sleep, my mind is reluctant to rest or merely tick over, instead racing at its usual speed and selecting topics at random to examine and explore. All of this is mainly to explain the genesis of what I want to talk about.
What follows is speculative. I’m going to explain what happened to me, and see if it strikes a chord with anyone else, or if others can understand and empathise with it. And I’m talking about writing fiction (which I have always done, since I was young, albeit with less public success than my commentary), so the primary audience might be those who also write fiction.
When I’m writing, I get very attached to my characters. They grow and evolve and fill out, and their histories and personalities develop. It isn’t always detail that will ever appear on the page, but these more rounded characters spring up in my mind partly because I enjoy it but also because I’ve long taken the view that I, as the writer, should always know more about the characters than the reader does. By “knowing” all these details (which I have ultimately invented), I find them more real and easier to understand, which helps me know how they will react and how the story will develop.
An important part of characters in fiction is, of course, their appearance. The writer must (I think this is true) be able to visualise them and see them in their world. The reader will also create a picture of the dramatis personae, but authors take different approaches to how much freedom they give to the readers. Some will describe the characters down to the last detail, intending, I suppose, to give the reader as great a chance as possible to see them as the writer does. Others will leave much more to the imagination, knowing that readers will become very attached to their own visualisations.
Ian Fleming was interesting on this point. He describes James Bond in some detail, but in one book (I can’t remember which and it doesn’t matter), he tries to pull off a having-and-eating-cake trick by having Bond, who is reading a novel, dismiss the practice of comparing fictional characters to real people, regarding it as lazy. But then he grudgingly allows that if anyone had tried to use this lazy method on Bond, then the spy would have resembled Hoagy Carmichael, the Tin Pan Alley singer and composer.
It is, I think, an unfortunate attempt to sketch 007. Choosing Hoagy Carmichael, recognisable in the 1950s when Fleming was writing, attached a likeness which would soon fade from the public imagination. By the 1970s, say, Bond readers and filmgoers would have been much less familiar with Carmichael’s likeness, and would have compared the singer to Sean Connery, George Lazenby and Roger Moore: the film stars would likely have been much richer in visual cues.
I always have a notion of what my characters look like: their height, hair colour, modes of dress, and, perhaps most critically, a sense of the physical space they occupy. But the images are not always pin sharp: sometimes they are men and women whom you glimpse as if in passing, catching only a few prominent features: they are like photographs which I cannot bring into focus. I may know how they think, and act, and (sometimes) sound, but I may not always be able to see a mugshot or exact portrait.
That need not matter, in my view. You can manipulate your characters even if they are only slightly nebulous presences, and you are confident that you still have a tight enough grip on them. Last night, though, slouching through the wakeful hours, I was browsing the internet (no, not like that) and I had a sudden an unexpected vision. I looked at a picture I had seen many times before, and I realised, suddenly but with utter conviction, that I was looking at my heroine. Not that the picture had provided visual cues to flesh out my mental portrait, but that I was looking her full in the face, exact in almost every detail.
This may be a breakthrough. I’ve been wrestling with the bones of a novel for a few years, and although I’ve written tens of thousands of words, it still has no real shape. It’s a baggy collection of scenes with some nod towards a narrative, but I’m keen to push on and try to create some greater clarity and structure. I know the characters intimately, I understand them and their motivations, and I have a notion of their arcs. But now I can see my heroine in sparkling detail, every lineament of her expression and physicality. Maybe weirdly, it has also given her a clearer voice: I knew how I wanted her to sound, but now I can hear her, see her lips move.
I don’t know if this will be familiar or even intelligible to anyone else, writers or not. But I’m excited. I hope that this will be a breakthrough, and that my heroine, vivid as she now is, will show me the way forward. Her apparition is not exactly what I had groped towards, but it fell into place instantly, and I knew it was her. With any luck, I can rely on her now to do some of the hard work.