How To Date - How to Write a Book | 5. CHARACTER

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

In the fifth episode of How to Write a Book, Elizabeth Day’s new podclass series, hosts Sara Collins, Sharmaine Lovegrove and Nelle Andrew discuss the art of creating characters. Just what makes a compelling character - need they be likeable? And just how much should we come to know them, before writing them into existence? Or could it be that they might surprise us one day, right there on the page? In this kaleidoscopic and…ahem…characterful conversation, Sara, Nelle and Sharmaine share their expertise with their trademark wit and wisdom…and they almost come to blows over the concept of ‘English Love ’(you have to listen to find out why). At the end, Elizabeth offers her own reflections on the conversation. Together, Sara, Sharmaine and Nelle are your on-hand writing community giving you the push you need to get started on that novel, memoir, or piece of non fiction you've always dreamed of writing. We hope you enjoy our fifth episode. Stay tuned for the next week’s chat on… DIALOGUE. If you don’t want to wait for next week’s episode, you can subscribe now and binge them all at once by tapping ‘subscribe’. You’ll get to listen to all episodes ad-free and get exclusive subscriber access to How To Fail and Failing With Friends. Books and authors discussed in this episode include: •The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins •Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen •The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera •Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston •The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith •Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe •The Art of Storytelling by Will Storr •The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro •The Party by Elizabeth Day •Judy Blume We also talk about: •Peaky Blinders Executive produced by Elizabeth Day for Daylight Productions and Carly Maile for Sony Music Entertainment. Produced by Imogen Serwotka. Please do get in touch with us, your writing community, with thoughts, feedback and more at: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. c a slash ymex hello and welcome back to how to write a book it's elizabeth day here author podcaster and executive producer of this 12 week podclass which takes you by the hand and guides you right through from developing an idea to getting your final manuscript ready for publication and how to write a book is also the place to come if like me you're a passionate

reader and want to find out more about what happens behind the scenes of the literary world. Every week, you'll get an exclusive insight into how and why our most celebrated writers wrote the books they did and what it really means to create unforgettable stories. Because we all have a story in us. But how do we get it out there? To help you through the process, I've brought together a crack team. Leading agent, Nell Andrew, best-selling author, Sarah Collins, and powerhouse publisher Charmaine Lovegrove, three amazing women who are also really good friends. So yes, we might be teaching you a new skill set,

but you'll also get a seat at our friendship table. We hope very much you'll stay for the conversation and the laughs along the way. So now, without further ado, let me hand over to Sarah, Nell and Charmaine. I am Nell Andrew. I am a literary agent at Rachel Mild Literary, and I am delighted to be sitting in the company of two incredible women to discuss this next segment, the amazing author, Sarah Collins, and the tour de force and publishing that is Charmaine Lovegrove. Ladies, shall we begin? Absolutely. I just love listening to your silky voice. I'm my silky flake advert voice.

Only the crumbliest flakiest chocolate. Yeah. So good. Is it character defining that you're wearing overalls and a big fluffy jumper? Is that a jumper? It looks like overalls. I adore dungarees. I am a dungary fiend.

Oh, dungeries. It's a dungary feed. But thank you for discussing character because that is actually going to be the topic of this episode. I mean, who's better than we three? Because there's so much character in this podcast situation right now. So I'm supposed to start off with a bit of an icebreaker so people get to know us if you haven't been listening to us. The opening icebreaking question is, what character left the most lasting impression on us?

Who wants to take that original bat on? It's Agnes in Melanchomdera's... Is the Unbearable Lightness of Being? Yeah, why have I just literally? I just said that, like, so confidently. You quote that novel in almost every conversation we have. I know, but I read it when I was 16, and the way that he describes Agnes, when she's sitting by pool and when she waves and this idea that nothing that anybody does is original, but the way

in which you do it is always yourself. That was just such a profound moment for me as a 16-year-old to understand that and also made me just sort of really deeply fall in love with literature at that point, like deeply fall in love with literature, but also this idea of in books, people are doing similar things but in their own unique way and that uniqueness is what we keep coming back to and that is the essence of character of self

in true human form and also in written form but don't you think that's like the beauty of books though that you may not have remembered the title but you did remember the character which is something I come back to again and again and again like the characters live beyond exactly it's the people I mean I did used to have a little bit of a problem

when I was younger, I mean, not that long ago. I used to tell kind of stories or like anecdotes about someone or something. And then as I'd tell off, I'd realize that it's just because I'd read it in a book. And I'd be like, oh, yeah, this person told me about this thing that they did what they did, this, this, this and this. And they'd be like, oh, where did you meet though? And I'd be like, in a book. This is telling me so much about who you are, Charmaine.

You could put this line of dialogue in a novel about Charmaine and it would say so much about who she is all lovely and also that I would want to know you because I know just from what you've said that we were similar teenagers that we shared that kind of bookish sensibility that people came alive on the page for us and that kind of turns on this sort of connection right it's that sort of connection point that you found with the characters I just think it's a kind of marvelous introduction to what we're talking about I can go yeah I think you need to I think you need to You do. It's your time. What made you become a writer?

Speaking of teenagers and bookish girls, when you were asking that, I was thinking kind of with a bit of surprise that the characters that jump out for me are not ones I've met in adulthood. And Charmaine said, she read Unbearable Lightness of Being when she was 16. And for me, it's similar.

It's the characters I fell in love with when I was a teenager, who are the characters I fell in love with when I fell in love with reading? I kind of hesitate to say it because it's sort of a cliche, but it's Elizabeth Bennett. and it's Janeair and it's classic Bridget Jones

but it kind of is if you are a sort of type of people pleasing secretly messy on the inside I'm not really real I love it what does this say about me right wow the thing I think that happened is that

they were the characters that reflected me to myself when I was becoming myself and now I can't decide if I recognize myself in them or if they informed who I ended up being, you know, because I so much wanted to be like them. And it's that sort of wonderful circular process of soaking them up by osmosis, but also feeling like you're giving something of yourself to the page. And I think that's when characters work really well,

when you can get a reader to connect with a character, even a bad one. And I guess we should come back to talk about this because I love talking about anti-heroes. But they feel like they can see something of themselves in that person. that's what does it for me. Mine when I was a child was Matilda was my one. No. Because, no, not so sweet.

Because, why you're wearing the dungarees? I think I've always been a bit obsessed with dungarees. I literally trust my son and dungare dungoes at the same time. And I genuinely, it's like too much. I mean, in future he's going to be like, what the hell did you do to me? Why do we came out of a 70-le- If you can get him to do that when he's 16,

then you'll be a cheats. I will be using that mother girl. I think you've got two years. Give me some more time. Would he do a dance with you? Absolutely. And see, look, character. He's got this character.

It was the first time I saw a character in print where the child was allowed to be more intelligent than the adults. And I thought that was incredibly brave to write a character where they're like, adults are not the safe guarding people in this world. The adults in Matilda are actually more traumatising, more vulnerable. than anyone else. And it's Matilda, the child with her perception and her intelligence who's actually able to save herself and other people around her and to stop the bad guys.

And I found that to be fundamentally profound because I didn't come from particularly safe background. And I think that is what characters at their best can do. And I think the fascinating thing is you and I can, all of us, we can talk about characters here. Like Nurse Watchet or Jena and Bridget Jones and Elizabeth Bennett and Tom Ripley, but I swear to God, if you went out to the general publishing, you said, how many of you heard of these people? Most of them would put their hands up,

but if you said, okay, how many of you have read all of the books that these characters have come from, that proportion would go right down. So the question then is, how do you create a character that people like us are still talking about how many decades later that lives beyond the book? Like, what is the transition to take it from the page and actually make it live in someone's head. Funny, because I was actually just talking about these characters,

Eliza Bennett, and like Mr. Darcy, because I've actually never read any of the English classics. Like, I've just never read. Really? Why? Was that a deliberate choice? You read everything, Sherman. Yeah. I do not read...

18th and 19th century English literature. Did he just not speak to you? You're just like, nah. The reason that I didn't read those books was because I was just interested in lots and lots of other things. And because of how I was brought up with books, because of the libraries that I went to, there was just so much else going on. Like I grew up in a really multicultural environment in London.

And I was just surrounded by so many different cultures that the kind of, like Englishness was like not of interest to me. And the blood just felt very reductive. And I don't even want to be critical of it because it's just when I was younger, I just wasn't as interested. And so because also I spent a lot of time going to Africa, Caribbean, Sassay schools, and I was already reading Baldwin and I was already reading Tony Morrison.

Like I already knew about Pakola from the bluest eye. And then on top of that, I was really interested in a lot of Eastern European literature. So I think when a lot of people were reading Austin and I was already reading like Stefan Schweig or I was reading Nabokov and I just never got round to it but because of those characters being so strong like the Elizabeth, is it Eliza or Elizabeth Banner?

Some people call him Mr. Lyser. And Mr. Darcy and because the characters have come up so much in culture and kind of been recast and reframed in different ways like Bridget Jones and also because I work in publishing and everybody around me studied English literature there's so many references to it

it's like I know it and I was talking to someone about Wuthering Heights and she was like oh I did this at school twice and I was like yeah no we just didn't and so I just read other books but the characters somehow I know them despite having read them and I don't feel that I've missed out

I remember the first time I ever read Janeette and I was about 11 years old and I just obviously moved to secondary school and I was like, okay, will I want to love books as much now? Because I've done all the children's edition. It was like, will I be satisfied? And I remember meeting Jane Ann. I was like, fuck of me, this is amazing.

This is absolutely amazing. And it was the notion, I think that even in this society, there are outsiders. Even in this society, there are outsiders there are people that do not fit. Even here. Thinking of torture devices for you, Shaw. I think that I always found sort of that there was a, stuffiness and a claustrophobia to this idea of books that were about sort of English love.

And I found that idea of that quite claustrophobic as all within a prism. You are really burning my babe Elizabeth, man. I don't know if I'm, I do not know if I'm here for this. Okay, let's let's, let's, I'll pivot, of acts of where like we were. English love. I know, let's stop. There's no judgment. No, it wasn't like I was saying to you like, I wasn't reading.

You were, you were. It's like, I'm just saying I was reading something else. But I think it's important to go back to the fact that even though you were not part of this, these people have permeated your cultural consciousness. 100%. And I appreciate that. You can get protein at home or a protein latte at Tim's. No powders, no blenders, no shakers. Starting at 17 grams per medium latte.

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I am 100% doing T-shirts with English love written across the front. So we have heard which characters resonate the most with our hosts, which characters they read about on the page who then seemed so integral to the rest of their lives that they accompany them like friends throughout their days. But how do we create compelling characters? Here's Sarah. I think a lot about this, A, because I'm in the business

of trying to create characters that people will buy into, but also because it's one of the reasons I read. I always think about that over-quoted Joan Didionline. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. But I firmly believe that a successful character taps into something that we all feel,

something true and fundamental that we all feel about being human. And for me, it's, Three things. One, it's yearning, it's desire. So we live life in this sort of gap between yearning and getting. That's where the kind of meat of life is. We're always going to be chasing something that we can't quite get. One of my favorite opening lines, Charmaine will have read this, and I hope you've read it too now. Oh, God. Ships at a distance have every man's wishes or dreams on board, you know, from their eyes are watching God. To me, that sums up

great character. A great character encapsulates that distance that we're all struggling with. want whatever it is, freedom, the man, the job, to solve the mystery, whatever it is, and I can't quite get there. And then also tied into that is change. Like, so we experience life as change and we experience change as trauma or unsettling. So we're learning how to navigate these things. And I think all of the characters that you've mentioned and the ones that kind of come alive and start walking among us, they encapsulate something about that. Think about Ripley and how he demonstrates that yearning for connection and that loneliness that's driving him through the story,

you've got to tap into something really simple but really fundamental like that, I think. Yeah, I agree. I think that that's a really brilliant way of putting it because ultimately it is about these layers of trying to connect and trying to take the time to understand what could be happening for yourself or others,

and that's why reading creates deep empathy, right? because the character's situation helps you to understand the world in a different way and understand people in a different way. I mean, as the person who does write characters here, what do you think our listeners need to do to try and really create compelling characters from a practical standpoint? I feel like it very much relates to something I said about voice, which is if you're trying to hit the sweet spot, sometimes you have to go inwards.

I was thinking about this essay because I'm writing a screenplay and I'm writing at the moment a very kind of sadistic Russian woman. I am not a sadistic Russian woman. And so I was sort of struggling to write the scene. And I realized I'm doing what an actor would do, I think, except I'm doing it from the other way in. So I'm doing it where there's nothing and I'm trying to sort of act my way into the part,

whereas the actor will then take what I've written and acted out. You're trying to inhabit a person. But in order to do that, and I think actors do this, you have to bring something real out of yourself into that person. So you've got to look for something in your own subconscious, some kind of understanding about what that person is going through, what their sort of flaw might be, what's holding them up in the moment, why are they sadistic? And it can't be cliched. It has to be as specific as possible. So you become a magpie. I am forever tuning in my antenna to people saying they felt a certain way about something,

or they had this happen to them and it caused them to go off and do something else. Because those are the little nuggets that you can store up and then bring to your work when the characters come alive. Sometimes you just have to get past the discomfort of knowing that you're going for something kind of revealing and maybe slightly embarrassing, but that's where you get the good stuff. You know, that's where you get the stuff that's real and true about being human. And I do think you have to allow yourself to inhabit someone else. I heard someone who is teaching say it's a bit like Keats' idea of negative capability,

which is that the artist is getting rid of their own self-consciousness and inhabiting the object of their art. And I think that's what writers and actors are doing. How can you dilute yourself into this other person who becomes as completely alive as you are in the process of doing that? That sounds really difficult, but that's what you're aiming for. No, no, but that is the aim, right? And ultimately, it's about that ability to create, to inhabit. And then in that inhabitation, then we are moved through those journeys of the multiple characters. And that's also why, you know, you have a protagonist, for example, that you have the person that you are following because actually it's too complicated.

to go that deep into the psyche of multiple people in that way, although you have your kind of cast of characters around you, but there has to be somebody for who, whatever the type of pluses, whatever type of genre there is, you're following the inciting incident. And then that allows for that shift and transformation. And for it to be satisfactory, then we have to see that transformation we carried out,

which is fascinating. I was just thinking actually of a story from writing my novel that I think illustrates this point, which is that I was writing about an enslaved person and the topic of slavery is really kind of big and overwhelming and in a way annihilating. It annihilates humanity. It's very difficult to find characters in stories about slavery. And I do remember feeling quite overwhelmed by it and maybe I didn't want to do it. I think I've mentioned that before. And part of it was that the cliche that's developed around these kinds of stories is that the only thing you you could ever want and do ever want if you're enslaved is freedom. You know the blurbs write

themselves, one woman's painful struggle for freedom. It's like, shoot me now. And I remember when we talked in one of our previous episodes about it coming alive when I saw her on the steps and I, you know, I saw her predicament. But I also remember thinking, and it was a moment where something autobiographical connected with the text. For me, it was, so what if she's a little girl on this plantation and she is enslaved. If it had been me, if I had been whisked back and sort of found myself in those circumstances, what's the thing that I would have lost in that time traveling experience that would mean the most to me? And for me, it was the books. It was so simple. It was like I was so addicted to books. I used to think of death, like the fear of death as, you know, there would be no

more books to read. That's how obsessed I was with reading. And so for me, it was like, this character is going to be standing on the outside looking in and the thing she wants more than anything is just to get her hands on those books and it was that kind of autobiographical connection like pulling something from myself into her and then you see it hopefully you saw it now in the kind of opening so it's a simple thing but then what you're trying to do in the opening is you're not putting it on the nose like that so you just get the sense in the opening i hope of someone who's really educated and kind of full of herself as a result. She's sort of self-satisfied. Like, yeah, I did that shit and yeah, I am hot shit. The way education makes you feel empowered. So you do that.

You find the thing and then you hide the thing. That's where the sort of craft comes in. So you're not ever saying chapter one, this woman is lonely or this woman is educated or this woman wants love. The reader discovers that for themselves through your sort of writing and the subtext. I definitely feel like I can tell when someone's not doing it. The first is something you guys already touched on, which is that when I read something, I'm like, I have no idea what this character wants. This character has no desire. There is no goal. And it's one of my big criticisms when I get in a submission. And I'm like, who the hell is this person? No story begins unless your character is wanting something. From the want, stems the goals, dense the

motivation stems a conflict, whether it's the English love or it's trying to get out of a dystopia. English love. Or is Tom Ripley trying to go up the upper echelons and, you know, class ladder, your character has to want something. If they don't have a want, then there's no point to them. And then I think the other part is the notion to me where your character don't change, where they basically, they start at point A, and by the end of the book, they're still at point A. And you go, well, what the fuck was the point? You're like, I've changed reading this. I've been through so much older reading this. I'm doing this a little bit to bait you now. Don't talk about English love. I'm talking about Marianne Dasher from

sense and sensibility is Charmaine's favorite, but Charmaine has no idea who that is. It is a really, really good example of a character change. This character starts off believing that love is this big, wild, frenzied, chaotic, all-conceiving passion,

and she only wants a certain kind of person in her life. I suppose her modern version would be Charlotte York from Sex and the City if we want to try and make it a little bit more culturally relevant. And then she thinks that that's where she is. But the person who best personifies that is, a card and a rake and someone who just has no authenticity

and she assues the person who might be a bit more solid and a bit more stable as being boring and she has to go through this waves of humiliation and betrayal and torture in an emotional context to get to the other side where she has to basically reframe. Oh my God, this is such an English lug. To her self, what does love mean? For real, what does love mean? And what is the context in which I have to raise you? Torturing yourself for absolutely no reason. But then at the same time,

But I think I get a massive kick out of characters that wouldn't speak to me. I wouldn't think they would speak to me, which is probably something psychologically from being like, the reject. You're very needy. You're very needy. Again, we are revealing so much about ourselves in this conversation. Let's talk about places for character in this particular scenario. This is an environment where women can't go out and earn their living.

This is an environment where women have absolutely no rights to property, And where women don't marry for love. And where you cannot marry for love. So what do you do in a situation where you have lost essentially any sense of independent recourse? Can I just point out? Look at Charmaine's face now, Nell. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but we're losing her. We're losing her. You haven't lost me. I'm listening. I'm listening, but I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about characters from the transatlantic slave trade. Or I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about characters from like different times where this. relates to you know it like this is a thing yeah sorry but i have a point to make here on the transatlantic slave tree because i wrote a novel about an enslaved person who pursues a version of english love so mic drop listen listen i'm i'm aware of the intersections of your of your i'm aware i'd reject and i'm aware and no but the thing is is that i think that that's actually why what we're doing in all of our work, which is really important, is to bring a different level of the narrative to different readers.

So, for example, actually coming to Franny meant that I was able, because there was a different layer of interest to me, which is because you have a black woman and you have a queer black woman and you have an enslaved woman. And so those kind of layers mixed with the English love and is actually opens it up to me, which is in the same way that, you know, again, publishing the secret diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph, then we also get Sancho in Regency London. And so when I'm looking at from like the suffragettes movement or looking at like the coffee houses around, you know, I'm in Blackfriars, I work in the city. and it was built upon my ancestors and so when I read these stories

and it doesn't include that as a narrative art then I do just lose interest because I'm just like it was just so terrible for you to just still be rich I know who feels like very basic and it just feels very basic but if you add these layers and characters that different types of people can connect to

then ultimately going back to story plot art then you know you've got this story art and you have these tropes well the reason that these tropes work is that you know you just have like different characters that play them out and then the people is what attracts like we can't be attracted to everybody we can't get on with everybody and we don't want to hear everybody's story and we're not interested there's just not enough time and so there isn't enough time and so it's like I'm not at all dismissive of it I'm just really honest, and I think it's very important to be honest, these characters don't connect to me, but you put a similar trope with extra layers and give it some seasoning, then I'm all

over it. And you know how much I love your book, right? So it's like, if there's an, and that's the point. And that's why, and that's why you don't just have sort of one book that tells a story. You have many books within a genre. Yeah. You know, you have many. And again, it goes back to what Condera said of, you know, nothing is like wholly original. You have to, you just have your own take on it, you know, and that's, and that's the point, and that's where we connect. Nothing is wholly original. But by layering different textures and seasonings, we can give our characters a uniqueness

that makes them compelling. So we've heard that they're. has to be a journey the character goes on, an internal change or an external shift that takes us, the reader, on their evolution. And in all convincing characterization, there needs to be a reason why we care, an understanding of what the character wants, but maybe an obstacle that prevents them from getting it. And that's the motivation for reading on. Back to Sharmayne. Thinking back to the books that I was reading when I was younger, it was almost like the setting was a character and so the situation was a character. So, for example, if there was a book about the Second World War, that state of war also felt like a character to me because there was a consistency to it, there was a story that the war was telling.

And because I've always been like super political, I think that just kind of fed into it. And sometimes when I'm editing, I also talk about the fact that the place itself, where the book is set, sometimes has that feeling of a character. I think there's something so true about that. If you think about the characters that you've mentioned now, these kind of archetypal characters, you can't separate them from the place that generates them. And I think it leads into thinking about something useful when you're building. characters as a writer, which is you're not sort of creating people in a vacuum. You've got to know this person. You've got to almost have been there at their birth, watch them grown up. Were they growing up in the swamps of Louisiana? Or were they in a regency drawing room? All of that stuff

goes into building the character. And then the way they interact with play shapes the place, and it becomes a kind of circular sort of thing. You have to think about for every external occurrence, what's the kind of emotional resonance of that? How is that contributing to this character understanding something about themselves? There's this great book by a literary agent where he talks about questions that the character should be asking. There always has to be some kind of landing of the emotional consequence of what's happening around a character that then leads them on to a different understanding of themselves or the world that affects how they then act the next time you see them. I think the other mistake that novelists make is they think this stuff is too simple. So we get

really muddled. It's because the person's trying to do too much and they forget that at the core of every story is actually something really simple and it seems like it's too simple to be the sort of subject of a good novel. It's love or its desire or it's loneliness. If you can nail that in the opening chapters, you're going to hook people because they're going to want to know how this person They want to be on that journey. Correct. Because they're already on that journey. So, you know, a lonely person will pick the book up.

And so the lonely person will immediately connect to that loneliness. But someone thinking, oh, no, I've got to be impressive, is going to be worrying too much about what words to use or making something big happen in the scene. That's where it becomes already overwritten, you know. And that's where all of the, like, lots of stereotypes or it just doesn't feel. Clisches come through. and then you're sort of dealing with this weird, inauthentic character that just feels like a caricature of themselves.

And you can definitely see that. I was editing a book recently where the characters almost showed like their light and dark, like they're happy and sad. And I was like, but what's their resting face? Like, you know, what's that, like what's the nuance in the middle? Who are they really? Who are they really? because of course they have these things, but in one moment you're like,

they're really angry and you can see this palpable anger and then a moment later, you see them being really charming. And I'm like, but I don't know who they are. I need to see how they turn from one to the other, not just in this moment they're like this and this moment. They're like that because I can't see the continuum, you know?

And actually that continuum is what brings us along on the journey alongside plot. So it's all about arcs, right? Like you have your character arc. and your character has to go from one place to another. And what we're doing is joining them on that journey as they go from one place to another. So I really love books that we're not seeing the whole of somebody's life. You know, we're not seeing from like birth to death and from cradle to grave,

but where we're just seeing a snapshot and we get a snapshot of their lives and then to see them sort of fully formed in one character and then to leave them fully formed as another character as they've taken that arm. And as the plot has also taken that art and the place has also taken that journey with us is like, you know, that's again, the magic that keeps giving in terms of why I really want to come to a book. That kind of is, I think, part of the biggest thing about characters I think writers can forget is that you can throw loads of plots and stuff at a character. But fundamentally, what we've all been talking about is connection and journey. I feel like those are the words that have come up over and over and over again. And what will make me put down a book or turn off a television is where I go, I just don't care what happens to you.

I don't care. I don't care what happens to you. Maybe you find it, maybe you don't. Maybe you do it. Maybe you don't want to know. Like, you have to find a point of connection. I have to give a shit. That doesn't necessarily mean I have to like this person.

And I think this is where people also slightly fall down. Like, what if this character isn't likable enough? I guess the question isn't well, whether. that they like them. There's loads of people that I'm obsessed with, but it doesn't mean I want to go for tea with them. I really wouldn't want to sit down and have like a coffee with Tom Ripley. I really wouldn't. I'm not going to lie. He... I would. Okay, cool. That's a psychological situation that we can stay for a different podcast. But I do want to see what happens to him. I do care about whether or not he achieves his goals. I want to find out. I want to see the impact on kind of other

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We know from Nell, Sarah and Charmaine that in order for a character to be cared about, there needs to be a point of connection, a point of relatability, a point where we as the reader can say, oh, I know who that is. But what does that mean for unlikable characters? Have you guys ever seen with Peaky Brow?

And this is my way of segueing into our anti-hero discussion. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I started watching peekie blinders, and I was a bit like, okay, what, I'm not going to have anything in common with a white guy from Birmingham who's basically a gangster. Like, I'm not. Why would I be interested in this? And I put off watching it for years, even though my husband literally has a freaking peeky blinders cat, I put on watching it for four years. And then finally I was like, I've got nothing to watch. You should be wearing it with the dungarees, by the way. rock that look and I absolutely would make it work. Finally I started watching it and I found his characterisation unbelievably fascinating and this is why, okay, if it was just some guy who was a gangster in Birmingham who's just like, you know, robbing and doing whatever they wanted and people

be damned, that's not interesting to me. It was the fact that this is a person who's actually very smart, very intelligent, who's from a gypsy background so he's seen as even more lower lower class than a normal working class person in that time frame. But it's also because this is a group of men who've come back from the First World War, deeply traumatised, and for whom the class wrongs are just ripped off. They've gone away, they have seen absolute horrors, they've done horrific things in the name of their country, and they've come back and there is zero opportunity for them to make their situation better whatsoever.

So there is a part of you that's like, well, if your country has basically screwed you over, and you've come up with all of this violence, all of this trauma, and no way of making your life better, no way of knowing what it was for. Like, one of the first things he does is he takes his medal and he throws it into the river because he's like, who gives a shit? And you're treated like that. Then what are you going to do? And so he basically says, fine, I'm just going to use what God gave me to make myself to make something better. Because if the system doesn't care about me and I've done everything I can and I've sacrificed for the system, then why should I care about it? It's that kernel of empathy that makes you kind of root for him that makes you almost like want to do well

and the way that the showwriter then kind of thrust him in his family against these upper echelons who sort of see him and like what are you doing how do you like oh are you rising up should i be interested in you but that's the whole point it's the kind of anti-hero these are universal things it's all internal so there was a lot for you to connect with there the outsider the person who's fighting against the system, refusing to accept the sort of boundaries of his existence. For me, that's all internal. And it's why it works. He may be a white guy in early 20th century Birmingham. But what's going on inside him is something that might be going on inside you. For me, it was like that with Elizabeth Bennett. I was going to say, you know, I've had quite a lot of fights about

that. I'm about the likeability stuff. Like not fights, but we've been talking about. Have we? I mean, we're on the same page about it. We fight. We fight the world about this. I mean, because one of the things that really absolutely pisses me off is, let me alienate whole chunks of readers now. But, you know, when readers say I didn't like this book because I didn't like the character, I mean, it just is so nonsensical. Some of the best fiction, as you have pointed out, is about unlikable characters. In fact, some of the best nonfiction, because one of the best books I read, and I think it was 2021, whenever I judged the Bailey Giffra Prize, was Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe. Oh, my gosh, I love that book. Yes, and it is actually a masterclass in characterization. I would say for anyone struggling to think about how to bring their characters to life, whether you're writing a novel or writing nonfiction, read that book without delay. Because it's a sort of Dickensian kind of conjuring of the Sackler family who were one of the big families responsible for sparking the opioid crisis in America, deliberately. And wholly unlikable people. As you know, Nell, one of my TV obsessions is Succession.

Again, thoroughly unlikable people. And Twitter is divided into two camps of people who are like salivate salivate over that show or people who think the rest of us are weird psychopaths because we like it because the people are so unlikable. But the point is that writers are supposed to be engaged in the electricity of human life. And part of that electricity is our bad behavior. I mean, really pious good people are boring. The example I always give is Little Woman, which is a book I could not get my girls to read. So I used to, unlike Charmaine's childhood, I used to force classics, not force, but you know, try to press classics on my kids. And Little Women was one of the ones they could not swallow down. And I think it's because the character is a little woman. I mean, I'm sort of partial to

them because, yes, I did love Joe. But they are actually all pretty damn pious. Like they're kind of boring. The characters that come to life are actually doing real shit, whether we want to accept it or not. They're doing the shit that people are either doing or secretly restraining themselves from doing or deep in that lizard brain part of ourselves. They're yearning to do. And we're scared of it, but we have to engage with it in this sort of safe way. You know, all the bad stuff, just as much as the good stuff. There's a kind of psychological purpose behind it. But the key for people who are writing on likeable characters is first you have to give the reader something human to hang on. Like I said, it's the loneliness or the desire for love or the, you know, think about Macbeth.

You know, he's a war hero when we meet him and he's kind of a simp for his wife, right? Or Walter White, another great anti-hero. Such a great example. Breaking Bad. He is this like loser of a chemistry teacher who really loves his family and then gets diagnosed with a terminal illness. So you kind of hook on to these people and then you stay with them through their journey into kind of badness. That's the secret, I think, to setting up a good anti-hero. But very quickly, just to add on to that, the reason why they all work is they all believe they're doing the right thing.

The best anti-hero is usually a person who actually thinks that what they're doing is right. Or somehow it doesn't matter if culture of society says it's wrong. They're like, yeah, but I'm just playing the game the way it has to be played or like Walter White. Yeah, but I'm just doing this for my family. I love that foyeristic observation because it's also, you know, in life, when people are doing things that are hurtful and harmful, that makes us vulnerable, then we're often the question is like, can they see it? Why can't they see what they're doing to me? Whereas in literature, when that happens, the question that we're asking is, you know, why can't they see it? but it's being answered, it's being answered for us.

And again, it goes back to how character elicits empathy and compassion and how important that is. And so I think that's why the anti-hero is a really, really important character arc. The books that I really love, the characters that really stayed with me from when I was, also when I was younger, was reading a lot of Judy Blume and like, are you there? my God, it's me, Margaret. You know? And like, again, just, you know, before we were sort of having those conversations

openly with friends about having periods or sex or just and forever, you know, then it's like these books kind of really helped me to understand that whatever I was going to go through was going to be normal, you know, and it actually, it didn't even matter what it was, it's going to have already happened to somebody else and somebody else would have done all the anxiety and worrying for me. So I actually feel like I got a lot of confidence from that and I don't worry about things as much because I realised from a very, very young age that I wasn't, I wasn't alone. And those characters have really stayed with me and reminded me and they're not always good people, but they always went through something that you could relate

to even if their lives themselves and I have to be really clear on this before we end this podcast that it's not that I have to read people who have similar lives to me or similar backgrounds to me. It's that the intersecting ideas and formation of their characters have to be layered and nuanced enough for me to feel compelled to keep going with them. Intersecting ideas that are nuanced enough to feel compelled to keep going with the book. I think that is a really wonderful point to end this discussion on. And in case you need any more inspiration, here is a little listener exercise. So one of the exercises I'm going to hopefully impart to listeners here as we wrap up is

I want you to think about your primary characters. I want you to put them in a restaurant and get them to order something to eat or drink, whatever that needs to be, what they would order, how they would order it. And then I want you to give them a conflict, which is that the waiter or waitress is going to get the order wrong every single time. And every time they come out with the wrong thing, I want you to think how your character would act and react to it. If they would be passive aggressive, if they would shout, if they would be rude, if they would just eat it. Like, how would they interact with that? If you really want to, you can also take some of your other primary characters and put them all

together and see how they would all interact with each other around this and what they would say and how they would behave. But the point is for you to be able to understand who these people are and to think about their backstory, why are they reacting that way? What happened to them that particular day or what's happening to them in their life that is making them behave that way? Have they always behaved that way? Or is there something particular that's going on, etc? And if you are struggling with it, that probably means you don't really know who your character is and you need to do much more of a deep dive into them, perhaps using some of the tools. and advice that we tried to give you

over the course of this particular podcast. And it can be a page, it can be just notes, just whatever it is that you need to do to get a little bit more in-depth with these people, so they feel more real to you. When you get to that level of knowledge,

the character starts acting with agency, which is this thing you'll hear authors talking about. When you know them really well, which means we've worked really well on developing this character so that you know them, they then start doing things that, You are not engineering, and it's a really sort of mystical, gorgeous part of the process, but it doesn't just come.

You actually have to put the work in so that they become fully fleshed and start surprising you. And that's the level of understanding you want to reach. That's the sweet spot that makes them feel real and become real. These two things that you both just said are the goosebumps moments, you know? It's like really understanding how the characters can come to life and then thinking about what we have discussed before in terms of voice as well and kind of adding that into the mix.

And so then these things, hopefully, to the listener, like doesn't feel so scary because it's all about a truth of a character, the voice of the character, and really being very real with them. I don't think we could have given more character in this particular episode if we asked for it. That was just such a brilliant conversation.

I'm thinking, and buzzing so much about characters and thinking about how to really nail it on the page. And in our next episode, we'll be discussing dialogue. Do you think it's pretty neat since, you know, ND a dialogue? Yes. Love that. Well, I don't know about you, but I am still reeling from Charmaine Lovegrove's takedown of English love. It's Elizabeth Day here with my final reflections on this episode and that fantastic conversation. I found that utterly hilarious that when Sarah was talking with such great passion about all of the greats,

all of the Jane Austens and the Brontes, Charmaine was just like, nah, I'm not into English love. I was too busy reading other kinds of literature and other kinds of influences. where love isn't the definition of character repression. But once again, I think part of what I really appreciate listening to these three women is that they come from not only different aspects of the creative process and the publishing industry, but also from different lived experiences and different influences. And I really enjoy hearing them agree and disagree with such eloquence and insight. And I think one of the things that I've taken from this episode myself is that idea

of specificity, the idea that the characters, the best characters, exist beyond having read the book. So they have a fully fleshed out life, even if we don't use every single characteristic that we know about them, even if we don't overexpose their entire hinterland, at least we as the writer know where they're coming from and we know who they are and we know their world view. There's a brilliant book called The Art of Storytelling by Will Stor

and he talks about the idea of the most convincing characters having a worldview that is challenged in some way and one of the examples he uses is the butler Stevens in Kazuo Ishigurus The Remains of the Day

and how his worldview which is almost entirely predicated on notions of service and meeting the needs of a higher class and his aristocratic boss, that worldview of sort of emotional repression and deep professionalism is shattered by a number of events. And I think that that ties in neatly to Sarah's brilliant phrase,

which I cannot stop thinking about, about the engine of character being the gap between yearning and getting I just think that goes to the heart of what great writing is and ultimately goes to the heart of the human condition. We yearn for things, but can we get them? And that's really, at the core of so much of this dynamic that we're talking about when we get our stories onto the page, that is the fundamental quest.

And it leads us to that idea of understanding what our characters are going through, what their fatal flaw might be, what's holding them up in the moment, and the avoidance of cliche being the targeting of specificity, being as specific as possible about someone's uniqueness on the page. And that goes for nonfiction as well as for fiction. And I'm really glad that Sarah brought up Patrick Raddenkief because he's one of my favourite nonfiction authors.

And he does an incredible job in his books, both Empire of Pain, which Sarah talked about, and Say Nothing, which is a sort of history of the northern Irish conflict, which I was completely riveted by. He does a great job of storytelling where he will start with a specific detail. It doesn't have to be character-driven. It can be something that happens in a precise part of the world. And he then builds out from this single telling detail.

which is accessible in scope. He then builds out. It's almost like a camera drawing back from focusing on one thing and then it draws back and you see the whole panoramic scene. And because Patrick Raddenkief often writes about very complicated issues,

it's such a good technique to start with a specific and then to build upwards and outwards and extrapolate. And he uses character to anchor many of those stories and he clearly does a lot of research to find the telling detail of each character that he writes about

and he finds out about their personal lives and their background and who they married and why and when and wherefore and what their relationship was like with their dad and all that stuff you can tell he has a mastery of it on the page and it keeps you so compelled by his prose. And, you know, his book's pretty thick, but they don't read like they're thick. They read like the best sort of psychological

or thrillers, because he has taken the time truly to understand the specificity of his characters. And I also really liked the point that they made that the situation can also be a character. And I would go one step further and say plot can be treated as character. And that's something that I did in my fourth novel, The Party. I'd always been slightly scared of plot. I'm a very character-driven writer. And a bit like Sara, I always think character informs the plot and that's just my way of writing and what I appreciate in other books. And with my first three novels, I mean, stuff happened, but I wouldn't say that I'd really spent enough time on crafting a compelling and clean plot through line. And it was partly because I was scared

of it. I thought of it almost like doing a revision timetable rather than getting on with the act of taking the exam. And when it came to the party, what unlocked the plot for the party? The party has the structure of a thriller, even though the thriller elements are more psychological than police procedural. But what unlocked the thinking around that for me with the party was treating plot like an additional character. So it meant that I really took the time to understand the plot, what was informing it, where it was coming from, where it was going, the specificity of it, where it was taking place, when it was taking place. And I physically mapped that out on a big old piece of brown paper with felt-tip pens and blue tacked it up on the wall, alongside

inspiring photos of people who I had come across who I felt looked like my characters or embodied some aspect of them. And that really, really helped me. And finally, a clarion call for unlikable characters, because I just think that that is one of the most compelling and gifted authorial tricks that you can play, rather than a trick, a slate of hand, where you create a character who is unlikable, but you've done such a good job of creating them, that the reader is compelled by them precisely because they understand what's driving them. They understand what is driving their yearning. They understand their flawed worldview. and how their own preconceptions are being confronted by this out-of-control turn of events.

That is a really amazing thing to be able to pull off. And so my note to you, aspiring writers, is don't be put off writing unlikable people. Because ultimately, we're all a bit unlikable in our way. We're all flawed. That's what makes us human. and actually some of my favourite fictional characters are unlikable in many ways and do unlikable things. Tom Ripley being one of them. Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights being another. Oh my gosh, we're veering dangerously close again to English love. So before we get into that and before

Charmaine batters my door down saying please stop banging on about Mr Darcy, I am going to leave things there and I would love to hear from you if you have that. any thoughts on this episode or any of the ones that you've listened to previously. Our email address is in the show notes. Until next time when we are tackling dialogue, I wish you very happy writing and very happy reading. And if it's your bag, very happy English-loving. Thank you so much for listening and please do remember to like and subscribe and share a link with everyone you know. This is a Daylight Productions and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you.