A Miscellany

I was looking out the window of the train a fair bit this morning. I usually have my eyes pretty much glued to the screen of my computer to work on my WIP Veiled in Storms. But this morning was cold, close to as cold as it gets in Melbourne. We had our first frost of the season, I had to clean ice off my windscreen so I could drive to the station.

My journey to work starts with a ten minute drive to our nearest station at Hurstbridge. My next hour or so is spent on the train into the heart of Melbourne. On the way in I always get a seat because Hurstbridge is the first station (or last depending which way you are going) on the line.

Normally I write the whole way, with the occasional glance at the other passengers or at the passing scenery. For roughly the first half of the trip the line meanders along one of green areas we are privileged to have in Melbourne. In this case the Diamond Creek Valley (isn’t that an amazing name?). Normally, although the scenery is worth watching I don’t look because writing is more important to me than trees and fields I have seen hundreds of times.

This morning was different the valley was covered with thick white frost and enveloped in mist. So the routine had become almost a different place. Very beautiful and very distracting.

But of course the writerly side of me took over and I began imagining the frost was snow and the mist was a Russian Blizzard. I was half expecting Zhukov’s Siberian troops to come bursting out of the mist riding their tanks as they fought to save Moscow in December 1941. (Anyone want to guess what I am writing about at the moment)

That of course made me think about place. Place is very important in fiction. I’ve never been to Russia or experienced a blizzard so how do I write with authenticity about places and times I have never been to?

I guess there are a number of solutions. One is to take advantage of places you have been. So in my novel Veiled in Shadows I chose to set a scene at a university in Oxford in the UK rather than in Cambridge. I’ve walked the streets in Oxford, I never quite made it to Cambridge. Similarly I’ve seen country around the Black Forest in Germany where another section of the novel is set.

But I’ve never been to Russia, and most of Veiled in Storms takes place there. So in my case it comes down to research. I watch every piece of video of the time and place I can get my hands on. I look at maps (period if possible) and Google Earth and I read. Usually biography from the place and time is great. In translation I most definitely do not read Russian, I can pretend with German or French (OK I’m lying but at least the alphabet is the same). Fiction written in the place and time is also really useful even if it isn’t what you’d normally read. But be careful, translators can lead you astray, I am fairly sure that Russians in the 1940s did not use the term “motherfuckers”. Yes, something equally derogatory but probably not that term.

So if you are a writer what do you do? Do you stick to what you ‘know’ or do you venture further afield?
And how important is it to be authentic?

Now finally, and in a completely different vein. I got my new camera on Friday night (Yay!) It is proving more difficult to learn then I thought. It is so different to my rather basic previous model. However I am getting some good piccies from it already .

A random sample of what I have taken since Saturday (most of these are worth clicking to enlarge).
The Yarra River.A long exposure taken without a tripod, image stabilizers are brilliant!

Some tiny flowers (I have no idea what they are, but a succulent and so not native)

Some tiny baby ‘spitfire caterpillars’ Actually they are not caterpillars at all. They are sawfly larvae. If you think they are ugly now imagine them two inches long, covered in bristles and vomiting a sticky mess of eucalyptus oil at you. But they are native so I love them and they are very sociable (to each other).

Autumn leaves.Great colour saturation with this camera!

And finally as appropriate for the end of a post. The sunset last night.

Secondary Characters?

I think I am in a crazy mood tonight so you will just have to forgive me.

I have been puzzling about characters. Where do they come from?

How do we as authors (or daydreamers, or whatever) create them?

As I write my characters grow. In some ways that should be obvious, a novel would be fairly tedious if characters did not change with the progression of the plot.

But for me it almost feels like my characters shape the plots as I write.

I talked a while ago about Valentina, one of my characters in my WIP, forcing her way from a secondary character into prominence.

I have to say this is not the first time I have had this experience. In my first novel Veiled in Shadows two of my minor characters met and fell in love. It was a necessary plot device because those two characters being together meant two of my main characters could meet, but then sparks flew.

So how is it that the secondary characters shifted into prominence? Well in my first draft both characters Penny and Danny were present. Both had roles that were important to the plot but they never even met.

Yet by the time my final draft had been completed they had not only met. In fact it went much further, they had fallen in love and been married.

On the surface it made sense, the plot needed my main characters to be drawn together through a chance meeting. Logically it made more sense to me to have some of the characters already in the story bring them together, rather than creating new characters to use in one or two scenes.

So Danny Parnell and Penny Chesterfield were introduced. On the surface they did not seem at all matched. She was beautiful, elegant, educated and sophisticated. He awkward, not particularly good at anything and shy. Yet they fell madly in love with each other. (I will forgive myself that contrast. I have known many, many loving couples who seemed to have nothing in common).

As an author I have to take the blame. These characters sprang from my mind (at least I think they did). Yet it really seems like they were in charge. I’ll add a couple of points to show why -

I mean Penny and Danny? Would any self respecting author have a couple with such names. Daniel fine, Penelope fine but together?

And Penny Chesterfield becoming Penny Parnell, it is so alliterative as to be almost painful. Yet neither character would let me change their name once they were on the page.

I swear it was their choice not mine!

Have you ever created characters that took charge of your WIP?

Sunset and trees damaged in the 2009 Bushfires taken this evening with my new camera

Writing Lost.: A Guest Post

Now while it is still Remembrance Day, and as a slight change from my usual fare, a Guest Post!

I am privileged to host the following guest post by Canadian blogger Rebecca Emrich of Living a Life Of Writing.
Rebecca Blogs profusely about blogging and writing in general.
Rebecca has also chosen to write with a theme of Remembrance for this post. By the way the piccies are my selection Rebecca deserves no blame for them. They are from Wikimedia Commons. Without further ado take it away Rebecca...

Writing Lost

The War to End All Wars? Not really the First World War ended the golden age of literature in my line of thinking. The result in the States was the 'Lost' generation of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others. A similar thing happened in other countries, but I'm not going to write about them but of the writing lost.

Writing Lost You Say?

In one particular battle, budding writers took bullets in the head, were blinded, maimed and countless others lost, not physically but mentally. It is impossible to even begin to count that loss. A Poet, unable to write anymore, his body broken, or dead in the mud of countless fields in France, in Russia, in Germany. It is impossible to imagine the loss of a single writer in their youth, perhaps with countless stories that they would write.

I think of The Russian Army and a young prince, Oleg Romanov, who if not for blood poisoning and death would have become a more powerful writer than his father the great Russian writer Konstantin Romanov.

Oleg Romanov

Of Two young German Princes who knew what war was about before they saw it, and still died. Hundreds of others dead or dying.

A Generation Lost, a Generation of Writers Lost.

Do we forget them or do we praise them, by continuing our writing, and recall their sacrifice to the old cry of King and Country?

To all these writers lost: We Shall Not Forget.

The Canadian War Cemetery at Dieppe.