There was a recently posed question at the Forum about whether most people write what they know, or make it all up from scratch. I didn’t find the time to answer it over there, but now and again I think about that question, and I consider it pretty important.
The thing is, I’ve never been an 18-year-old farmer from country Western Australia, and I definitely haven’t been to war, and I haven’t tried to raise a child on my own, nor am I an alcoholic, or…
However, I don’t think the specifics matter necessarily- I still think you actually are best writing what you know.
Underneath those specifics, Bill’s point of view as a human being is informed by his attitudes, ideas, beliefs and responses. He has the psychological makeup of a real human being.
What he really has is the psychological makeup of… well… me.
How so? Well, there are the basics. I’ve had a relationship with my brother that has never run short on conflict, and I’ve drawn heavily on how that makes me feel in creating Bill and Lionel. They might argue about different things to my brother and I, and for different reasons, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand it just as well.
I wasn’t a very confident person at high school- quite introverted (you just wouldn’t believe that if you knew me now), a bit shy, picked on for being smart. Internally, that meant I lacked self-confidence, and I became very self-critical. If anything went wrong I blamed myself, because that’s what everyone else did, anyway. This is exactly what Bill does when we first meet him. He carries a whopping guilt complex, and underneath his desire to make other people happy he’s just the tiniest bit furious with the whole world.
Until I was 15, my family moved houses (nay, countries!) every few years. I lacked a solid sense of place and belonging. This is the opposite to Bill- he’s been in his family home since the age of 6, and he’s very strongly connected to Edenvale Farm. I’ve been able to translate simply because things changed for me a couple of years back- I moved to a country town, at my own choice, and discovered a connection to a place that was like nothing I’d ever felt before. All of a sudden I understood how other people felt about their childhood homes.
Almost everything in Bill’s emotional and psychological makeup is based on an experience of mine, be it small or big. The real trick is, the same applies to Lionel, and Kit, and every other character in the story. It’s the giant web of my experience on this planet that informs how I portray other people. It’s how I understand the way they think and feel. Sure, I observe other people, and I absorb the experiences of my closest friends and family- but the only way I can know how Bill or anyone else feels is to have felt something similar myself.
The rest of it- the actual situations, the specific actions and reactions- those are all imagination. The rest of it constitutes 90% of the story. The 10% core, though, is what hopefully makes the story and the character resonate with readers.
Excerpt from Between the Lines
A memory wavered into his mind, shimmery as heat rising off the road in summer.
He was six years old, and he’d been in Stonehaven no more than a week. He was hollow and lonely, confused. He missed the bustle of Melbourne. He missed the other kids on his street, the whole gang of them and their scampy games. He was stuck out in the bush, all of a sudden, with nobody but Lionel for company. Lionel had spent the first day ignoring him completely, and the last few beating the stuffing out of him whenever he got the chance. So that day, he’d wandered out to the back garden, if it could even be called that- just a scrubbed, flat expanse of hot red dirt with a veil of tangled trees and shrubs behind it.
The bush.
On impulse, he’d taken a couple of steps toward it, bare feet burning on the hot ground. The air was filled with the lemony scent of eucalyptus and the fresh tang of the distant sea. He'd filled his lungs and the two steps had turned into six, then ten, then before he knew it he was running headlong toward the wall of whispering green and brown, pushing all his mother’s warnings about snakes and savages from his head. He barrelled between the first spicy-scented leaves and, to his surprise, popped out on a sort of beaten down track, hidden from view of the house. After a moment’s pause to wonder how many strokes of the belt he’d get for this, he set off down the track toward the most interesting noise he’d heard so far- the babbling giggle of flowing water, and laced in with it, the high, clear notes of a girl’s voice, singing.
He stepped off the track with his heart hammering in his chest, suddenly terrified as he caught side of the wide river bank and the rolling mass of glassy green water.
She was standing there, all right- a girl not much taller than him, skinny as a rake, skin the golden brown of tree bark lit by sun. A cascade of golden curls rolled over her shoulders to skim at her waist, tendrils flicking out here and there as she drew back her arm and lobbed a big rock into the water.
He watched it go, traced the arc with his eyes until it hit the water with a loud splash and was swallowed. She was singing, still, her voice high and clear. She was wearing a white dress that finished at her knees and puffed into short sleeves at her shoulders. He looked down at himself, his grey shorts and jumper coated in jam, dirt and everything else he’d been busy with that morning. He stared at her back with suspicion. She was pristine. The only dirty bit of her was her feet, bare as his.
If it hadn’t been for those feet, he might have thought she was an angel. Or a ghost.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment