Chandler's Ford Today

characterisation

Author Interview: Maressa Mortimer – Going Downstream

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Image Credits:-
Many thanks to Maressa Mortimer and Lynsey Adams for author and book cover pictures. Other images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.

It is a great pleasure to welcome Maressa Mortimer back to Chandler’s Ford Today. Maressa and I are members of the Association of Christian Writers.

If you’ve been tempted to think you don’t have time to write, Maressa may encourage you to think again. She writes around her home life of four children, who are home schooled, a dog, and the demands of her husband’s job as a church minister.

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Questions and Answers for Characters

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Image Credit:   Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay images

As I write a lot of stories, I have to find ways to continually invent characters. One useful way of doing this is to outline my characters (rather than the plot) as by knowing more about them, I can figure out what trouble I can land them in – such fun! Plots come from that. Outlines don’t have to be long. It is a question of working out what you need to know. That will vary from writer to writer.

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Ways Into Creating Characters

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Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos

Writers of short form fiction, including flash, need to find reliable, sustainable ways of inventing characters. Stories are character led. We’re writing a lot of stories. So we need to create a lot of characters, especially over the course of say a year.

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The Joys of Writing Dialogue

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Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.

I love creating new characters and stories. The challenge is ongoing to come up with situations and people/other beings of choice which will hopefully grip me first and, later on, readers (hopefully).

But my favourite thing to write is dialogue. I literally put words into my characters’ mouths. That in itself is fun but it is when you get the words exactly right for the kind of character you’ve created, that is a wonderful feeling. It confirms I’ve got my character portrayal right.

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Quizzing Your Characters

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Image Credits:-
Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Screenshot re Hannah Kate’s Hannah’s Bookshelf show on North Manchester FM was taken by me, Allison Symes.

I can guess what you’re thinking. How can you quiz characters, which are literally figments of my imagination?

Fair point but I find it a useful way to work out what my characters are made of before I put them into a story. I need to know who they are before I work out what they’re going to be getting up to in my flash fiction or short stories.

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Favourite Supporting Characters

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Image Credit:   Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One image directly from Pixabay.

Supporting characters in stories have much the same role as supporting actors do. Without them, the story is incomplete. They add richness and depth to a story too, especially if they are involved in the sub-plots in novellas and novels. But their task is to either help or hinder the lead characters in their task. They don’t overshadow the leading character either.

For a villainous character, their supporting character can help increase the difficulties faced by the hero/heroine. That in turn increases the tension in the story and the risks of failure for the hero/heroine. For a more noble character, their supporting characters can help them achieve their objective quicker and limit the risks faced by the lead and increase their chances of success.

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Your Lead Character In Fiction

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Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.

Your lead character is the star of your story. Their actions are a result of needing something (to fulfil a quest is one example) but there are obstacles. This includes other characters who are not there to make life easy. Cause and consequence; conflict and resolution – these are the foundations of any story. Your lead character drives the action.

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Verbs and Verbosity in Fiction

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Image Credits:-
Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.
Screenshot taken by me, Allison Symes.

Now you might think one of these has an obvious place in any kind of creative writing and the other definitely not.

On the face of it, quite right too. Ironically, though there can be a place for some judicially placed verbosity but more on that shortly.

Verbs are, of course, part of the writer’s creative toolbox, along with the various component parts of our language. I use them to trigger story ideas. How?

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Settings and Simplicity in Fiction

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Image Credit:          Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.

Setting often act like characters. Many stories wouldn’t work without their settings. It is as true for The Lord of the Rings and the Discworld series, as it is for Wuthering Heights and A Christmas Carol. Can you imagine the latter happening outside of London, for example? Writers can exploit settings to get more from their tales/characters.

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Making Characters Real In Fiction

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Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.

It is the irony of all fiction writing that, while everyone knows the stories are made up, people want characters they can believe.

These characters must be true to life so a story writer’s job is to make their characters seem real enough that, if the situation could happen in reality, these would be the characters who would also exist in reality.

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Laughter in Fiction

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Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.

Laughter is one of the great joys of life and it has a huge range. This is reflected in fiction too. There are the laugh out loud stories, those wonderful moments of irony, slapstick, the great one-liners and so on. What matters in stories is that humour arises naturally out of the characters and the situations the writer has put them in (and often the greater the height from which the author has dropped their characters in it, the better).

Forcing humour never works. Something is funny or not, as the case may be. When I interviewed Fran Hill and Ruth Leigh on this topic, their insights showed how difficult writing writing humour can be though both ladies manage it magnificently despite writing in different genres. Fran writes memoir with humour. Ruth writes women’s fiction with humour.

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Journeys in Fiction

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Image Credits: Some images directly from Pixabay. Other images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos and one photo from Allison Symes.

This post is timely because by the time this goes out I will be up in Scotland again for the Scottish Association of Writers’ Conference. I’m running a flash fiction workshop there and have judged one of their competitions (the Margaret McConnell Woman’s Short Story).

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I hope to interrupt my In Fiction series to report back on how things went soon. And yes I loved the train journey (Waterloo, King’s Cross, Edinburgh, Croy) – the scenery on much of the route is amazing. It’s the second time I’ve been up to Scotland in the last few months as I was at the Brechin and Angus Book Festival back in November.

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