Growing up, our family had a sheepdog. A real one, slated to be a national trials champion by his breeder, a farmer who we kids used to ‘help’ during summer holidays. But this particular dog liked to take a mouthful of sheep from time to time, making him a serious embarrassment on the sheepdog trials circuit. So he came to our family as a pet.
I’d seen him working cattle. He was fearless, nipping hocks above flying hooves doing their best to kick his head in. We kept chickens, and thought to use him to corral them instead of putting up wire netting. But it turned out that while cattle didn’t bother him at all, and sheep were seen as snacks, hens scared him silly. He hated even the slightest threat of being pecked on the nose. The hens could roam where they wanted, but the dog put on a truly excellent show of slinking around them looking like he was in control.
I’m on my third attempt to write a saleable story. After trying total freeform writing the first time, planning to death the second time, I’m now writing ‘synopsis first’, possibly driven by fearful memories of trying to create synopses from complete manuscripts. The synopsis deals with structure, enabling it to be easily seen, and, like a sheepdog, directs the flock of words in the manuscript where they need to go.
Like the family sheepdog, however, it can be bullied. When writing gets sticky, I now firmly believe in going straight to the characters and letting them speak. I ask them what they would do rather than try to think for them, and as often as not, just open a quotation mark ready for them to say something, think of being the character and see what happens.
So here is my prompt. Create a couple of characters, or let them create themselves with just a little direction. Open a quotation mark and let dialogue flow. If one of them says something like ‘It’s nice today, isn’t it?’ kill him off and try a stronger character. Keep going until a storyline develops.
Image by JamesDeMers from Pixabay
Lucy stood in her garden, roasting under the fierce sun, frustrated by the changing climate wreaking havoc with her careful vegetable and fruit planting. Driven to this new enterprise by her concerns for the environment and the quality of food she fed her family, she saw that she still had much to learn about simply keeping plants alive, let alone cropping well.
The postman came by. ‘Hi, Lucy, nice and warm today, isn’t it?’ he called over the fence.
‘Piss off’ said Lucy, weightier issues on her mind.
Only a few minutes later, her troubled thoughts on the future of mankind as well as her family were disturbed again, this time by her neighbour, laden with shopping bags, clicking opening her garden gate.
‘Hi, Lucy,’ she called, ‘I asked AI about climate change and it told me this year is a bad El Nino year. That’s why we have this heat dome. But it’s saved me going to the tanning salon.’
‘And you just made things worse,’ replied Lucy, ‘with the litre of water and goodness knows how many kilowatthours of electricity your AI query used. We have a hosepipe ban and are urged to save energy but the datacentres can use as much water and power as they like. In the national interest, they say.’
‘Anyway, did you hear about the hunt for old books? You’ve got loads, haven’t you? Always collecting them. They might be worth something.’ Her neighbour always had an eye out for bargains, coupons and freebies.
‘Who’s looking for them?’
‘AI companies, they say. They need books from before 2022, when they were all written by humans, to feed their machines. They say the rubbish that’s been written by AI since then is ruining the models they have. Unbelievable, isn’t it? Pushing the price of old books up just for that?’
‘So, not content with pirating all the books they could in the first place, they’re now systematically stripping human authored books from the face of the earth too? You know that when they feed a machine with paper copy, they destroy the book, don’t you? Cut the spine off and push the pages through. Gone forever.’
‘Yes, but, you don’t read them, do you? You’ve got hundreds and they could be worth something. Got to be worth thinking about, hasn’t it? You might get enough for a last minute flight to Marbella.’
‘Piss off,’ said Lucy, once again.
Barely had Lucy’s neighbour hurried into her house, red-faced, than her husband drew up in their Range Rover, with the hum and burble of a powerful V8. ‘I’m home, Lucy,’ he called out. ‘It’s a bit warm, shall I put the air-conditioning on in the house?’
Lucy sat down and wept.
Great blog and super topical story, Rachel.
Thanks for the story, Rachel. I smiled.
Getting characters to tell you about themselves – or have conversations with one another – is a good way to learn about them, I think, and sometimes it’s surprising what they come out with.