Frowning as I write

I was pounding away at the keyboard, totally immersed in what I was writing; I broke off for a minute to have a drink and realised I was relaxing my face because I had been frowning intently… I wasn’t frowning with concentration, I was actually frowning because the character I was writing about was deep in thought; he was really concentrating, trying to work out a conundrum which was puzzling him… he is totally imaginary, and yet I was frowning for him!

I usually write in the third person – trying to be objective and distancing myself from my characters, trying to maintain the disinterested observer perspective… however, with my last two novels, and this one, I have been writing in the first person. The first person in this case is a thirty-something, bearded, red-haired man… I am certainly not thirty, nor a bearded man and my hair is definitely not red… and yet somehow as I am writing these novels I identify with my character much more closely than I have with others.

In my other novels the main character has been a woman; I guess that Jaz in ‘Flipside’ was closest to me in experience in that she was a teacher in Oldham; in ‘Loving Judah’ Aislin had some of the same experiences as I had and she too ended up as a teacher of English as a second language, and there were definitely aspects of my character in Tyche Kane in ‘The Stalking of Rosa Czekov’. Yet somehow, somehow the character of Thomas Radwinter has taken over in a way that none of the others ever have…. Strange!

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