For some reason I have been rereading my own books – is that what other writers and authors do? In both books someone who began as a walk-on character, developed into a major player and significant in the story line. When I write my stories, unlike most writers (as far as I can tell) I have no clear idea about where the story is going, what will happen, who the characters are, what will happen to them – and as for the ending, I rarely have much of an idea at all until I’m nearly there. I confess, sometimes the final chapters are a mystery until I write them! This is most true in two of my novels:
‘The Stalking of Rosa Czekov’:
“Rosa Czekov is an ordinary person who, through an extraordinary act of courage, brings herself to public attention. Rosa is modest and private, and this unwelcome publicity attracts a stalker who makes her life a misery and brings her to the verge of a breakdown. Her cousin, Tyche Kane, has a mission to discover who is tormenting Rosa and bring him or her to retribution. In the course of her pursuit, Tyche uncovers many secrets in an effort to prove Rosa was not just imagining her persecutor.However, her quest not only puts her own life at risk, but endangers Rosa’s friends and family and leads to the murder of someone very close to her.“
In the early scenes of “Rosa”, her cousin Tyche is invited to dinner with those closest to her. When I wrote the dinner party scene there was a group of guests who had known Rosa and one of them was just a walk-on part as the spouse of a best friend. This walk-on obviously decided they didn’t want that minor role and stormed into the book and took on an important and crucial role. They became so significant that they were there in the last chapter and speaks the last words in the story.
“Lucky Portbraddon”
“A few days before Christmas, as the Portbraddon family gathers at their grandmother’s big house up on the moors, the last of the cousins drives through a blizzard to join them. A near-death experience does not seem an auspicious start to their family get together, but the cousins determine to celebrate as they always do. However as the old year ends and the new begins it seems their good fortune is about to run out. An unexpected death, a descent into madness, betrayal… and as the year progresses other things befall them, a stalker, attempted murder, a patently dodgy scheme for selling holiday homes in a dangerous part of the Caucasus… Maybe the Portbraddons are not so lucky… except there is also love, a new home, reconciliation, a spiritual journey, music.. . One thing remains true, whatever difficulties arise between them, whatever happens, family is family, family first – ‘They’re like a big bunch of musketeers, all for one and one for all!’”
The first couple of chapters, almost swamp the reader with different characters, their relationships to each other and their names. I wrote it like this deliberately because the main player, Ismene, is a stranger – a girlfriend invited to join the family for the festive season and she is swamped with names and faces. Old Mrs Portbraddon is not in good health but it’s tradition that her grandsons and their families gather together at her huge “ancestral” home up on the moors. I used Ismene as an observer, as a witness to the way the family relationships change – fracture, reunite, break down, reconcile, as she gets to know them all in the following year. Her relationship with them – strangers at first, dear friends by the end, becomes very personal to her with one of them in particular.
With both Tyche and Ismene and the two characters they become involved with, I wanted to continue their “lives” because I had become so involved with them. I fins when I wrote about a character, especially in a novel, they become so real to me I want to follow their life stories. Sometimes i continue writing about them – but these scribblings never become more than an unwind for me although sometimes the ideas and themes might errupt into something new!
My featured image is one of my favourite paintings by my favourite artist, Joseph Wright of Derby. It is “A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery“
Lois Elsden 