Good morning all. Please dive in – I’ve got fresh coffee and plenty of black and herbal tea. There are pastries and mini mince pies plus a tin of Quality Street from the office. Go on, you know you want one, those shiny foil wrappers are just begging to be unpeeled...
Congratulations to Chris on her exciting news this week and to Cally for a fab debut launch party last weekend. Such developments keep all of us Novel Racers inspired and motivated to carry on. I’m currently 77,000 words into the rewrite after a stop/start year and am pleased with my progress but it won’t be finished this side of Christmas. What’s interesting is that I have incorporated certain plot strands or characters into this draft which were abandoned way back after the first or second versions. The time that I have taken to develop and redefine the plot and character arcs was necessary in order for me to smooth out any previous problems.
Congratulations to Chris on her exciting news this week and to Cally for a fab debut launch party last weekend. Such developments keep all of us Novel Racers inspired and motivated to carry on. I’m currently 77,000 words into the rewrite after a stop/start year and am pleased with my progress but it won’t be finished this side of Christmas. What’s interesting is that I have incorporated certain plot strands or characters into this draft which were abandoned way back after the first or second versions. The time that I have taken to develop and redefine the plot and character arcs was necessary in order for me to smooth out any previous problems.
I set out to write a contemporary story about a trio of female Londoners and when I read the end of the first draft it occurred to me that they were all white. I have relatives, friends and colleagues who are Londoners but not white; I have dear friends who are gay and colleagues who are lesbian. I wanted my characters to reflect the city and its diverse population. The experiences that I was writing about could be those of any young woman regardless of race, sexual persuasion or religion so I attempted to make my main protagonist black.
This was an edit that remained cut because I had failed miserably to make her ethnicity work within the story. It just seemed unsubtle; references to her appearance were clunky and did not add to the story. I have a secondary character who is gay and he’s ended up camp and bitchy which does a disservice to the many gay guys I know who are neither of those. Resorting to stereotypes is weak writing but using accents and regional speech takes great skill to ensure authenticity and consistency.
So how does one successfully create a character that does not necessarily need to be white and/or straight if these aspects of their identity do not form a key part of the story and their character arc? Or is it best to leave well alone and let the reader decide?
Finally, have you cut characters, plot lines or swathes of dialogue only to put the back in down the line? How has this improved your work?
