Living with your characters

Even when writing short stories, I have always felt the need to "round out" a character. I may not use all the detail I develop but the process fixes a person, both as a physical being and as a personality, in my mind. So I might list the contents of a woman's handbag, make notes on places a certain character might have holidayed at in their past, that sort of thing. Then, when they are "real" to me, I can put them in a time and place to live out the story I'm writing.

Novelists often talk about "living with" the characters they develop, probably over many months as their books are written; those characters become a real part of their everyday lives. Recently this situation has come about in my own life as I write about the lives of my forebears in the family chronicles (which are at last making considerable progress!). My characters of course are not fictional but, with sometimes limited factual information to rely on, I have to use a fair amount of conjecture and informed guess work to reconstruct their daily experience in the early to mid nineteenth century. I now find that shades of Victorian Britain are encroaching more and more into my twenty first century reality!

I have been researching and writing up the life of my great great grandmother, Martha Carter, who lived in rural Wiltshire, married to an agricultural worker and bringing up twenty (yes - twenty!) children in a tiny labourer's cottage. In writing her story I have tried to immerse myself completely in her world - and in doing so I have found her becoming increasingly real to me. I was dismayed when I found that after a life so circumscribed by her fertility she died alone, a pauper, in 1896. I found the chapel where her funeral was held and even the bier which bore the plain coffin to its unmarked resting place a hundred and twenty years ago. It was almost a tangible grief that I felt for her. A real living with one's character!

Writing Up Family History

To the music of memory a motley crew
congas through my dreams,
Cinderella skeletons
tangoing through time
for their night at the ball.
I must choreograph with care,
for to watch them dance
will be to hear them speak.

(Copyright Gill Garrett 2015)