Phase 9
Mary Anning and the Exploding World
Writing stories is easy peasy. I just have to think up a series of exciting things that could happen to drive my narrative along. The hero staggers from a car crash, has a shoot out with the baddies, falls over the cliff, is chased by a giant octopus as he tries to swim to safety. Or meets a girl, falls in love (after a series of hilarious misunderstandings) they marry, she contracts severe illness, and so on and so on. But what about the characters that these events happen to? Somebody has to actually wear the Superhero costume. Again simples if they are to be Radioactive Man or someone living out an unusually eventful life with three wives in different parts of the world. As I suggested in Phase 8 of this series, you like to have somebody to root for. Someone in there you empathise with. Love them or hate them, you have to know more about them. And this is where I like to mix it up a bit. I like to give my characters the chance to explore their exploding world in a bit more depth. I like to have my characters ask questions like “How did I get here?” and “Why?”
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well... how did I get here?"
Writers: D. Byrne, C. Frantz, B. Eno, J. Harrison, T. Weymouth
The fact is that most of us on this world are different from each other. You’ve probably worked that out for yourself already. It’s what makes being alive and being among people so exciting. It means you come at the vicissitudes of life from a different background having made a different journey and you view events from a different point of view from those awful people next door. More importantly, you react to them in your own individual way. Throwing snails over the garden fence and so on. Human beings are not all superheroes. You can be cowardly, lazy, mercenary, and sometimes, downright villainous. But you have different reasons for the cowardice, idleness, self centredness. So you can use the characters in my stories to explore other aspects of the world. You can see down The road not travelled. You probably ask “What would I do in the situation?” and feel somehow comforted that you don’t have to make that choice.” Above all, you want characters you can identify with so that they can go where you do not, or cannot, go. There has to be a complexity that you recognise as being human.
The fun, for a playwright is seeing just how interesting and complex. I can make my characters. So I ask “Why do they do these things?” “How do they justify their villainy?” “How on earth do they put up with three wives?” And I want to understand whether the reasons they may give are entirely truthful. The closer I can get to the complexity of real life individuals. The more I can flesh out a character fully, the more you will have to gnaw on.
Of course, I may never answer these questions fully. With most people we meet we can never really know what things are churning away in each other’s heads. So sometimes I end up as bewildered as you are. And you and I have to agree to differ over what a character’s true motivations are.
The thing of it is that when I start a journey with a new character I may not know much about them at all. The writing process becomes a learning process as much as it is a creative one. As the story progresses I am always astonished by what I discover about their past and how it effects their actions now.
As a writer I like to take my characters out for a walk, as it were. Imagining them in different situations, even writing stories that include them, just to get to know the possibilities and limitations of their lives before I include them in the main piece I am meant to be working on.
Strangely, this is as true with historically real characters as it is with entirely invented ones. The fact is, by using my imagination, my knowledge of human nature (such as it is) and my ability to say “What if?” I can discover things about a character that are not necessarily open to the strict, historically accurate biographer.
When I was commissioned by AsOne Theatre Company to write a play about Mary Anning, the palaeontologist, all I knew about her was that she was from Lyme Regis, a few miles down the coast in Dorset. My knowledge of the place enabled me to imagine what it was like for a woman of that time and in those circumstances; not as the young girl tra la lahing along the sunny beach stopping every so often to pick up a pretty fossil as she’s usually portrayed. I was able to see her as a woman whose life must have been unremitting drudgery. The blue mud where she made her finds was deep, clinging. Every step in the winter storms when the waves scoured at the clayey cliffs and revealed the outcrops where the fossils were to be found must have required huge reserves of strength and fortitude just to venture out there, let alone spend hours with pick and hammer, gouging at the lias. She must have been extremely tough and resilient. For ever cold and mud-stained. She had her mother and younger siblings to feed and clothe. Her whole world must have centred on survival. Hers was not a romantic existence. I have known women like that. Country women for whom life is an unending battle with poverty and the elements. And yet… And yet… Beyond this she made the time to read, to study, to carry out her scientific examinations and recordings. She found time to imagine how the world of deep time was and how her pieces of stoney bone fitted into that. She wrestled with her conscience and religion at the implications of what she was doing. She made time to correspond with other scientists throughout the world. She dealt with a world in which I doubt if there was a great deal of time for feeling sorry for herself even if she was increasingly aware of the injustices that life handed out to her as someone on the bottom rung of society’s ladder. And as a woman. Most of all, I am convinced that she would not have seen herself as any sort of heroine. She was living her life as best as she could according to what had been given to her. Just as you would.
I could see that the satisfaction in her life must have come as a result of her dogged determination to advance the cause of science over her own well-being. That for me is true heroism. And is a form of heroism that we still see in the world today. And that is what I wanted to transmit to the world.
So, once I had that sort of picture in my mind, the play could more or less write itself. Any event that happened to her (the landslide that killed her Dog Tray, her breast cancer) she would react to as only she could and would inform how she reacted to later events. The What Where and When of her life were sketchy and were thus relatively straightforward to set out, but the how and why only came from understanding of her situation. It was only as I progressed that I discovered how she spoke, how she thought, how she expressed herself. And each new revelation would alter the course of events (or alter how she reacted to them) Mary Anning herself took charge of the narrative.
The biographer sees their subject objectively, from outside. The imaginative writer tries to see the world through the eyes of their character.
My job then was to follow where she wandered and notice all the little details of day to day life that she would have noticed herself. Not including too many, of course, not wanting to overwhelm you, the watcher but watching through her eyes noticing what should be important, what held her attention or played upon her mind, made her irritable or unhappy. Making her gruff of speech and vulnerable to the brickbats of other townsfolk. Trying not to impose my twenty-first century sensibilities on her but looking for what would make her a great human being in any century under any circumstances.
Thus comes my advice to new writers when they ask:
Write about what you don’t know rather than what you do know.
It is so much more interesting and fruitful to me to find out something new in a character. Possibly something that no-one else has discovered. To let them grow as my understanding grows.
Of course all my invented characters are based on people I know, family members, someone I met at a bus stop, friends. They all appear. They are the actors upon which I hang the costume of the developing character. All writers have hunted through old telephone directories to find a suitable name, just as we borrow the face of an uncle or aunt for the look of a murdering villain. Just as the actor might find a pair of shoes to begin constructing their performance, so it is the writer finds a look, a manner of speech, a name that fires their imagination and enables them to begin their search for some sort of truth. And I have to acknowledge that the limitations of my knowledge limits the scope of my characters. It is essential that I spend as much of my time listening and observing and building the best library of human motivations and foibles as I can in much the same way Mary Anning spent chipping at the mud and rock that hid her finds.
I may not be able to work out all the facts but, I can at least, deduce some of them by asking “How did I get here?”
It may be because I am a writer that many names of characters come to me unbidden in dreams. I wake up with a particular name ringing in my ears. “Who’s that?” I think. I scroll through my address file. No. I google them. I search directories. No, that name is completely new. For absolutely no reason and with absolutely no prompting it is the product of my subconscious. Like so much of being a writer there is no real explanation. So it is.
And of course, I include all on my own experiences and attitudes and extrapolate from there. I try to write down remembered pain and amplify it, disappointment, rage. In the end, it’s all about me, really.
Any character, fictional or factual, is essentially autobiographical
It's odd but I have never written a character that I have not come to sympathise with in some way. Even if they are a total bastard I still find I have to defend their villainy in some way. They are my babies. They may go round murdering people but they have whispered in my ear and I understand How and Why even if I don’t in any way condone their actions.
The crucial part of constructing a character is through dialogue and ephemeral detail which are generally never recorded but which demonstrate the crucial turning points in a character’s own journey. Whether factual or fictional we do that thing of walking a mile in their shoes and having the conversations or experiencing those events that makes their story interesting. This means dialogue and interaction with other characters. I’ll come to that in another episode.