Character Traits
It only takes a moment. There I was stirring a spoonful of brown sugar into a cup of coffee in the kitchen of my apartment in Riyadh, the weekend stretching lazily ahead, when a stranger tapped me on the shoulder. His name was Johnny Tattoo and he’s been with me ever since. For seven long years he’s been doing summersaults through my mind. Begging for attention. What if I did this? What if I did that? What if you did fuck all instead Johnny? Not even the hint of an apology when he interrupts whatever it is I’m doing. I have to tell him to give it a rest, but Johnny’s way too excited to take any heed. It’s always now or never. He hasn’t got the time to be waiting around. There’s stories to be written, books to be sold and films to be made, all off the back of his fame and my time. I had never even thought about him before that faithful day. I didn’t even know his name until it popped into my head and now here he is planning a trilogy. He walks, talks, lives and breathes as if he’s real and in a way he is.
This is what characters do to writers. These weird and wonderful constructions of the subconscious. They toy with us. Take for example the curious case of Sherlock Holmes creeping up on an equally unsuspecting Arthur Conan Doyle, throwing on a pair of slippers and a dressing gown, stuffing some tobacco into his pipe (well okay, so the pipe came later), lighting it and settling down for the evening in front of a roaring fire to discuss the latest mystery that needed solving with the inimitable Doctor Watson. Think of Harry Potter’s wand casting a dizzy spell over J.K. Rowling or James Bond shaking and stirring Ian Fleming into action or Winnie the Pooh wrestling the quill from A.A. Milne’s hand and running off into the Hundred Acre Wood. These characters who are but a drop in the ocean of literature, figures that have taken on a life of their own and ended up demanding the absolute attention of their creator. And the bigger these figures of the imagination become, the more they seem drawn to the personality of fame, desperate for the fortune and the adulation that will inevitably come their way, so much so that they trap their unwitting writer leaving them unable to move onto something else. And even when the writer tries, the detective or the wizard or whoever it is knows they only have to click their fingers and they’ll will come running.
After all, they pay the bills meaning Arthur or J.K. can’t afford to say no even if they want to, bound in servitude forever more to break rocks in the hot sun. They’ll be with with them no matter what and they’ll even have the audacity to live on when they’re gone, immortal and untamed. Take Sherlock, Arthur tried to kill him off in a scuffle with his arch nemesis Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, but his adoring public refused to believe it and so he reappeared in probably his most famous outing called ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’. Despite Harry Potter finishing school, it still feels like he never left. And Bond, James Bond, you’re clearly not going anywhere anytime soon even if Daniel Craig has had enough. A.A. Milne tried to write about the horrors of war, but Winnie wasn’t having any of that malarkey. Of course there’s plenty of others: Robin Hood, Thomas the Tank, Paddington and Jaws – they even tried to bring the great white back after Sergeant Brody had blown him to smithereens.
All it is takes an idle moment to create a legend. The desperate writer waiting for a train sipping a coffee, her mind sifting through the early evening crowd when suddenly she sees him standing all alone on the opposite platform. For a second the young boy is nothing until she takes a leap of faith and suddenly out of nowhere a wizard is born and Harry Potter is up, up and away. These creatures that inhabit the dark and become light. The writer is forced to follow them to hell and back. They take over. They go everywhere with the writer and the writer goes everywhere with them. Pulling and pushing each other to faraway places. At first they keep the writer company, until they start waking them in the middle of the night forcing them to switch on the light to write down a stream of words so they won’t be forgotten. These characters who run faster than the writer can keep up. They take their scribbles home and take a step back in a desperate attempt to join the dots until they make some sense. The writer edits and edits again, stripping the imagination back and painting on the detail. The names collect in scribbles on a forgotten page: Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, Francisco Scaramanga - the man with the golden gun, Doctor Watson and Piglet, they loiter in the shadows waiting for their turn to shine, even though they know they’ll never be the main one.
Once the character becomes the writer’s muse, there’s no going back. They reel them in. Hook, line and fuckin’ sinker. You cover your tracks and you’re clever enough to chose the most curious ones. The ones that can’t say no, that have to know more and even then it’ll never be enough. When they write about you; you take them somewhere else, somewhere safe or somewhere dangerous, somewhere far beyond the realm of the subconscious where you’ve existed all this time. You’ve met them before, played with them, laughed and cried with them. You’re the something they’ve forgotten. The something that was always there. The something lost along the way: the spirit, the flicker waiting patiently for the chance to stir their attention and now you have them they can’t let go. You’re in everything they are, the story unfolding into print: hardback, paperback, suddenly you turn to ink. Now you’re everywhere: on the bookshop shelf, in the bestsellers list, on the radio, in the newspaper and on the front of colour magazines. But still you’re not done spreading your wings, when suddenly you’re on the silver screen taking some poor auld actor to the places the author has already been: Daniel Radcliffe, Basil Rathbone or Sean Connery. From now on they’ll always be you and only you. Hollywood takes you by the hand. Universal and 20th Century Fox take the stand, the dollar bills piling high, the champagne flowing as you kiss the world goodbye. They wine and dine you and turn you into the person you were always going to be.
They’ll take your dignity, even though it’s not yours to give away. You can be anything they want you to be. in the end it’s the writer that pays. The ones who want you to be the same as you were when they first met you. It’s easy for you; all you have to do is jump off the page into the nation’s consciousness. You become your own voice. I’m sure you hurt like anyone, but you’ve managed to create this world where you’re the brightest star. Immortality is a frightening thing, but not for you. You embrace it, squeeze it, adore it and lap it up. Whereas the writer is forced to shut up and take the money as editors, agents, publishers and screenwriters adapt you to their ways. It must be nice to be loved, no matter what you do. You get to delve into your dark side and take your audience to places they would not dare to go alone. It only serves to make you even more attractive. You get to do things they would be thrown in jail for. Sherlock smoking opium, Harry drives the muggles mad, 007 sleeping with nearly every woman he meets, or Paddington eating enough marmalade to cause an orange famine, or whatever it is you do. You don’t even have to turn up at the book launch and sign autographs. You get to make it up as you go long after the writer is long gone. You’re the inspiration that comes from deep inside, the two edged sword that weaves and cuts its way through all the rejection that’s gone before, the endless letters piling up on the hall floor. You’re the intuition the writer cannot set aside, the stream of consciousness that they can never hide.
The voices that live inside the writer, of whom do they speak? Is it a lost child or the lost object or the person they were always meant to be? We know not, but the important thing is that they get to tell their story through you. It’s you and only you whose job it is to give the writer a message they will only truly understand when it is written on the page in front of them. This special place that you can only reach through story. This place that shakes the writer up so that they can carry on. You teach them how to grow. You fill them with the will to go. On.
I find it’s best not to think too much when a character comes along; otherwise they’ll become someone they are not. They’re often pushy. Caring. Moody. Kind. Restless. Happy. Relentless. Sad. Fun. Crazy. Angry. Shameful. Guilty. Forgiving. Unforgiving. Obstinate. Hard. Stoic. Deserving. Desperate motherfuckers. They come laced with hope and fear in equal measure. They talk. Sit. Act. Eat. Sleep. Shit and wake at the most inappropriate hour. They fight. Fuck. Retreat. Advance. Shoot up. Shoot down. They’ll never let you down and they’ll never let you go. They feed off your ego. Ancient. Divine. Godless. They come from somewhere long ago. They occupy that secret place. They live the truth by telling lies. They dance, they laugh, they cry. They exist in everyone you see. They hide in the darkest corners lying in wait and when you’re ready they race across the page faster than a meteor rushing towards earth. They can find the beauty in every little thing. No shortcuts, they’ll go off-road to access the deepest recess. They take the long way round and when they fall they get back up again and again. They climb the highest mountains and swim the deepest seas even if it means getting lost in the space beyond memory. They float with the tide and go against the flow depending on what the day demands. They sing hallelujah and whistle the last post when they think it’s time to let you go, but there is no end, there can never be. After all there’s a prequel and a sequel to be written still. Like Sherlock they’ll even go as far to dig themselves up to seal their writer’s fate.
They’ll only ever leave you at heaven’s gate.
