Character reference

Not sure I create those who populate my work, so much as absorb them IRL. Plus: SOS - the Significance of Style – beyond the paywall below.

The scribe surrounded by inspiration. [Concept: Adrian Lacey; image: AI-created at Perchance.]

Where do writers get their characters? There are a million sources, but we can’t really improve on real life.

I find it helps to start with someone I’ve met in mind – or perhaps they’ve been gleaned from radio, TV, or film.

A kernel of truth

In the case of the executive producer of my TV show in my newly published debut novel Waving, Drowning (available here) he started out in my mind as the boss of a commercial radio station I worked on in the 1980s. The breakfast jock there, who’s since become a big noise in a very different world, referred to the managing director as behaving like a captain.

He was picking up on the upper middle class officious manner which gave the good captain a military air in his dealings with underlings - such as the low life known as DJs. I can still recall the MD apparently taking lumps out of a presenter beyond a glass door which led to the studios. As a lowly runner at the beginning of my media career I was heading in that direction when the captain very deliberately put his hand up to the top of the door barring my way. Point made; humbling power dynamic very obviously underscored.

For some reason in Waving, Drowning I preferred the rank colonel to captain, which then led me to Elvis’s manager, Tom Parker, known as The Colonel. I’m also a sucker for alliteration, even more so where there’s a hint of an anagram, so he became Colin the Colonel.

If I’m in a building and it’s on fire, I’m not expecting an award-winning oration from a firefighter hymning the ‘rich russets of the skyward-licking tongues’.

– how style should be the norm, not the exception in ‘SOS: Style or Surrender?’ beyond the paywall below

I then amped up Colin’s military bearing, and never resisted an opportunity to crowbar in related imagery – hence ‘[his] steely blue eyes, which had seen action across the wastelands of British light entertainment for too long … He would have waved the white showbiz flag long ago but he had too much alimony, too many leaching children … and a folly in Esher with life-size battlements to support.’

There’s a saying that an Englishman’s home is his castle (I’m sure women have their redoubts, too), but here Colin’s home takes that sentiment further than most! In my mind he has a bluff manner, and it may not be a coincidence that I once had to look after General Sir Mike Jackson for BBC TV’s Newsnight programme.

He was perfectly polite, but wasn’t going to waste too much energy to ooze and schmooze charm. (You might be surprised how charming and funny MPs are by contrast.)

As time went on in the creation of Waving, Drowning I came to see Colin the Colonel as less the ogre my narrator Nate would have you believe him to be, and more of a pantomime dame.

I derived some fun putting him in his glass office-within-an-open-plan-office, and then pointing out, when it’s all hitting the fan on show day, on the eve of the millennium, ‘It’s been likened to the glass coffin of yore, but this one contains no beauty, sleeping or otherwise, although there are plenty of curses emanating from there.’

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