Today, beloved listener, we provide an intensive step-by-step guide to creating, describing and using characters in fiction, along with tutelary videos, a comprehensive workshop package, one-to-one coaching, and seventeen character stereotypes you hadn’t thought of. No, no, dear gods we do not! We lied again. Instead, we mess around with an Australasian author of the Victorian era, Marcus Clarke, and share one of his most amusing tales from 1871 – ‘The Haunted Author’ – about a writer plagued by his own characters. It may impart some valuable lessons…
But we could quite easily collect together all the extensive advice available on character development, with detailed references to hundreds (if not thousands) of articles which tell you to:
- Make them stop and think
- Give them opinions
- Give them flaws
- Describe their body language
- Give them motivations
- Create a back story for them
And so on. Pages of that sort of thing. We pay little attention to any of it (which is perhaps why old greydog is an award-winning, billionaire author with so many film options taken up).
Some of the advice is written by people who should be busy producing fiction if they’re that good at it (which makes us suspicious). Some advice may be genuinely useful, though much tends to be a bit over-obvious – unless you had planned a novel with motiveless characters who stand there like cardboard cut-outs and have never met anyone else in the world or done anything until the story starts.
John Linwood Grant (greydog to you) writes tolerable character-based fiction. This is mostly because:
- He has come across other people, and spoken to them
- He does not only know white Britlander males exactly like himself
- He has spent most of his life as a Human Being
- He has eyes and ears
It may also be that he is good at copying what better writers did in the past, but we won’t explore that one in case it’s true.
We did think about including real tips, but could only come up with one:
- Assume your characters ALL exist as real people, and do/did so whether you write about them or not.
If you do not know any real people, then copying neatly may be your only option.
LAZY READER NOTE: If you want to skip down to the rather amusing Marcus Clarke story ‘The Haunted Author’, about writing and characters, feel free. It’s not like you paid for this and have to squeeze value out of it. Nor do you have to be a genre fan to enjoy the tale.
MARCUS CLARKE
And on to our featured author, who sadly does not exist any more. Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke (1846 – 1881) was born in London, but was send out to Australia at the age of seventeen with £800 in his pocket, from his father (Marcus had an uncle out there who was a judge). In his brief time, he managed to be novelist, poet, farmer, journalist, playwright, and useless bank clerk.
As a lively, mercurial character, by all accounts, he wrote many wry pieces of journalism, but also the totally serious novel His Natural Life –
“The convict of fiction has been hitherto shown only at the beginning or at the end of his career. Either his exile has been the mysterious end to his misdeeds, or he has appeared upon the scene to claim interest by reason of an equally unintelligible love of crime acquired during his experience in a penal settlement. Charles Reade has drawn the interior of a house of correction in England, and Victor Hugo has shown how a French convict fares after the fulfilment of his sentence. But no writer—so far as I am aware—has attempted to depict the dismal condition of a felon during his term of transportation.
“I have endeavoured in ‘His Natural Life’ to set forth the working and the results of an English system of transportation carefully considered and carried out under official supervision; and to illustrate in the manner best calculated, as I think, to attract general attention, the inexpediency of again allowing offenders against the law to be herded together in places remote from the wholesome influence of public opinion, and to he submitted to a discipline which must necessarily depend for its just administration upon the personal character and temper of their gaolers.”
Dedication, His Natural Life (1874)
Clarke married in 1869, and the couple had six children, of which at least two survived, but he died in Melbourne at the age of only thirty five.
“After Clarke’s death his friend Hamilton Mackinnon assembled the Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume (Melbourne, 1884), a selection of his most popular journalism with a biographical introduction. The witty, often malicious, ephemeral humour which colours the greater part of these writings contrasts strangely with the dark, powerful imagination exhibited in His Natural Life, the revised, shortened and best known version of which appeared in book form in 1874 and 1875. The title, For the Term of His Natural Life, was applied by publishers to this work after Clarke’s death. Whether the light and trivial social journalist, the literary butterfly, or the serious author of this great, if defective, novel is the true Marcus Clarke, who is to say? The best defence of his journalism is that, viewed in its context, it still seems extraordinarily alive and vivid, providing a brilliant index to a very vigorous period of colonial literary life.”
Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1969
For the Term of His Natural Life has been filmed a few times, most recently in 1983, though we understand that this version was given a happy ending (?!).
The book can be read on-line here.
THE HAUNTED AUTHOR
by Marcus Clarke
First published as ‘Hunted Down’ in The Australasian 6 May 1871
‘What can I do for you, sir?’ I asked blandly, astonished. He was a tall broad-shouldered man in a rough pea-jacket, and scowled portentously.
‘Put me into an honest livelihood,’ he answered. It was such a strange request that I could only stare. ‘Don’t you understand?’ he said, seating himself with rough vehemence, ‘I want to become a reputable member of society. I want some honest employment.’
‘But, my good sir, why do you come to me? Your motive is most excellent, but an honest employment is the last thing at my disposal.’
‘That be blowed!’ said he, ‘you could give me a fortune if you liked, you know you could. But I don’t want that. No, I’m fly to that game! You’ll have some blessed elder brother, that nobody knowed of, coming back from New Zealand and succeeding to the ancestral mansion; or you’ll get me pitched out of my gilded chariot at the church door, and marry my wife, that ought to be, to somebody else. I know you. I only want a modest competence, nobody interferes with that.’
‘Your language is even more mysterious than your appearance, my friend,’ I said.
‘Pshaw!’ said he (I never heard a man outside a book said ‘pshaw’–never), ‘don’t you know me?’
I looked at him steadily, and it seemed that I ought to know him, that hat, that pea-jacket, that knotted scarf around his muscular throat, those fierce eyes–all were familiar to me…
‘You don’t happen to have any marks about you?’ I asked, while a cold sweat broke out upon my brow.
He laughed–that bitter laugh which I had described so often. ‘I have a peculiar mole on the back of my neck, the tip of my left ear is shot away, my right side still bears the mark of Pompey’s claws when he defended his young mistress Alice in the lonely swamp. I have lost the little finger of my right hand, and have three pear-shaped wens, besides the usual allowance of strawberry marks.’
There was no mistaking him. It was my Villain! I knew his bloodthirsty nature, and dreaded the tremendous struggle which experience told me was to follow.
‘But why come here?’ I urged.
‘I am sick of it,’ said my villain, doggedly. ‘I ain’t to be badgered any more. It ain’t a respectable business. First I was Jabez Jamrack, then Black Will the Smuggler, then Curlewis Carleyon, then a Poacher, then a Burglar, then an Unjust Steward, and now I’m an Escaped Convict.’
It was true. The unhappy creature before me had figured–in my world-renowned novels–in all those capacities…
‘It ain’t because I’m out all nights in all sorts of weather, mostly thunderous. It ain’t because I’m often drunk, always in debt, and totally disreputable. It ain’t because I’ve murdered a large variety of mothers, and brought the grey ‘airs of a corresponding number of aged fathers with sorrow to the grave. It ain’t because my langwidge is altogether ridiculous, and I leave out more ‘h’s and put in more oaths in my conversation than any natural man did yet. It ain’t that. No!’ he cried, waxing wroth, ‘it’s because I’m always left at the end of the third volume, if I’m still alive, without hope of mercy or promise of repentance.’
I shuddered. ‘Take some brandy,’ I said, and pushed him the decanter. He took it, and filling half-a-tumbler with neat spirit drained it at a gulp. I knew he would. The Beast–under my direction–invariably took his liquor in that fashion…
‘Is it right? Is it just, guvernor?…Your comic servant winds up with the chambermaid. Your aristocratic villain, the Marquis, my master, who poisons his niece, and shoots his aunt with an air-gun, he’s all right…he’s never hung in chains, or tuk to Newgate, or starved to death in a deserted drive on the diggings in Bend-i-go…But why waste words? Are we not alone here? No sound but the whistling of the wind in the wide chimneys of the moated grange; no footsteps but that of the midnight mouser as she creeps stealthily to her prey. Ha, ha! Thou art mine, and–‘…
Ha, ha, indeed! I guessed how it would happen. My experience as a novel-writer told me as much. Just as the enraged ruffian advanced to seize me…a new-comer appeared upon the scene. By his wavy hair, square-toed Wellingtons, massive watch chain, and handkerchief that hung from the right hand pocket of his shooting coat, I knew him at once.
He was Sir Aubrey de Briancourt.
‘Assist me!’ I exclaimed. The look of scorn he gave me was sufficient to daunt a bolder man, but I knew of a spell by which I could compel him.
‘Hist!’ I said, in a thrilling whisper. ‘Proud scion of a lordly house, there is another Sir Aubrey. Refuse me aid, and young Fairfield will assume your name and title. These minions are beyond my power, but remember you are to be continued in our next.’
The threat made pale the cheek even of one whose ancestors had bled on Bosworth, and the baronet waved a white hand towards the back door. ‘Take my cabriolet, dog!’ he said, with that courtesy which characterizes the British aristocrat…
I need scarcely remark that I leapt into the cabriolet, and was soon driving with the rapidity of lightning towards Goodman’s Gully. Fast behind came the echo of hooves. The lightning flashed incessantly, and the negro who held the reins was white with fear. All at once a man clad in a red shirt jumped from behind a bush and seized the head of the mare.
‘Who are you?’ I cried.
‘The most abused of all,’ said he. ‘I am the Typical Digger! I am the man whom you and the others of your tribe have made to eat banknotes as sandwiches. I have shod my horse with gold and swilled champagne–which I detest–out of stable buckets…Am I to pass my life in finding repeatedly gigantic nuggets, and being perpetually robbed of the same? Must I never shave? Shall the tyranny of the fictionmonger compel me to sleep in my boots?’
‘Calm yourself, my friend,’ I said, ‘There is not much harm done. I know of some poor fellows whom the fictionmongers have treated much more rudely.’
At that instant, the demoniac howls of my pursuers were borne upon the blast.
‘That may be,’ roared the Digger of Romance, ‘but I will be revenged on thee. Come!’
The cabriolet disappeared in the distance–there was never a cabriolet yet that did not do so under such circumstances–and my captor led me away. He paused at the door of the usual bush inn (how well I knew it), and striking three blows upon the door (they invariably struck three loud blows), we were admitted into a long apartment. I beheld with astonishment that all the personages whom I had imagined the creatures of my own too fertile brain were there.
‘Wretch!’ cried the fair Madeline, ‘why did you not unite me to the Duke? You know you only changed your mind at the last moment.’
‘Monster,’ said the lovely Violet, ‘you made me pass three nights of horror in the Red Farm, when one stroke of your pen would have freed me.’…
‘Christian dog!’ roared Mordecai the Jew, ‘I was born with charitable impulses, and should have lent in peace the humble shilling upon the ragged coat of poverty, had not your felon soul plunged me into crime to gratify the tastes of a blood-and-thunder loving public.’
‘And I,’ remarked Henry Mortimer, with that cynical smile that I had so often depicted, curling his proud lip, ‘did I wish to throw my elder brother down a well in order to succeed to his name and heritage? No! I loved him fondly, madly, as you took pains to state in your earlier chapters.’…
‘Away with him!’ hissed Lady Millicent, the Poisoner. ‘I knew not of the deadly power of strychnine until he told me.’…
”Twas he that let me linger in consumption for forty pages folio!’ cried Coralie de Belleisle, the planter’s daughter.
”Twas he that blighted my voluptous contours with an entirely unnecessary railway accident!’ wept the lovely Geraldine.
‘Away with him!’
‘Mercy!’ I cried, gazing in terror on their well-known lineaments.
‘Mercy!’ cried the Lost Heiress, Isabelle Beaumanoir, ‘when for two long hours you deliberated whether my sainted mother or the poacher’s wife should give me birth! Mercy for thee! Oh, no, no, no!’…
I trembled over the abyss.
‘Why seek to dispel my ennui with this espieglerie, mon ami,’ said the soft tones of the Count in his native tongue. ‘Sacre, let the pauvre petit escape, my dejeuner at the fourchette awaits. The coup d’oeil is superb, the tout ensemble all that could be desired. Voila.’
The digger swung me over the yawning grave. All the buttons in my waistcoat gave way, and for an instant my life hung literally by a thread.
‘Will you make me respectable?’ said the Villain.
‘Never.’
The button cracked. I was going, going–gone, when the alarm-bell sounded, the door was burst open, and–Bridget entered.
‘It is the boy from the printers’ for the proofs,’ said she.
‘Tell him to wait,’ said I; and wiping the sweat from my intellectual brow, I seized my pen, and in ten lines had got my Villain comfortably in irons at Norfolk Island.
THE END
And that was ‘The Haunted Author’. There’s also a fun podcast version of ‘The Haunted Author’ to be heard here:
http://nineteennocturne.libsyn.com/-the-haunted-author-by-marcus-clarke
Next time on greydogtales – something unrelated to the above. And don’t forget to subscribe (it’s free!) top left, so that you’ll know when to avoid visiting the site…