How to make your characters believable
by
Keith Anthony
Fergus from "Times and Places"
I knew the basics of Fergus
before I put pen to paper: a late middle aged man who has spent a decade soul
searching, since the death of his 24 year old daughter. He has grown anxious, feeling detached from
the rest of the world, but empathising strongly with those who are vulnerable
or a little different. He has a deep
relationship with Sylvie, his wife, borne of a long marriage and shared tragedy,
even if there are few signs of surviving passion. He is a man feeling a spiritual draw, but one
marked by quiet searching rather than preachy certainties. He is encouraged by a seemingly miraculous
moment, but his anxieties are not supernaturally resolved and, during a three
week cruise, they come to a terrible head.
A bit like a river flowing from
source to sea, tributaries of further personality joined that basic character
as I wrote, and I hope Fergus grew into a fully drawn protagonist. I made him easily irritated, for example by loud
phone conversations, disingenuous cruise line communications and a trio of
boorish men hogging the spa bath. But I gave
him a touching relationship with his twelve year old daughter, moved by her
excitement when he takes her away, but anxiously asking himself “Would she still be pleased to spend time
with her father when she became a teenager?” He feels most comfortable with Sylvie and, dancing
with her on the ship, he looks back on painful discos from his youth: “there how you danced mattered, here it didn’t. He pictured his struggling youthful self
without envy, he was happy to be when and where he was, in this time and place,
dancing with his wife”.
When adding new sides to his personality,
they had to complement what had already been written... and yet a complexity in
creating lifelike characters is that we are rarely consistent, but adapt with
different people and dependent on mood: so Fergus is confident in a flashback when
meeting his daughter’s boyfriend, but shy when avoiding an opportunity to meet
the cruise ship Captain; he can appear somewhat child-like with his wife, but is
strongly protective of the vulnerable. He
may be intolerant, but often shows deep compassion.
We are only given glimpses of
what Fergus once did for a living – rushed sandwiches for lunch over a computer
keyboard, occasional home-working, colleagues who were stuck in ruts – this could
be any office job, but, whatever it was, one suspects he worked to live rather
than the other way round.
What makes Fergus tick are the
quiet things. That soul-mate
relationship with his wife, to whose calmness “he sometimes clung as if it were indeed a lifebelt and he lost at sea”. The peace and beauty of their home: “outward journeys were never natural to
them, as if travelling against an invisible current or an atavistic
instinct. Homewards invariably felt the
right direction”. The numinous
natural world and a bumbling faith which leaves him feeling out of his
spiritual depths on retreat, praying hard that “he wouldn’t be found out, that nobody would ask him what he did, that
he wouldn’t be chased out of the retreat centre as the fraud that he felt
himself to be”.
These quiet tools – along with a
mindfulness App - are what Fergus uses to manage his anxieties and, towards the
end of the book, it is clear he finally achieves a breakthrough, though still
not a full cure as, when an expected visitor is late, “an old foe revisited Fergus, suggesting various misfortunes that might
have befallen her”.
After his earlier apparent
miracle he reflected how:
“He would continue to grieve for his daughter and he accepted that
there would be moments when this would feel almost unbearable. He was under no illusion that he was now a
saint, rather (judging himself a little harshly) that he would still have his
grumpy, anxious, lazy, antisocial personality...”
But he was unfair on himself,
because “Times and Places” shows Fergus, despite his occasional ineptness, to
have great depths. I sought, though, to
make him a believable mixture of good and bad, but the former being his true nature,
the latter the weaknesses he struggles against.
Like many of us, perhaps he could go a bit easier on himself and just
maybe - while it doesn’t magic away all his problems - that breakthrough towards
the end of the story means he finally does.
Amazon | Book Guild | WH Smith | Waterstones | Twitter
Introducing…
Times and Places
Ten years after his daughter
Justine's death, an anxious Fergus embarks on a cruise with his wife. On board, he meets a myriad of characters and
is entranced by some, irritated by others and disgusted by one. These turbulent feelings, combined with a sequence
of bizarre events, only lead to his increased anxiety.
 |
| Amazon | Book Guild | WH Smith | Waterstones |
In a series of flashbacks,
Justine enjoys an ultimately short romance, a woman concludes she killed her
and an investigating police officer is drawn into her idyllic world. Fergus, haunted by poignant memories,
withdraws in search of answers.
Back on the cruise, Fergus
reaches breaking point, fearing he has done something terrible. By the time the ship returns, his world has
changed forever.
"Times and Places"
spans Atlantic islands, the Chiltern countryside, Cornish coasts and rural
Slovenia, all of which provide spectacular backdrops to a humorous and moving
tale of quiet spirituality.
~
Keith Anthony was born and brought up in the Chilterns, to where he returned
after studying French at university in Aberystwyth and a subsequent spell
living in west London. He has a love of
nature, both in his native Buckinghamshire countryside, but also in Cornwall
and wherever there is a wild sea.
Keith has been lucky enough to spend time living in France, Spain,
Belgium, Serbia and Croatia, as well as being a regular visitor to Germany, and
languages were the only thing he was ever half good at in school. Since graduating he has worked in government
departments, but between 2005 and 2008 he was seconded to the European
Commission in Brussels and, thanks to a friend from Ljubljana he met there, has
travelled regularly to Slovenia, getting to know that country well.
Keith's other great love is music and he plays classical and finger
picking blues guitar, though with persistently limited success. He has always enjoyed writing, including
attempts at children's fiction, and in 2016 he began work on his first full
book with “Times and Places" the end result: an accessible, observational
story, mixing quiet spirituality with humour, pathos and gothic horror, and
setting it against a rich backdrop of the natural world.
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