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40 Part II: Realising That Character Is Everything
I hate to turn to Marcel Proust again, but he is the master of memory! Look at
the way the sound of water running through a pipe seamlessly takes the narrator
back to the past:
The shrill noise of water running through a pipe, a noise exactly like
those long-drawn-out whistles which sometimes on summer evenings we
heard pleasure-steamers make as they approached Balbec from the sea.
—Marcel Proust (Remembrance of Things Past/À la recherche du
temps perdu, Trans C K Scott Moncrieff, Chatto &, Windus, 1973,
first published 1922)
1. Make a list of six key childhood memories for your character.
2. Now come up with a series of prompts to trigger the memories.
3. Make one a sight, one a smell, one a sound, one a taste, one an action
and one an object.
Childhood memories are particularly vivid and can be a great way of explaining
things that happened long ago that shaped your character’s life, and that
may reveal why the person behaves as she does now.
Showing these events through a flashback is far more effective than simply
telling readers what happened. For example, you can state directly that when
she was a child your character was terrified of her father’s rages, but if you
dramatise this moment skilfully, readers identify with the character, hear
the father’s voice and empathise with her fear of him. For example, you can
describe the character tying her shoelaces when she was young, which triggers
a vivid memory of her father standing over her and shouting at her for
going about it the wrong way.
Long slabs of memories of a character’s back story – all the things that happened
before your story begins – can be fatal to the forward momentum of
your narrative. Keep flashbacks short, specific and focused! For much more on
flashbacks, check out Chapter 19.
Write about your character doing a simple action now – perhaps eating ice
cream, putting on her hat or playing the piano. Have her remember doing the
same action as a child. Write for five minutes; don’t let the memory go on too
long, and come back into the present moment at the end.
Another useful exercise is to dig out some old photographs from your childhood
and write about a memory they create. Then write about your character
at the same age, experiencing a similar kind of memory. Think about how
the experience is the same and in what ways it’s different.