Letting your characters speak

[John Dean]

I have written blogs before about the importance of characters in the writing process and I have just experienced another powerful example of the role that they can play.

I am 5,000 words into the new Harris crime novel and was writing a scene in which I had ground to a halt. I knew what I wanted the scene to achieve but seemed to have hit a brick wall.

How did I break through? By going back to the basics. For me, all characters start out with the jobs that I need them to do within the story. They are not there to fill space, they’re there to agitate, to keep secrets, to antagonise the police, to terrorise the community, to make the reader think etc. Once their job is identified, they can grow.

That’s what happened this time. By exploring the personality of one of the characters (a new character, one that has not appeared in any of other Harris novels) and giving him history with one of my usual team of detectives, new energy was injected into the narrative by the bad feeling that emerged between them and the chapter worked.

Just shows that writers need to listen when their characters speak.