EDITORIAL

Character building

CHARACTERS are a writer’s stock-in-trade. Without them novels, stories, plays – even esoteric poems or news reports – can seem arid, literally stripped of life. ‘We read to know we are not alone,’ is how C S Lewis explained the desire to populate our literature. To look at it another way: ‘Without characters there is no story,’ says author and writing teacher Julia Bell (The Creative Writing Coursebook, Macmillan).

The human ingredients that form the basis of our writing are a talking point in this issue. In the lead article on page 9 Danuta Kean takes commercial women’s fiction to task for dishing up a slop of vapid stereotypes – of needy women and feeble men – and urges writers to provide readers with something more flavoursome and nutritious. To this end, the second instalment of the Mslexia MA in Novel Writing on page 25 is a character-building session, in which Jenny Newman looks at the variety of ways authors develop and mould the people in their books. For further inspiration, Carol McGuigan’s article on the application of acting skills to writing practice (page 22) reveals what actors do to get under the skin of the characters they play.
Don’t feel you have to do it this way, though: as Whitbread-winner Kate Atkinson says in the Mslexia interview on page 46, not all writers feel the need to live and breathe the lives they are crafting. And if you’re done fussing over the people on the page, try poetry slamming (page 13), travel writing (page 14), feature writing (page 19) – or pen a story that will win a competition (page 17).

Melanie Ashby
Deputy Editor