Pageturners: Resurrecting Monsters

I hated him with a passion, an intensity that was actually far too difficult to live with, so it was sensible and easier to forget him in my youth.

Wow, this is it, the last Pageturners blog post! Thanks for reading, for all your comments and messages of support. I hope it’s been entertaining and helpful, and has sparked your own creativity.

Pageturners: How To Create Iconic Stories From The Creator of 2000AD (e-book edition) is available for pre-order on Amazon. It’ll be published on 26th November, after Doctor Who and the Star Beast has broadcast and the paperback will go on sale at the same time. All my paying subscribers will get a download link to the book, and founding members will receive a signed paperback copy.

And on the 29th November I’ll post part one of His Master’s Voice, one of two origins stories on Sean Stone, aka MI7 Assassin. I’m so excited that you all get to read my latest fiction project that is very close to my heart and I’ve been working on for years. WW1, propaganda, conspiracies and assassinations - it’s a great combination!

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I began by talking about my English teacher so I should end Pageturners with him.

He is valuable to demonstrate how a writer can recreate a character who is lost in the mists of time. Someone you badly want to build a story around, but you only consciously remember a few key aspects of who they were, because it was so long ago and in my case, somewhat traumatic.

It’s not as difficult as you might think. I’ll use him as an example. Because, apart from the basic facts I will never forget, I had erased him and everything else he stood for from my mind. I hated him with a passion, an intensity that was actually far too difficult to live with, so it was sensible and easier to forget him in my youth. 

And it worked, but the hatred remained until it was time to resurrect him.

But, whoever it is and whatever your reasons, the ground rules are pretty much the same for any character you feel compelled to resurrect. If you feel that inner compulsion, it’s almost certainly your Muse at work, nagging you to do something that’s important to her. And thus to you.

One word of warning, however. If he or she is a bad guy who you’ve consciously tried to forget, you may experience some fallout. To put it mildly. Most people prefer to keep their Pandora’s Box of memories firmly shut. They have often said to me that it can be dangerous to stir up the past. And they are absolutely right. But writers are not most people. Unless we’re hacks, we are—as Robert McKee says frequently in Story—searchers after truth, which means we will willingly choose to play with fire.

Step One is to identify the personality type your character is.

In my case I know my English teacher was a narcissist, although I didn’t recognise it at the time. I wouldn’t have even known what the word meant. And there are different categories of narcissist to consider, too.

He loved being the centre of an adoring group of school boys. At prize day, at my rather posh college, all the lay teachers wore fur trims of various colours on their gowns. But the only one I can recall is my English teacher, preening himself in his gown with its white fur trim. 

He was vermin in ermine.

From this and other small clues, it became clear to me, in retrospect, that he was a narcissist.

It may be that a different psychological label might fit your character. They might be one of the eight psychoanalytic personalities. Or the twelve character archetypes. But this will give you a foundation stone to build on. 

Step Two is to find someone in recent years you know well who reminds you of your character. There may well be more than one because, chances are, you are attracted to this kind of personality because your interaction with the original is unresolved. So I quickly found a narcissist I knew very well. He served as a useful time machine to revisit the English teacher and suddenly the latter’s previously mystifying behaviour began to make a horrible sense to me.

Step Three is to find a book or film that bears out your thesis, so you have confirmation you’re not imagining things, or are deluded in your conclusion about your character. Because, where human behaviour is concerned, there’s really nothing new under the sun. In this example, the film Cracks does the job for me. Set in a British girls boarding school, Miss G is a narcissist. She is idolised by a clique of girls, until an outsider, Fiamma, comes along. She challenges Miss G, upsetting her power base. Miss G sees her as a threat. In response, the teacher becomes obsessed by her and rapes her. Fearful that Fiamma will report her, Miss G instigates events that lead to Fiamma’s death.

The film Whiplash about a talented drummer at a music school is another powerful example of mentor becoming tormentor. This kind of thing clearly happens a great deal in schools, more than is generally known, and further explains my own experience.

Step Four is to reconstruct the past. My experience didn’t have a tragic ending like Cracks, but in other respects it was remarkably similar. My young English teacher loved being down with the kids, the centre of attention, but I was an outsider, a precocious, very confident, working-class wannabe, writing stories and poems every night. I didn’t fit. I didn’t know my place.

Why that should bother him so much, I’m still not sure. Possibly because of his past covert relationship with another member of my family. But he needed to destroy me and there are various ways for a narcissist to do that. See above. I don’t think I have to go into details.

Step Five is to put some flesh on the bones of this summary. To find an incident that shows the dramatic potential and the truth in the character you are resurrecting. So, when I look at incidents in my past, which I barely understood at the time, I now understand the subtext and the character’s motivation because I have the character’s type. This brings them alive. If you don’t understand your character, it will just be an incident without significance or impact on your readers. 

There was such an incident.

It was the exciting ‘60s era of kitchen sink films: Victim; The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner; Billy Liar; Room at the Top; Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Working-class wannabes were looking for room at the top. We kids talked endlessly about them and we even managed to sneak into the cinema to see some of these ground-breaking X-rated films.

But, instead of welcoming such films and the revolutionary changes in society they were actively promoting, my teacher chose to denigrate them. I think he felt threatened by them. He wrote a parody kitchen sink play, devoid of subtext, about a particularly dumb and cliched working class family on a council estate, mocking them, and their pathetic ways. Whether he was also throwing a curved ball at me I can’t be certain, because he was the most impressive gas-lighter I have ever met. But it would seem likely. 

He encouraged our class to make additions to his script—satirising this family further. And then to bring along scummy and tarty clothes for the family to wear. The cheaper and trashier the better. He was playing his slice of life play for laughs. Naturally, I laughed, along with my posh schoolmates, as they all took the piss out of the plebs. But I was not laughing inside. I was one of those plebs. My performance in his play, as a tarty, thick, bimbo teenage girl, he described later in the school magazine as “adequate”.

I would describe it as leaden.

A classmate reminded me recently. “I do however remember you as an avid reader—600 pages a week?” I recall it as more like a thousand pages a week. Because, without a television, books were my primary source of entertainment.

But thanks to my English teacher, for two long years after leaving school and escaping his clutches, I was unable to read anything. I would try desperately, pick the trashiest books, and still have to give up after the first chapter or so. The words simply didn’t register on my brain anymore. Because books—any books—reminded me of him. In order to survive, I successfully blanked anything to do with him from my mind.

Ironically, it made me the person I am: a fiction writer who found a way to profit from childhood trauma and turn lead into gold. In that sense, I am the creation of a mentor who was really a tormentor. He opened my eyes to the true nature of injustice. Without him, today I’d be a very different, establishment-approved, ‘safe’ writer of some kind.

Avoiding that blinkered fate, I have a lot to be thankful for.

So he may not have been Major Pollard, but—for me—he was always the centre-stage villain in my life.

And so to his comeuppance.

I did, finally, exact justice and it was a most satisfying catharsis. The unspoken, passive aggressive conflict between us led, a lifetime later, to a most powerful dénouement.

He was arrested recently at the age of ninety.

The cops do not arrest nonagenarians without good reason.

He had to attend the police station with his solicitor, his carer, and an appropriate adult. He couldn’t be charged because of infirmity, but I was still satisfied that justice was done. Whether he was compos mentis I don’t know, but he was very compos mentis two years earlier when he was an articulate spokesperson for my old school.

You may think that wanting payback on a man at the end of his life is cruel. It was not a quick or easy decision. I talked to a friend of mine, a retired High Court judge, and he encouraged me to take action. I have no doubt it was the right thing to do.

You have to relate what happened to him, to the best of your knowledge.

From a story point of view, it’s a remarkable twist ending. Real life always has the best finales.

It may not be “Rosebud,” but it’s not bad. My Muse liked it.

And so this completes Pageturners, which I hope has been of value to you.

I’ve saved the best writing advice for last.

I can’t recall who told me or where I came across it. But in a region of South Africa, villagers cover their huts with impressive chalk paintings, beautiful to behold. They are then washed away every year by heavy rain. And so they start painting all over again.

In answer to a comment about the loss of these wonderful murals, a tribal elder replied:

“Why should we worry about the rains coming when we can forever create?”

Next week is part one of His Masters Voice - an MI7 Assassin origin story!