Models

            A good week. I sent two short stories off to a competition each. Wrote one from start to finish- the 200 word one for the Chalk The Sun/ Wandsworth Arts Festival competition. That one, in fact, I had to rewrite twice. After I wrote the first draft, I decided that the characters I'd put in it were resembled too closely some friends of my wife's. It's caused arguments between us before, that she feels I'm drawing on her and her friends and relatives. So I struggled to come up with a completely different set of characters.
            I don't feel good about saying this, but one of the things I do before I start to write a story is think of people I know in real life. Does any writer do it differently? If you want living, breathing characters, you surely have to start with the real thing. You need models, just as artists and sculptors do. Don't you?
            I should write character biographies before I start a first draft. I swear I will one day. Then you can decide on a different hair colour, house, occupation, hobby, to your model's. It's different if you base the character on yourself, of course; or people whom you can't stand- you don't care if they're offended. Otherwise, you're walking a tightrope.
            Anyway, I wrote the second draft, barely looking at the first. Because once you change characters, you change everything. Even though the substitutes were in the same setting, carrying out roughly the same actions (they didn't do everything entirely the same), you describe everything differently. At least I do. I usually try and write something through the eyes of one person, and the way people experience even the same events at the same time, and think and feel about them, is unique to every individual.
            Once I began typing up this second draft, I hit another hurdle. I looked at the word count, and discovered I'd expended my 200 word allowance on just one third of the story. I groaned in frustration. 200 words is not a lot. In short stories anyway, the trade off between plot and character is brutal. The more complicated the plot, the less time you have to depict character. Readers won't bother with a story if the characters don't engage them in some way; but you have to give those characters something to do, you have to complicate their lives.
            200 words. And I'd decided, again, that this was going to be a horror story. So that meant certain conventions. The threat of death- or even something worse. From a person, a monster or some supernatural creature. Something to scare the protagonist horribly, and the reader pleasurably. Plotting a short story might possibly- possibly- have been easier if I'd set out to write a literary short story, of the William Trevor variety. Describing the moment when a man decided he wants a divorce, or a woman realizes her partner has been unfaithful. Trevor once said that a short story is closer to a poem than a novel; that a novel needs a plot, a short story needs a point. (In fairness to writers of literary short stories, though, I should say that though plotting them might be simpler, the standard of character depiction is higher. Writing a horror story still seemed, for me, an easier option.)
            So I wrote a third version, a summary of the second. 200 words equals about ten sentences. Again, I barely looked at the previous draft. This third version came in at around 180 words. I daresay that I could have added the remaining twenty words somehow or other. I realize now that, in this 200 word version, I don't reveal who the narrator is (she's the protagonist's sister). There's also a reference to another character who never gets properly introduced (he's the narrator's son, the protagonist's nephew). But the deadline was looming, and that looked like a whole can of worms.
            A lot of stuff that made the characters quirkier, more engaging, had to be jettisoned for the story to come in at the right number of words. Like a boxer dehydrating himself to make the weight before a fight. I hope, anyway, that I've conveyed a flavour of real people.

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