More Than Ink and Paper?

Have you ever finished a family saga book, closed the cover, and felt a strange sense of mourning? Like you’ve just said goodbye to a dear friend, or felt furious that someone got away with a dastardly deed?

The comments that bring me the greatest joy are when a reader falls in love with my characters. One reviewer told me, “I feel like part of the family now!”.

I love to know who people cry over, it’s nearly always Florrie and perhaps a few for Joe. I’m also keen to find out what contrasts they spotted in the complex relationships tucked inside this family story.

When I set out to write a historical fiction book, I was so worried that I’d be writing a dull, dry tome, but I need not have worried — my characters had other plans. In no time at all, they took control of the story and showed me how to find the humanity in the grit. In my experience, history is taught as a monotonous sequence of dates, events, and empty characters, but the actual truth of history is in the people. I wasn’t simply trying to recreate a historical period. I was looking for the life-force and I found it in the ordinary people who turned the wheels of the Industrial Revolution.

In writing my own family’s story, I discovered a multitude of other families’ stories — the tales of the working people who made Birmingham the Workshop of the World. The Sellers symbolise every determined, gutsy individual who worked arduous hours in the sweat and filth of our cities. The Seller's story pays tribute to every woman who sat at her kitchen table making buttons from bone whilst running a house and a family. This is where I found the pulse, and that is why I believe my characters come alive.

As those first paragraphs started to go down, I became aware that Matthew, Matthias and Mary were not just names on a family tree. They lived and breathed the Shropshire air — Matthew really walked all those miles towards Birmingham. What must that have felt like to a ten-year-old country boy? Just imagine leaving green fields and farm livestock to come across open source mining scaring the countryside. Imagine his amazement as he looked up at steam-driven pumps bigger than the cottage he had left. How would it have smelt? How would he comprehend such a dramatic shift in the scenery as each step took him along the canal with Samson, the boat horse?

The Anatomy of an Emotion

Matthew on the first passenger train out of Birmingham to Liverpool

When you read the Seller & Son stories, I want you to feel the power of Matthew’s drive in your own bones and to see the grit from the forge under your fingernails.

I believe the reason we become invested in characters isn’t because they are “perfect” or “likable.” It’s because we recognise their humanity. When a character in my book feels grief or fear, I don’t just tell you they are sad or scared. I describe the cold, hollow ache in their heart or the way their breath hitches against a tightening chest. I studied the physical expression of emotions over thirty decades as a complementary health therapist and counsellor. My clients would describe how they felt sadness, or anger in terms of how their body felt. “I feel so heavy, my heart is being squeezed,” or “I’m so torn up inside, my stomach feels knotted and makes me feel sick”.

Think about the times we use our body to describe an emotional reaction. A pain in the neck; a pain in the back-side; giving someone the elbow; sick to the stomach; shouldering a burden; he’s got no spine; I’m on my knees. Our bodies betray our emotions and as a writer, this is a fabulous resource which drops the reader straight into the character.

By writing through the physical body, I’m inviting you to step inside their skin. When Matthew has that flaming row with William and worries that he’s taking on his father’s rage, he internalises it. The effects of this explode in his head, and the reader watches the pressure of suppressing this overwhelming emotion take its toll on Matthew’s health. I hope my readers aren’t just observers; they are there in that room, sensing the rage or the sadness or even feeling excited at the whisper of romance.

The “Real” Over the “Perfect”

Whichever way you look at it, history can be messy. The British Industrial Revolution was a time of immense progress, but it was also a time of profound hardship. To honour the people who lived through it, I couldn’t paint them in simple black and white. I want my characters to have colour. They are flawed, they are tired, and sometimes they make the wrong choices. But they are real. A book clubber remarked that, on several occasions, she thought Matthew’s decisions could go one way or another. She read on anxiously, almost in tears, hoping to goodness that he’d make the right decision — she was very relieved when he did. This is when a reader becomes invested in a character, when they care about the decisions they make. The characters, whether warm and loving like Florrie, or dark and sinister like that awful Aidan MacCarthy, are all deeply human and possess authentic truths. I ask myself with all of them, “Why do they behave the way they do? Where do their feelings come from? If I were them, what would I do or say next?”

 When the Story Writes Itself

Florrie dancing before all the pins fell out of her hair.

The first special magic writing moment happened when a character began to take responsibility for her own storyline. I remember making myself a coffee and standing in the kitchen pondering what would happen to Sarah. The idea appeared from nowhere. At first, I laughed with delight at such a terrific plot, then burst into tears. I went straight to my computer, the words streamed through me as I became a conduit for her voice.

When I am sitting at my desk, tears blurring my vision, I know that my characters have come alive. I truly hope that you will feel their heartbeats as you read. If the words become stuck and won’t flow for me, that is when my characters are still just ink. Then, I turn towards intuitive writing (I’ll do another blog on that) or play music which really helps to reconnect with my character or the event.

I want my stories to pay tribute to the resilience of the human spirit. I am privileged to have witnessed this resilience in my family, friends, and clients. I hope I have found a way to weave this experience into my fictional characters, so that readers can connect and recognise a part of themselves in the ink on the page.

PS Please forgive the slightly dodgy AI images. It seemed a better option to my own badly drawn stick people.

If you haven't read A Legacy Forged yet, you can buy a signed copy directly from me or download a Kindle copy to your device here. A brand new version of 'ALF' will be re-launched in early June with his new cover -- it promises to be quite different.