Lies seem to be flavour of the month, don’t they? [Can’t think what made me light on that, can you?] I can’t match Dame Isadora on lies, but I found myself thinking about lies in fiction and what they say about the characters. And, sometimes, the readers, too.
Don’t know about you, but the heroes and heroines I write have to be people of integrity. Does that mean they can’t tell lies, though?
Um. Well, no. Not exactly.
It depends… Continue reading
Times are difficult, scary even, for all of us — especially the older or vulnerable ones — so I thought I’d add a bit of light-hearted distraction. To wit: earwigging.
I do it. Don’t you?
Doesn’t everybody?
Especially authors…
I was in a pub, on my own, having a quiet meal. There were four elderly gents — nattily dressed, clearly ex-military — sitting across the way, drinking various beverages and gossiping. They were not trying to keep their voices down, though they must have known other drinkers could hear every word.
One of them was even louder than the others, very keen to be heard. All The Time. And even when the others were trying to hold a conversation about something else.
Must admit that I took agin Mr Loudmouth.
Anyway, Mr Loudmouth told a joke Continue reading
Delightful chap, isn’t he, our villain? I particularly admire those enormous teeth. And that improbable moustache.
I’ve blogged about villains before — including charismatic villains played by Alan Rickman (yes!) and Richard Armitage — but today’s blog isn’t about individual villains. It’s about what villains can bring to our manuscripts, especially when we’re stuck.
I was stuck on my current wip. It was moving at the rate of a glacier before we had climate change.
In other words, it was going nowhere very slowly.
Empathy with characters:Empathy? Roughly, it’s feeling what another person is feeling, from their point of view. Even if that other person is fictional.
So readers may identify with the heroine in a romance, or with the spy in a thriller, or with the detective in a crime story.
Writing Regency romances, my aim was always that my [mostly female] readers would identify with my heroine and fall in love with my hero.
But readers don’t all react in the same way to our characters and our plots. And I’m beginning to wonder if age is one important factor in that. Continue reading
Today’s guest blog on YA heroes is from award-winning author Pia Fenton (Christina Courtenay)
There’s been a lot of talk about heroes on the Libertà blog. Also delicious villains.
Yes, I too am a fan of Mr Rickman and others like him, notably Lucius Malfoy (actor Jason Isaacs) in the Harry Potter movies — how could you forget him?! — and Loki in the Thor movies (actor Tom Hiddleston). Continue reading
Villains can be a turn-off. But they can also be compelling, fanciable, even sexy. Think Alan Rickman as just about any movie baddie you care to name. (Confession here — I’m a Rickman fan and this blog was partly inspired by him. But there are other baddies here too, and many are from books as well as films.)
