Grimshaw admits that her character is a hybrid of a number of different men in her life. She’s just taken bits and pieces of their personalities and circumstances and stitched them together. “I guess that makes him sound like Frankenstein,” Grimshaw says with a laugh.
All four authors agree that some details of their characters and their fiction in general are borrowed truths from their own lives and the people around them. However, as Grimshaw put it, you push these details through the fictional filter, and the original sources disappear.
Mary Swan read from her newest novel My Ghosts (Knopf, 2013) which has a handful of engaging characters from all different eras. She chose to give us a taste of one of the male characters in the book who, Mary Swan says, just sort of unfolded. She knew she wanted to do something set in the First World War and wanted a male character. One day, it came to her: He had lost his arm, ironically, not in the war but in an unfortunate train wreck, and that one detail opened up a whole world of possibilities.
Similarly, David Macfarlane told us he chose a specific detail and went with it: an intense love of sculpture and marble. Macfarlane’s latest book The Figures of Beauty (HarperCollins, 2013) is a broken love story between two characters and art. Canadian traveller Oliver is in love with Italian sculptor Anna, but she is more in love with marble than anything or anyone else.
The moderator of this event, Shaena Lambert, asked all four authors many thought-provoking questions, many with specific references to each author’s works, making it clear that she had read all their books thoroughly. Most answers came in four distinct flavours, but a few were unanimous. When Lambert asked if the authors considered whether their characters would have been likable when they were writing them, there was a mutual stir across all four faces, an unreleased snicker.
During their writing processes, none of these novelists worry whether their characters will be likable – interesting, maybe, but never likable. Real people are not liked by everyone, so if some readers end up disliking the characters, these writers feel like they’ve done something right. They’ve nailed a realistic character.
