Do Clothes Make the Man?

My son's new school term begins tomorrow and he's going back with a new suit, even though he's only 14. The school reviewed its uniform policy last term and decided to ditch the familiar blue blazers and grey or black school trousers or skirts in favour of black suits to be worn with an orange and black school tie (to match the school's new orange logo).

It struck me that it must feel slightly odd for a teacher to be confronted with a class full of young teenagers who are sitting in black business suits. But then it must feel even more odd for the staff at Eton whose pupils wear frock coats and wing collars.

That got me thinking about the clothes that people wear and the sort of judgement we make about them because of the way they dress. I remember one lady I knew in Buckinghamshire who was a farmer's wife, salt of the earth, but she dressed a bit like a bag lady.

She once went to look at a show house and the estate agent was very snooty to her, as if to say, 'There's no point in showing you our houses as you wouldn't be able to afford them.' Little did the estate agent know that this middle-aged lady with scruffy hair and no make-up owned a farm that was worth ten times the cost of the most expensive show house!

Some actors say that if they want to get inside a character they are going to play and really understand them, then they need to wear the character's shoes. Once they get used to the feel of the shoes, they know what the character's walk will be like and then everything else falls into place.

How could you use some of these ideas when you're creating your own fictional characters? Could you make a person look and dress contrary to their type, so that they are an enigma to the people they meet? Could the character have a particular item of clothing or a particular accessory that is the key to understanding them?

What is it about them you need to know or imagine for them to really come to life in your mind?

Give Your Characters an Interesting Job

As well as providing a locale for your characters and a suitable name, another thing you can do to add interest and depth to your writing is to provide them with a suitable occupation. It's all too easy to plump for obvious jobs for your characters - doctor, nurse, teacher, waitress. But there are many other jobs you could choose for them which have not been so overused in fiction.

How about a nail technician? A pharmacist? A dog handler? A court stenographer? A website designer? A graphic designer? A surveyor? Remember, you can always give your character a job that's unusual for their gender too to make them even more intriguing. What's to stop your surveyor from being female or your nail technician from being male?

There are lots of websites you can look on which advertise job vacancies. You could look in the appointments pages of your local newspaper to find some more. Or spend an hour or so browsing round the offices of a careers adviser - you'll find enough jobs to last your characters years! You'll also pick up some real life facts which will make them seem more realistic too.

Another thing you can do is be curious about people that you meet. If you get chatting to someone on a bus or at a party, ask them what they do, and if it's a job you don't know much about, ask them questions about it. People love to talk about themselves. Make notes afterwards about what you've found out, and perhaps get their contact details.

Or you can seek out people and ask for their expertise. I was once doing some research about how dentists train and what it's like to be a dentist, and my own dental surgeon gave up his lunch hour to chat with me. He gave me some marvellous anecdotes that I'd never have thought up myself. I also rang someone at one of the university dental hospitals, which resulted in a very interesting visit to the department - more interesting things to spot - and he even rang back the following week with lots more information for me.

These days it's even easier with e-mail. It's a cheap way of communicating experts and if someone doesn't want to answer questions, he can ignore your request without you having to suffer the embarrassment of being knocked back on the phone.

So why not give it a go? Find your characters an interesting job. It will make your job as a writer that bit more rewarding too.

Finding a Place for Your Characters

I talked in an earlier blog about how you can find names for your characters by using internet baby name sites, random name generators, and telephone directories. But this week one of my students said she has trouble finding place names for her stories and asked if I had any advice about how to go about this. So here goes...

The most obvious sources of place names are an atlas, a guide book, or an internet site which deals with geography. But the range of places available is vast, so it might be useful to find some ways to narrow it down. Here are some questions you could ask yourself:

• Is my story set in a rural area, in a large city or in a medium-sized town?
• What sort of landscape do I envisage for the story? Is it lush? Tropical? Arid desert? Heavily built-up and industrialised?
• Is a sense of tradition going to be important for my characters? If so, what sort of place would have the traditions that will affect them?
• What sort of character traits will my main character(s) have? Are they traits that are particularly associated with certain nationalities?

If you still feel stuck, you could try the old trick of opening the atlas at a suitable country or continent and sticking a pin in it.

Sometimes there is something in your character's description that leads you to give them a certain home town. In a play I was writing with my partner, Kimm, we had a character who wasn't interesting enough, a young woman who had fallen into prostitution in London. Kimm wanted her to come from a middle-class family and to make peace with her parents at the end, but I was against this.

It seemed we had come to an impasse, but the solution came very unexpectedly when I was at a writers' workshop one evening. The task we were given was to list some items a character would have in his or her bag or pockets and then work out what that told us about their character.

A couple of items gave us a new insight into our character and led us to give her a completely new identity, name, and place of origin, and also added a totally new dimension to the drama. The items were a brightly coloured embroidered belt and a pair of sandals (even though the play was set on a snowy Christmas Day in London).

From those two clues, our character became an educated girl from an Eastern European country who found herself working as a prostitute in London because she had been tricked into going there to find a new life by some human traffickers.

To find a town and a name for the girl we did some research on the internet into the phenomenon of human trafficking, found out where lots of girls in that position came from, then researched to find a country which was in the European Community as we wanted her to have the chance to make a new life in Britain once the play was resolved.

So if you're feeling stuck in a rut with your characters, try doing some little exercises or playing some games to discover more about them, then do some research to give them an appropriate identity. If all else fails, try conversing with them. Ask them who they are and what their life is like where they come from. You'll be surprised at what you might discover!

Going Too Far - Exaggerate in your Writing

You want your writing to be memorable, so how are you going to make it so? Are you going to stick really closely to real life or are you going to make your writing larger than life? What sort of a character do you think your readers will be intrigued by, one who is mousy, quiet, careful, or one who is over the top, melodramatic, wild?

To illustrate this point, I'd like you to think of five characters from literature that stand out in your mind. List them and jot down why you think you remember each of them. Then take a piece of your own work that isn't quite working. Think of a character that you could exaggerate in some way and make them much bigger and more exciting. Go really over the top - think of what would be reasonable then multiply it by five. Be bold and brave!

If you have someone sympathetic who reads your stories, you could let them read the before and after versions and see which one they prefer.

What Your Character's Suitcase Reveals about Him?

It's the time of year when many of us are packing our suitcases and heading off on holiday. So I thought it would be fun to think about what our characters will be putting in their suitcases.

The contents of a character's suitcase can reveal a lot about their personality, both to your readers and to you yourself. An interesting exercise you can do if you've got a character that hasn't quite come to life is to describe their suitcase or handbag and its contents.

The first thing that will tell us something about them is what sort of bag they have in the first place. Is it an expensive Louis Vuitton piece of luggage? A backpack? A poacher's bag? A battered leather briefcase? A shocking pink vanity case?

Then the actual contents will give you even more clues as to their personality, their situation, their likes and dislikes, their preoccupations. If you list them, you'll be surprised at what you discover about them.

I did an exercise like this about a character from a play I was writing, after I realised the character didn't quite work. It yielded all sorts of information about her background - as a result of that exercise, she even acquired a new nationality, a perilous situation, and an entire family!

So if you have a character that isn't quite fully-formed, try the suitcase exercise and let your character surprise you.