The skating minister: how I found a protagonist

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This is the story of a protagonist and how he found his way into my imagination.

In late 2014, I had the bare bones of a new book, the themes and basic structure. I had the main characters too, but I still knew very little about them. I was really challenging myself when I suddenly decided to make the main character a man. Would I be able to look at the world through his eyes, think his thoughts and speak for him through the dialogue? How would I get to know him well enough to write convincingly?

On a visit to the National Gallery of Scotland, in Edinburgh, I was blown away by the amazing collection but there was one portrait that I didn’t want to walk away from. The moment I saw ‘the skating minister’ I knew I’d found the man I’d been trying to picture in my imagination for weeks. Everything was right: the subject was the right age, born in the right year, and he was painted in Scotland. I thought about that painting for months and when I looked at it again on the Internet, back at my desk in western Australia, I began to get to know my fictional character better.

I was spending time randomly doing research for the book while I worked on self-publishing and marketing ‘Georgiana Molloy, the Mind That Shines’ and I was still not sure whether or not to start work on a new piece of writing that would keep me busy for at least a year.

In November 2015 Mike and I went to Sydney for a few days and I met with Alex Craig at Picador for the first time, to finalise details of the new publishing contract for ‘Georgiana Molloy’. Right after that meeting, I walked with Mike across the park to the Art Gallery of New South Wales to see an exhibition I’d read about and was really keen to see. It was called, ‘The Greats’ and all I knew was that it included some of the most famous paintings in the world. As we walked into the foyer, I went cold, on the hottest November day in Sydney for twenty years. The skating minster was everywhere around me, on enormous posters, on every display area and on the front cover of the exhibition catalogue. I’d had no idea, until that moment, that all the paintings had been loaned by the National Gallery of Scotland, and that the painting by Sir Henry Raeburn that had captured my imagination had been chosen as the main iconic image.

The Reverend Robert Walker, skating on Duddingston Loch, had followed me from Scotland to Australia and I stood in front of him once again and stared even more closely. I bought his face on a T-shirt, on a bag, on a postcard and even on a case for my glasses.

I knew then, without any doubt, I had to write the story of my fictional David Dennisoun Sinclair. The portrait gave me most of the important characteristics of the man I came to know well over the next two years. He had once studied to become a minister of the church. The black clothes he wore for the rest of his life would contrast well with another main character who dressed very differently. The painting itself gave me one of the most important scenes in the story, too. And there was much more.

While I was writing and redrafting and editing, I looked at the skating minister every day, pinned next to my computer. Writers work in so many different ways and what works for one doesn’t work for another. I know that, for me, a character that has its roots in something real – even just a place, a name, a face – is what makes me want to write. If someone is real to me, they matter.

Reverend Robert Walker skating on Duddingston Loch
Sir Henry Raeburn c1795 Attribution:Henry Raeburn [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Learning to write

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In a blog about writing and being a writer, it’s well past the time for saying something about READING and being a reader. It must be thirty years since I first heard the phrase ‘the reader within the writer’ and I used it often as a teacher of writing but it began to feel like such a simple, obvious concept that it eventually dropped off my radar, replaced by other, newer ideas.

In the last year, as I struggled with writing in an unfamiliar genre, managing the voice of an 18th century male protagonist, I found myself to be the learner once again. I examined every paragraph, every line, every word and tried to work out what works and what doesn’t. What’s good and needs to stay just as it is? What’s okay but needs different words or a different sentence shape? What’s awful, too repetitive, too weighty, too light, too obscure, too detailed?  There are writerly decisions to be made with every tap of the finger on keyboard. Deciding what to say next and how, which words to use and how to shape them into chunks of meaning, all that affects not just the content of my plot but also the style of the whole manuscript, the pace of it, the mood and colour of it, the things that are left with a reader long after they’ve finished reading.

So, I’ve been learning again in a big way, learning more about writing and trying to understand what makes really good writing so good.  What I’ve found – and I know it’s just a personal thing, this – is that if I can’t work out, at least in a simple way, why something I’ve read is really good, I don’t stand a chance of writing something that good myself. I don’t believe that the best writing happens by accident. At least, not the kind of books I enjoy as a reader. When the words demand to be re-read and read aloud, when I want to lay down in the words and breathe them in, I usually have the feeling I’m enjoying the results of an author’s hard work, their time and effort and skill and not just the quick’n’easy out-churning of their talent.

I realise now, more than ever, that it’s the reader in me who sits and tap-tap-taps every day at my desk. I admit now that I try to write what I’d like to read. Over and over again, I read what I’ve just written out loud to ‘hear how it reads’ and I find it’s the best way to spot the stumbles and repetitions and weak bits. With every word, I have to satisfy me, the reader.

When I feel really stuck, I sit down and read for a few minutes. I pick up a book that I love as a reader and remind myself what good writing looks and feels and sounds like. Last year, my go-to Good Book was Lucy Treloar’s wonderful ‘Salt Creek’, a place where I soaked up the very best of dialogue, description and action. Sometimes it was a reminder about the effect on me – as a reader – of the juxtaposition of long and short sentences, the way Lucy created a reading rhythm.  Sometimes it was a lesson in how to develop character, lightly and unobtrusively by weaving thoughts, memories and feelings into narration. And more…

There have been many other great books for me since I’ve been working on my own manuscripts and I discover new things about writing from all of them. There will always be something to learn. In the last few months, I’ve been excited by authors who do different, surprising things with historical stories. Books I’ve read lately, like Sara Schmidt’s ‘See What I Have Done’, make me want to shove myself out of the comfort zone and write in braver ways.  I’m just finishing the research for something new, something that I guess will take me to the end of 2017 at least, and I’m planning to try something that, for me, will feel really different. I know it won’t be easy and I’ll need to choose a couple of good books to sit on my desk, sustenance for the many moments of frustration and despair. One thing’s for sure, the more I read, the better I’ll write.