Hope everyone from the states celebrating the 4th is having a wonderful holiday weekend! San Francisco was delightfully free of low-hanging fog last night, so we saw spectacular fireworks over the bay at the party I was at instead of the colored fog we frequently get (though even the colored fog has its charms, as it’s so very San Francisco).
At the start of the holiday weekend, I guest blogged on Romantic Inks about giving your characters a past–specifically, past romantic and/or sexual experiences. It was an interesting blog to write, so I thought I’d repost it here, especially since I’m curious to hear what the other writers who read this blog have to say.
Creating a rich backstory for our characters is one of the first things we do as writers in working on a book. In the title of this post, I’m referring to a very particular sort of past, the sort referenced in the“a woman with a past” (funny we don’t talk about “a man with a past”—the old double standard at work). Part of developing characters is thinking through their sexual and romantic history. This is perhaps particularly important in a love story. The characters’ previous experiences will inform their attitudes toward love and sex and relationships. They will influence how the characters interact with each other, even if they are consciously trying to do things differently this time. In the case of characters with a checkered past, their pasts will also affect their position in society (much more so for the women than the men thanks again to double standards) and perhaps threaten their prospect of a happy ending (think of the Camille/La Traviata).
There are a host of questions to consider, from the simplest and most obvious “have they ever had sex?” “have they ever been in love?” to the more complex “do they think sex and love have anything to do with each other? “do they believe romantic relationships can last?” And of course “what experiences underlie these beliefs?” Often your plot will dictate elements of your characters’ pasts. When I began developing Charles and Mélanie, I knew from the initial premise that Mélanie would be a sexually experienced heroine. It’s all tied up in the secrets that were the starting place for the first book.
I thought for a bit of giving Charles a rakish past of his own. But as I thought through the story more, I decided I wanted him to be more of a contrast to Mélanie. Mélanie has a quite pragmatic attitude toward sex. Charles takes sex a lot more seriously. He’s much more inclined to romanticize it and at the same time much less comfortable with desire. As Mélanie says in Beneath a Silent Moon, “Lovemaking doesn’t always have to mean more than an exchange of pleasure. Surely there’s no harm if the pleasure is mutual.”
To which Charles replies, “That reduces us to rutting animals.
And Mélanie says, “Perhaps animals have the right idea. They don’t try to think about everything so much.”
Charles is inclined to think about everything, which is one of the things I love about him. He can’t separate sex from its emotional resonances, which is why he’s constitutionally incapable of being a libertine. As he thinks in Secrets of a Lady, “Intimacy was difficult enough for him. He could never bring himself to pay for the substitute.”
Working out why your characters have the attitudes they do toward sex and love often means looking back even before their first love affairs. To explain how Charles developed his attitudes, I gave him parents who were the sort of late 18th century aristocrats depicted in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Charles’s reaction to the environment he grew up in was to be quite the opposite.
Another decision I made early on was not to make Mélanie an experienced woman who’s romantically untouched until she meets her true love. She was in love with Raoul up to when she met Charles and overlapping with her falling in love (against her better judgment) with her husband. I knew that very early in my planning of the book, before I had all the elements of the Charles/Melanie/Raoul triangle worked out. I hadn’t thought of it until I started writing on this topic, but I wonder now if I was subconsciously reacted against the archetype of the experienced heroine whose heart remains untouched until she meets the hero. Mélanie’s past with Raoul in turn drove some of the plot twists as I worked out the rest of the book (not to mention on going plot twists and issues in the series).
It’s hard for me, looking back now, to think I even considered making Charles a rake. His and Mélanie’s different pasts and different attitudes toward love and sex continue to create interesting tensions and complications between them as the series continues. Their pasts are so much a part of who they both are now that I can’t imagine them any other way.
Do you like to know about the pasts of characters you read about? Writers, at what point in working developing a story do you think about your characters’ sexual and romantic pasts? Do you find your characters’ pasts inform their attitudes toward love and sex or do you consciously give them a past history that would lead to the attitudes you need for your story?
I’ve just posted a new addition to the Fraser Correspondence, a letter from Mélanie to Lady Frances in which she talks about Talleyrand and his glamorous niece Dorothée.
July 6, 2009 at 5:05 am
No, I don’t think Charles as a rake would be in character for the man you describe.
And honestly, I for one am tired of rakes. They’re boring.
July 6, 2009 at 5:17 am
Charles as a rake would be totally out of character with the man he is now. I thought of it very early in the process, before his character had really taken shape in my head. I’m not quite sure why my mind went in that direction, except perhaps for the number of rakish heroes one reads about. I’m a bit tired of them too, though some of my favorite heroes–Damerel for instance–are rakes. On the other hand, I find Heyer’s nonrakish heroes, like Charles Audley and Charles Rivenhall, very refreshing. I think my Charles owes a bit to both of them.
July 8, 2009 at 4:30 am
Honestly, most rakes come off as the sign of a lazy author. “I know! I’ll make the hero a rake because of his Evil Mommy/Ex-wife! How original!”
NOT. Because 9 out of 10 times, the guy’s a promiscuous rake. Period. He has NO personality other than his inability to keep his pants zipped and his hatred of women.
The only rake I really felt for was Reggie from Putney’s “The Rake”. I suppose it’s because he was never presented as the ideal. He hated himself, not the women he slept with.
July 8, 2009 at 5:02 am
I liked Reggie a lot too, JMM. I agree, I think the fact that he knew his rakishness was not ideal was part of what made him interesting. Damerel also is flawed and knows it. (In fact, that’s a big part of the conflict). I confess to also being quite fond of the Duke of Avon (despite having issues with the presentation of social class in “These Old Shades”). Avon perhaps has his own share of self-loathing. Though he’s too much of a realist to put it in those terms (unlike Reggie and Damerel who are both, I think, disappointed romantics).
Gideon Carne, the hero of my mom’s and my Anthea Malcolm Regency “A Touch of Scandal” was supposed to start out the book like Valmont in “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Only he became a lot more human and sympathetic even at the start of the story. His rakishness was definitely driven by self-loathing (he was quite self-destructive.
I’m actually very fond of Quen, who is certainly a rake. I had a lot of fun writing him, and his romance with Aspasia. He’s young and angry and lashing out at his father (while at the same time trying to live up to his father’s image). But he has enough self-knowledge to see his behavior for what it is. And I certainly don’t think he hates the women he sleeps with (though he does, at the start of the book, hate himself).
July 10, 2009 at 2:26 am
I generally fill in the characters’ backgrounds as I watch them interact with each other, which often means re-writing. Considering how many times I’ve rewritten Twenty Years After, it’s not surprising that some of my characters’ sexual backgrounds have changed as well.
One thing that’s remained the same is that Jack had his heart quite severely bruised by an older widow (older meaning mid-twenties to Jack’s seven- or eighteen). Whether or not she seduced him is something that’s come in and out. It’s currently in.
I’ve also always know that there will be a sub-plot were a girl is a victim of what we today would call acquaintance- or date-rape. The man gets off scot-free, but she has to deal with all the stigma. This was originally Annabel Ffoulkes’s plot, but in the current version is Daisy Blakeney’s. In fact, the rape happens offstage and we (I hope) only see clues to what happened until the third book in the trilogy.
And then there’s Gerry…
But then, experience shows that I will make many more changes before the end, for all of my characters.
July 10, 2009 at 2:42 am
Oh, I change things too
. I was thinking today about how I can write up character profiles for my characters but usually not until after I’ve written at least a few scenes with them. And I’ve been known to change things even after books in the series are published, as long as I haven’t locked myself in (I’ve also learned to try not to lock myself in). As I mentioned in my Infidelity post recently, I changed my mind about whether or not Mélanie had been unfaithful to Charles. I started out making it explicit that she had been, decide to make it ambiguous, and only decided what the “truth” was after the book had been published (I’ll work it into a subsequent book).
How horrible for Daisy. But also how that turn of events would open up plot possibilities. Writing compelling fiction often means being so very hard on one’s characters.
July 12, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Historical romance seems to be overpopulated by rakes, so I definitely appreciate heroes like Charles who are a bit more thoughtful and discriminating about their sexual partners. Maybe it’s also the result of growing up in an era where sexually transmitted diseases like herpes and AIDS were getting increased media coverage. After that, promiscuity doesn’t seem that desirable a trait in either a real-life partner or a fictional character, especially when you consider that there was no cure for syphilis during the Regency or other popular historical settings.
I think the most appealing rake-heroes are those who have abandoned or are about to abandon that lifestyle, whether for reasons of health or from the realization that they want something more substantial. I can sympathize with characters who are trying to change for the better, the way I tend not to sympathize with those who are just wallowing and only give up tomcatting around because they have to.
And yet, I don’t object to heroes or heroines with pasts. Having romantic couples all be as pure as the driven snow would make for dull reading. But I do want the characters’ sexual histories to ring true–to their natures as presented, to their individual circumstances, and to their particular time periods. Widows, courtesans, actresses, adventuresses–it makes sense that such women would be more sexually experienced than sheltered young misses of the Regency/Victorian period.
Consequently, I grit my teeth over those same sheltered misses indulging in the kind of behavior more suited to widows, courtesans, etc. There was an Edwardian series I read a year or two ago, in which the unmarried heroines–daughters of a lord– all lost their virginity just because they wanted to know what sex was like. I didn’t object to their not being virgins, but I thought the reasoning behind it was singularly foolish. More unbelievably, there were no emotional, social, or physical repercussions to their actions, even though the heroines apparently chose men whom they considered friends to deflower them. None of these men, by the way, ended up with any of the heroines or even appeared onstage. No . . . just No. Like it or not, having premarital sex in that day and age was a big deal, and any woman with a brain in her head would have to think long and hard about whether the reward was worth the risk–especially if there was no possibility of a future with the man in question.
With my own characters, I’ve tried to find a position on middle ground. In my finished MS, the hero and heroine both had prior relationships that failed, which gives them both some romantic experience and emotional baggage. And the heroine did, at one point, contemplate sleeping with her ex–at least until the flaws in their relationship convinced her that she’d be making a huge mistake if she did. The hero’s situation is a bit trickier to figure out; culturally, it would have been semi-acceptable for him to have relations with his former fiancee, so he might have. But like the heroine, he discovered that the relationship had serious problems on other fronts that made it ultimately untenable. So, when the hero and heroine meet, they’re both a little wary about getting romantically involved. They need to develop trust and find out whether they’re compatible as friends and partners before they can act on their attraction.
July 12, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Excellent points, Stephanie. I agree that rakes are more interesting when they’re trying to change. Reggie, who JMM brought up, is trying to chance in “The Rake” (formerly “The Rake and Reformer”) and Damerel tries to change in the middle of “Venetia” when he decides he wants to marry Venetia. Then he decides it won’t work. But even then you can see he’s begun to change his life. Barbara Childe in Heyer’s “An Infamous Army” who is in some ways a female rake (though it isn’t clear how far her love affairs have gone) tries to change early on when she becomes betrothed to Charles Audley, then slides back into her old patterns of behavior, which gives an interesting shape to the love story.
And I totally agree that in historical settings past sexual and romantic behavior has to make sense, both in terms of who the characters are and in terms of the social repercussions they suffer (or know they’d suffer if the truth got out). Your just finished MS sounds intriguing!