Giving Your Characters a Past

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.

 

Shakespearean Inspiration

When I was six or seven, my parents took me to Twelfth Night and As You Like It at a local outdoor Shakespeare festival. I was entranced. I saw in the program that the company was also doing Romeo & Juliet, and I wanted to see that too. My mom warned me it was sad, but I still wanted to go, and I loved it. Ever since, outdoor summer Shakespeare performances have been one of the delights of summer for me. I recently saw a truly fabulous Romeo & Juliet at the California Shakespeare Theater. It left me in tears, and it was the raw, real grief of the parents that I found so heartrending.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Shakespeare is a big influence on my writing. Charles and Mel quote Shakespeare at each other as a sort of private code. And just as a I pick composers for each book, I pick one or two Shakespeare plays that to me relate to that books themes and story arc. For Secrets of a Lady it was Measure for Measure and Troilus & Cressida, for Beneath a Silent Moon it was Hamlet.

I talked a bit more about the inspiration of Shakespeare in this video clip:

Do you like books with Shakespearean references? Writers, do you like to put Shakespearean or other literary references on your work? What other Shakespeare plays do you think would make good inspiration for Charles and Mélanie stories? Who else finds Shakespeare festivals one of the joys of summer?

This week’s Fraser Correspondence addition is a letter from Charles to David describing a real meeting at the Congress of Vienna in which Talleyrand neatly turned the tables on the victorious powers.

 

Thoughts on Tosca and The Scarlet Pimpernel

As you may have seen if you happen to follow me on Twitter, during a performance of Tosca at San Francisco Opera last week, I found myself thinking about how Mélanie would have played the situation differently from Tosca. Yes, I think about my books and characters all the time, even-or perhaps especially-at the theater. After Adrianne Pieczonka’s powerful “Vissi d’Arte” (in which Tosca realizes she’s going to have to agree to sleep with Scarpia to save her lover Cavaradossi) I decided that Mélanie probably wouldn’t have killed Scarpia as Tosca does. She’d have been too aware of the complications that would create. His body would be discovered, and ten to one they’d be caught before they could escape. Mel would have been quite capable of going through with the bargain and sleeping with Scarpia. But she’d also have been aware of the likelihood that Scarpia would double-cross her, so she’d have figured out some plan to outwit him. Of course, Charles would have played the situation differently from Mario Cavaradossi in the first place (he’d have told Mel what was going on for one thing). Not to mention that Charles and Mel might well have had different agendas from each other, which would have led to a whole new set of complications…

I was also struck, as I have been before, by some interesting parallels between Tosca and The Scarlet Pimpernel. The three central characters are similar in both–the beautiful, emotional actress, the idealistic hero, the cold, scheming police chief/agent. But the most striking parallels are not to the original Scarlet Pimpernel book, but to later adaptations. It’s in the film adaptations (and the musical) that one finds the triangle Marguerite/Percy/Chauvelin triangle which has similarities to the Tosca/Cavaradossi/Scarpia triangle. And then there’s the ending. Tosca ends with Cavaradossi going through what is supposed to be a mock execution, only Scarpia double-crosses Tosca, and Cavaradossi actually dies. The Howard/Oberson and Andrews/Seymour Scarlet Pimpernels end with the reverse. Marguerite believes Percy has been executed, only to learn it was a mock execution (does anyone know if the mock execution is in any other versions of TSP?).

Do you ever find yourself watching a play, opera, movie, tv show and thinking of how characters from a different story would behave in similar circumstances? Writers, do you find yourselves imagining what your own characters would do in the plot of another story? Has anyone else noticed the Tosca/Scarlet Pimpernel parallels?

Talking of Mélanie’s behavior in the midst of intrigue, this week’s Fraser Correspondence addition is another dispatch from her to Raoul from the Congress of Vienna.

 

Infidelity – the dark side of romance?

It’s at the heart of the conflict in Casablanca, Tristan & Isolde, The English Patient, Anna Karenina, Notorious, Brief Encounter, The Painted Veil, and countless classic love stories. And yet for many readers, it’s a deal-breaker, particularly when it comes to genre romance.

As a reader and a writer, I don’t dislike infidelity or adultery plots per say. Infidelity is an uncomfortable subject but uncomfortable subjects can make for good drama. It can definitely be a challenge to give a story a happy ending after someone’s been unfaithful. Of all of the stories I mentioned at the start of the post, only Notorious has a conventional happily-ever-after ending. The others have unhappy or bittersweet endings. If the marriage survives the infidelity, you need to believe that the couple can get past it, that it won’t happen again, that the betrayed partner won’t constantly blame the unfaithful partner (which is pretty mucht he conversation Steve and Miranda have with their marriage counselor in the recent Sex & the City movie). If the unfaithful lovers end up together, one can find oneself sympathizing with the betrayed spouse. (Notorious pulls it off by making the spouse a villain, albeit a complex one who genuinely loves his wife).

Of course the terms of the marriage and the expectations go into it affect the level of betrayal. In my historical romance, Rightfully His, there’s a subplot between the heroine’s sister and her husband who have a society marriage in which both have lovers and they get along quite amiably. However, in the course of the book, they realize that they love each other and the terms of their marriage change.

I write about betrayal a lot, so when I write about infidelity, I like to explore how it compares and contrasts to other types of betrayal. In Secrets of a Lady Mélanie has undeniably betrayed Charles in a number of ways, but I deliberately left it ambiguous as to whether or not she committed adultery. I actually was explicit about it in an earlier draft of the book, then decided I wasn’t sure myself so I left it open to question. I figured out the answer for myself a bit later, and at some point, when appropriate, I’ll work it into a subsequent book.

They do confront the issue of infidelity and their different expectations going into marriage, in a scene in The Mask of Night:

You didn’t intend to be faithful when you married me.”
She regarded him with that scouring honesty with which she confronted uncomfortable questions. “No, I didn’t. But then I’d never hold my own behavior up as a model of anything.” She smoothed a crease from her skirt. “Did you? Intend to be faithful?”
“Yes, as it happens. But it was hardly as though I had a very active career to abandon.”
“And you take your promises seriously.” In the warm wash of candlelight, Mélanie’s gaze had the bruised look he remembered from last night. “Fidelity hasn’t been a word in my vocabulary for a long time. It might have been once. When I was a girl playing Juliet in my father’s theatre company. Before—”
“Everything else.” Before she’d been raped by a gang of British soldiers, seen her father and sister killed, been left penniless and homeless.
“Being raped was the least of it,” she said, in the low, rough voice he’d learned to recognize from moments when she dredged up long-buried truths. “I could have got past that, I think. It was losing everyone I cared about, fighting for survival. I had to claw my way back to a sense of purpose. When I did, so much I’d used to value didn’t make sense anymore.”
“There’s more than one kind of fidelity, Mel. You’ve been remarkably faithful to a number of things.”
Her gaze fastened on his face. “Charles, you know that I—“
He looked into the scarred, beautiful eyes from which he’d never been able to hide things. He found he didn’t want a declaration based on duty or guilt. “I know you,” he said.

How do you feel about infidelity in books? Is it a deal-breaker? If not, what you think makes it work in some stories? Does it make a difference whether it’s the hero or the heroine who is unfaithful? What the terms of the marriage are? Whether it’s a story about a couple overcoming one or both partners’ infidelity or the story of a pair of unfaithful lovers? Do you think Mélanie was unfaithful to Charles after they married? Why or why not?

I just posted a new Fraser Correspondence addition, Mélanie writing to Simon about the love affairs at the Congress of Vienna (where fidelity appears to have been in short supply).

 

Thoughts on the Fraser Correspondence

This week, Peggy posted on the Mask of Night page about discovering the Charles & Mélanie books. I’m always thrilled to know new readers are discovering my books. In this case, I was particularly fascinated because Peggy wrote that she read most of the Fraser Correspondence before reading either of the books. I have so much fun writing the Fraser Correspondence– it’s a great way to explore Charles and Mélanie’s world, to look at events from the perspective of different characters, to weave in different historical events and how they influenced the characters’ lives. I love to know that readers are reading the correspondence. But this was the first I’d heard from someone who’d read the correspondence before the actual books.

I’m intrigued, as I’ve blogged about before, about how each reader shapes the story they read. Though I deliberately wrote Secrets of a Lady and Beneath a Silent Moon so they could be read in either order, I think the reading experience is somewhat different depending on which order one reads them in. Reading the Fraser Correspondence first would add yet another layer. I try to make the letters mesh well with the books, but they contain information that hasn’t yet been revealed in the published books. Most of it is character nuances, but there are some revelations hidden in the Fraser Correspondence. Chloe Dacre-Hammond’s parentage for one thing. And the fact that Lady Frances and Raoul are in communication. I was very pleased that Peggy said she went back and re-read the letters concerning Raoul and Lady Frances.

I was also very pleased that Peggy wrote that “I definitely felt that the characters of Charles and Melanie were consistent with the correspondence.” Then she raised an interesting question: “However, I was bemused that Charles, who is supposed to be so emotionally restrained, is the partner most able to express his love. This seems to be especially true in the correspondence, even after he learns to ‘truth’ about Melanie’s past. I found myself wondering about Melanie’s reticence; does she have a harder time saying I love you because she feels unworthy of being loved, in addition to guilt over her duplicity?”

I’ve been mulling this over, because Mel being more emotionally reticent in the letters than Charles isn’t something I’d consciously considered. Now that Peggy pointed it out, I can definitely see if though (I love it when readers get me to look at my characters in a different light ). I do think that, to quote Lady Frances in Secrets, “Charles is more nurturing than most men, though one wouldn’t think it to look at him.” And, particularly after the revelations in Secrets, he’s at great pains to show Mel that he loves her and isn’t holding the past against her. I think Mel has a hard time expressing her feelings early in their marriage because of the deception she’s practicing on him and because she hasn’t yet even admitted her feelings to herself. Later, I think she may be afraid that by expressing her own feeling she’s putting some sort of emotional demand on Charles, asking for something he may not be able to give and something she isn’t sure she has a right to. In Beneath, she thinks of of just how much she wants such a declaration from him (”total surrender”) and at the same time recognizes “the selfish, desperate depths of her greed” in longing for it.

Now, if you’ll indulge me, I’d love to get some more feedback on the Fraser Correspondence from those of you who read it or who’ve read some of it:

Do you find the letters change or enrich your reading of the books?

Are there any revelations in the letters that have surprised you?

Did anyone else read any of the letters before reading the books?

Are there any particular characters you’d like to see letters from/to? Events you’d like to see dealt with? Times in the characters’ lives you’d like the letters to visit? Secrets not revealed in the books so far you’d like to see addressed? (Writing letters every week, I’m always looking for inspiration ).

This week’s Fraser Correspondence addition is an (originally coded) letter Mélanie writes to Raoul from the Congress of Vienna.

 

Damaged Characters

I blogged recently on both Jaunty Quills and History Hoydens about Damaged Characters. By which, as I said, I wasn’t talking about the damage an author can inflict with one too many rounds of revising (though that would make an interesting blog topic in and of itself). I was thinking of characters who are damaged by their past experiences, whether it’s a painful childhood, battlefield trauma, the morally ambiguous life of a spy, or a love affair gone tragically wrong. Which comes down to the focus of this blog–history. Whether it’s real historical events, such as the brutal aftermath of the Siege of Badajoz, or fictional history, such as a lover’s betrayal or parental neglect, the scars of the past create damaged characters. To explore and heal that damage, a writer has to delve into the character’s history.

As a reader and writer, I’ve always been fascinated by history, both real historical events and the history of fictional characters (I love sequels and prequels, seeing characters at different points in their lives, part of what I so enjoyed about the new Star Trek movie). So perhaps it isn’t surprising that a lot of my favorite characters are defined by their pasts. Francis Crawford of Lymond begins his adventures in Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles already an outlaw and an attainted traitor, estranged from his family and guilty over his sister’s death. Damerel, the hero of one of my favorite Georgette Heyer novels, Venetia, is a social outcast thanks to the scandals in his past. He’s convinced he’ll make Venetia miserable by dragging her into social ruin if he marries her. Venetia has to go to great (and very entertaining) lengths to convince him otherwise.

Lymond’s past scars, while they involve fictional plot twists, are rooted in the real historical event of the Scottish defeat at the Battle of Solway Moss. Damerel’s damage on the other hand is more personal–a love affair with a married woman, subsequent estrangement from his family, his father’s death in the midst of it. Both Lymond and Damerel are wonderful examples of the classic tortured hero. Both have a complex backstory, which I think is one of the keys to doing tortured characters well (there’s nothing more annoying than a character who’s tortured over a deep dark secret that seems commonplace when revealed). But while traditionally it’s the hero who’s suffered the most emotional damage, I’ve always liked heroines with emotional baggage. Barbara Childe, the edgy, self-destructive heroine from Heyer’s An Infamous Army, is a wonderful example of the type. So is Dorothy Sayers’s Harriet Vane. I know some readers find Harriet too prickly to be sympathetic, but she’s one of my favorite heroines, struggling to come to terms with the past (her lover’s murder, her own trial on charges of killing him) yet refusing to let herself be defined or defeated by it. Of course Peter Wimsey has scars of his own, rooted in historical events–shell shock from World War I. In one of my favorite scenes from Busman’s Honeymoon, it’s Harriet (who begins the series “sick of myself, body and soul”) who comforts Peter. That scene shows the hard-won balance they’ve achieved in their relationship. (That scene also inspired the last scene between Charles and Mel in Beneath a Silent Moon).

It can be particularly interesting when both the hero and heroine have emotional scars. One of the reasons I found The X-Files so compelling for me is that both Mulder and Scully are damaged characters (and of course acquire considerably more emotional baggage as the show goes on ). As I’ve blogged about recently, I just read Laurie King’s latest (quite wonderful) Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes book, The Language of Bees. In this series King (who talks about Sayers as an influence and has some wonderful Sayers parallels in books) took Holmes, who has suffered plenty of damage (some shown, some hinted at) in the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories, and paired him with the much younger but equally scarred Russell. One of the delights of the series is watching these two people, who both guard themselves carefully, reveal bits of their scarred pasts to each other and to the reader.

There’s something particularly heartening about two damaged people being able to form a bond. I love the moment in The X-Files episode Requiem (end of the 7th season) where Mulder says to Scully “I don’t want to risk…losing you.” From the way he delivers it and Scully’s reaction, you can tell exactly how much those words mean. The declaration scene in A Monstrous Regiment of Women is one of the most wonderful I have ever read, right among there among my favorites with the Harriet and Peter scene at the end of Gaudy Night). And of course, the bond doesn’t heal all the damage, which makes for interesting developments over a series. The previous book in the series, Locked Rooms, dealt with Russell coming to terms with the events surrounding her family’s death. In The Language of Bees, Holmes comes face to face with the “lovely, lost son” King referred to in a previous book and with a painful past that goes back to Irene Adler. King creates a Holmes who moves believably into the 20th century, yet he is still coming to terms with his past.

It’s perhaps no wonder that as a writer I can be quite merciless in creating histories for my characters that leave them weighed down with emotional baggage. When I first began sketching out notes on Charles & Mélanie, I knew that the secrets of Mélanie’s past would create plenty of angst for both of them. But it never occurred to me to stop there. Before I even had the plot of Secrets of a Lady/Daughter of the Game worked out, I had given Charles a tragic love past affair with Kitty Ashford, an emotionally neglectful childhood, a strained relationship with his brother Edgar, and questions about his legitimacy. While Mélanie had suffered the horrors of the Peninsular War (specifically the carnage inflicted by the British Army during Sir John Moore’s retreat) and lost both her parents and her younger sister Rosie. Quite a bit of that is mentioned or at least alluded to in the first scene between them in Secrets/Daughter. I wanted to show the damage these two people had suffered and the stable marriage they’d managed to build in spite it. To me, that made it all the worse when the very foundations of that marriage are threatened. All of that past damage also provides rich fodder for subsequent books in the series. Charles’s relationship with his family, particularly his father, was the starting place for Beneath a Silent Moon. And there’s lots more to deal with in Mélanie’s past. A llot happened in those years before she met Charles, not to mention the early years of their marriage…

Do you like stories about damaged characters? Do you prefer it to be the hero or the heroine or both to have the emotional scars? Any favorite examples to suggest? Writers, when you create characters do you think about how their past history has defined them? Do you try to work real historical events into their past history?

Speaking of real historical events, this week’s Fraser Correspondence addition continues Charles’s & Mel’s updates from the Congress of Vienna with a letter Mélanie writes to David’s sister, Isobel Lydgate.

 

Marriage in Trouble Plots

I recently returned to reading Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, which I had started last summer and then put aside (I sometimes hit moments when I’m writing when I just can’t read anything). I was drawn back immediately by the richness of the writing and the sharp emotional details. I was also struck by comparing and contrasting the book with the recent film, which I also liked. The major events are the same, but the emotional arc is quite different (though Kitty Fane does grow and change in both). It’s rather as though someone were to film Secrets of a Lady with the same basic plot but have the story end with Charles and Mel realizing they’d never really known or loved each other but staying together for practicality.

The other the thing The Painted Veil got me to thinking about is one of my favorite literary tropes–marriage in trouble plots. They’ve always fascinated me, long before I started writing about Charles and Mélanie. That’s why, when I cite influences and inspirations for the Charles & Mélanie series, in addition to the more obvious ones like The Scarlet Pimpernel, Scaramouche, Dorothy Dunnett, and Dorothy Sayers, I mention Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, and Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson books.

Reading The Painted Veil, I was pondering the fascination of this plotline. The intimacy of marriage ups the stakes in the conflict between two people. Percy’s devastation at Marguerite’s seeming lack of trustworthiness is all the great because she has just become his wife. Betrayal, I think, is one of the worst things that can happen to a person. How much worse is it when that betrayal comes from a spouse? Years of living together also gives characters a knowledge of each other that recent lovers wouldn’t have. In The Real Thing, the hero has a wonderful speech about knowing one’s spouse, in a way that goes far beyond carnal. That knowledge can be used for good or will. George and Martha know just how to push each other’s buttons. So, for that matter, do Maggie and Brick.

Particularly in an historical setting, marriage makes it difficult for two people to walk away from each other, no matter how poisoned their relationship has grown. There’s a fascinating tension in two people pretending to be a couple to the outside world, while being estranged when they’re alone. Think of Percy and Marguerite keeping up appearances to the beau monde yet unable to communicate in private, Maggie and Brick maintaining the charade of their marriage (or at least Maggie trying to) in front of his family. Kitty and Walter Fane sharing a bungalow in a cholera-infested town, seen by most as a devoted couple who’ve risked infection so as not to be separated.

Unlike most of the other couples mentioned in this post, Kitty and Walter actually know each other very little (hence much of the tragedy). But even they share a history. With any married couple, there’s a past to explore–how they came to be married and why, what they both expected, how that expectation compares to the current reality. And history is something I love to explore as a writer, whether it’s historical events or the personal history shared by two people.

Do you like marriage in trouble stories? Why or why not? Any favorite examples to suggest? What do you think makes them work?

The Fraser Correspondence takes a new turn this week. To go along with some research I’m doing for a possible project, I’ve gone back to 1814, when Charles and Mel have just arrived at the glittering Congress of Vienna. This week’s letter is from Charles to David.

 

Star Trek, Lost, and characters that fascinate

My friend Penny Williamson and I spent Friday afternoon at a matinée of the new Star Trek movie. We both loved it. It manages to simultaneously be fresh and innovative and yet true to the original. The actors do a fabulous job of capturing the characters we know so well, in mannerism and vocal patterns (and the way the writers wrote their dialogue). You can really believe these characters will grow into the characters from the original tv series. And yet the new actors never seem to be mimicking, they make the characters their own. Since I love to move back and forth in time in my own writing and examine my characters at different points in their history, I particularly enjoyed the prequel aspect.

As I’ve mentioned in past blogs, Penny and I both love to talk about favorite series. When we first became friends, we spent endless lunches analyzing and speculating over Dorothy Dunnett’s books (this was in the years when the House of Niccolò series was still being written and published). More recently, we could be found picking apart Alias over lattes in our favorite café. Waiting for the movie to start Friday, we were discussing the season finale of Lost. Penny and I’ve been discussing Lost a lot lately. In fact, we talked about it for the entire five hour plus drive from the San Francisco Bay Area to Ashland, Oregon, on our recent trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Lost fascinates and baffles both of us. Usually we can come up with a theory about where we think a story arc is headed (wrong perhaps to varying degrees but at least a theory that works with the information at hand). With Lost, every time we think we have something figured out, the next episode pulls the rug out from under us.

I blogged a while back about the delights of speculating over a series. Part of it of course is trying to unravel the plot. When I was a teenager, my mom and I had numerous discussions about Star Wars in the years between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. I still remember the moment when, thinking about Arthurian mythology, I said “oh, I know, Luke and Leia are brother and sister.” Of course, I was thrilled to be proved right when we saw Return of the Jedi (the day it opened). But mostly, I was relieved to see the characters I cared about get the happy ending I so wanted them to have. Thinking about Star Trek and Lost, I realized how much of the allure of an ongoing series is the characters. Characters you care about and root for. Characters who seem to have a rich inner life off the screen/page. Characters you want to learn more about. Characters whose fates seem very real and a matter of great concern (I confess to having tears in my eyes at one point in the new Star Trek movie, and the recent Lost season finale definitely left me choked up).

I returned to the world of another favorite series recently when I read Laurie King’s The Language of Bees. It was a delight to step back into Russell & Holmes’s world. When I finished the book, I didn’t want to leave that world (partly because of the questions left to be answered in the next installment, but mostly because I wanted to spend more time with these characters). I’ve been rereading earlier books in the series since, unable to move on to something new.

What makes you bond with the characters in a particular series? Have you seen the new Star Trek movie? Do you watch Lost? If so, do you have the faintest idea of where the show is headed? .

Returning to my own series, this week’s Fraser Correspondence addition is Cecily Summers’s reply to Mélanie’s letter from last week about their children and the Edinburgh premiere of Simon’s play.

 

Writing with Joan Grant

As you may know, I began my writing career collaborating with my mother, Joan Grant. We wrote eight books and four novellas together, seven Regencies romances (and four novellas) as Anthea Malcolm, and one historical romance, Dark Angel, as Anna Grant (which is the first of of a quartet that continues with the three historical romances I

As I mention in the long version of my bio, my mother, a social psychologist (as was my father), loved books and read out loud to me a great deal. She introduced me to Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Orczy and the Scarlet Pimpernel world, Sabatini, Mary Stewart, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. I in turn introduced her to Dorothy Dunnett (we used to discuss the Lymond Chronicles and the House of Niccolò endlessly) and Elizabeth George. I think my mom would have loved Laurie King’s Russell & Holmes books. I think the fact that we loved the same books and shared the same literary influences made it easier for us to plot and write together.

In honor of Mother’s Day (a holiday my mom deplored as too commercial ), I thought I’d post a video clip where I talk my mom’s influence on me as writer. I still feel her influence when I write. In fact, Charles and Mélanie were inspired by two secondary characters from an unpublished book my mom and I wrote together.

Has anyone read the Anthea Malcolm/Anna Grant books? Do you see an evolution from them to the books I write now? What similarities and differences do you note? Are there other writers you read who are writing partnerships? Writers, have you ever written with a partner? What are the rewards and challenges you’ve found?

This week’s Fraser Correspondence addition is a letter from Mélanie to Cecily Summer, Simon Tanner’s actress friend who appears in Beneath a Silent Moon. Cecily Summers is the only character so far to have appeared in both the Anthea Malcolm books and the Charles & Mélanie books. Cecily appears in my mom’s and my Anthea Malcolm Regency, An Improper Proposal. Readers of both sets of books may have noticed that Simon’s theatre, the Tavistock, is also Rachel Ford’s theatre in An Improper Proposal. It hasn’t been dealt with in the books thus far, but Simon is partners with Rachel and Guy Melchett and Rachel’s uncle by marriage.

In her letter to Cecily, Mélanie writes about the challenges of juggling motherhood and her other work and responsibilities. What do you think of Mélanie as a mother? Where do you think motherhood fits in her complicated life as a priority? How well do you think she manages to juggle the many, complicated (and often contradictory) aspects of her life?

12 May update: I’m guest blogging today on Jaunty Quills about Damaged Characters. Do stop by and comment.

 

In Appreciation of Russell & Holmes

I discovered Laurie King’s The Moor browsing in a bookstore in 1999. It’s the fourth book in Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes series, but I’ve never minded reading series out of order. I was immediately entranced by the world of the books, Russell’s distinctive voice (the books are first person), and Russell and Holmes’s fascinating relationship. I quickly bought and devoured the three previous books in the series. When the fifth book in the series O Jerusalem was released, I was in the bookstore on the day it went on sale. I did the same last week for the eighth Russell & Holmes book, The Language of Bees.

As I mentioned in a comment on History Hoydens this week, these are books I often return to as comfort reads. Russell and Holmes and the other continuing characters feel like old friends. Holmes and Russell and their relationship are familiar and yet tantalizingly I always want to learn more about them. Like the previous book in the series, Locked Rooms (in which Russell confronted her past), The Language of Bees reveals a great deal and yet leaves one with more questions. In m favorite mystery series, though I look forward to each individual adventure, I also read to learn more about the characters themselves.

At the time I discovered King’s books, I had enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes stories on television, but I hadn’t, I confess, actually read them. I think the literary parallel that caught me more in the books was to Dorothy Sayers Peter and Harriet novels. Laurie King talks about Sayers as an influence, and there are deliberate references/resonances to the Sayers’ books that it’s fun to analyze.

And, of course, I’ve always loved mysteries with detective couples. At the time I discovered the Russell & Holmes books, I was writing the first draft of Daughter of the Game/Secrets of a Lady (which at that time was called The End of Reckoning). Mélanie and Charles are very different characters from Russell and Holmes, but King ’s skillful depiction of the delicate balance of two independent people being true to themselves and also being a couple, and of the way a mystery investigation can at once challenge their relationship and bring them together definitely influenced me, just as Sayers is a big influence on me.

Do you the Russell & Holmes books? Did you start the beginning of the series or with one of the later books? Are reading The Language of Bees? What authors do you rush out to the book store to buy on publication day?

This week’s Fraser Correspondence addition is a letter from Mélanie to Simon in Edinburgh. Also, I am now on Twitter. (http://twitter.com/tracygrant).