The Mirror Trick

There’s an assumption, I think, that readers need to know what a character looks like in order to sympathise or connect with them.

They don’t.

We used to, back when we were kids. In fairy tales for example, where appearance was a marker for morality; we needed to know if the princess was a looker or the step-sister had a wart on her nose – after all, we were just little and it was our way of understanding who to root for and who to hate.

But now we’re grown ups, we recognise there isn’t a link. Beauty and the Beast taught us that. Who cares, we say, as long as they’re flawed and interesting.

Irritatingly though, plenty of writers still assume we’re desperate for an accurate picture. And this assumption leads to all manner of comic shenanigans as writers try and crowbar in descriptions of characters’ aspects, faces, clothes and demeanors where they just aren’t necessary.

Reflections of all types are usually the conveniently-engineered solution here. Shop windows work. Car windscreens. But there’s no need to push the creative boat out, people. Cut to the chase! The lousiest of all solutions is the character who simply looks in a mirror during an introspective moment and reports to us the reflection that they see, along the lines of “Amy studied herself in the mirror. A serious, heart-shaped visage met her gaze.”

It kills me. Why? Well, there’s two problems here. The first is that old show/tell chestnut. My first adjective above is qualitative, so I’m telling you what Amy is like rather than bothering showing you. And the mirror-trick description virtually always does this, whoever uses it.

Secondly, it’s worse when our seemingly impartial narrator clearly fancies the protagonist, or ascribes characteristics they think we will admire: “Amy studied herself in the mirror. Her dark eyes blazed, framed by a mane of wild red hair.” The problem with Amy’s blazing eyes – apart from my terrible writing – is that all I’ve done is given the impression of a shallow and self-centred catalogue model of a character whose eyes light up at the sight of... herself.  

Everyone in the world looks in a mirror self-consciously – but the mirror-trick doesn’t allow characters to do that. The result, for me, is to make each character who studies themselves in this way just that little less likeable. Stop staring at the damn mirror, I think, and do something.

There’s a number of guilty parties when it comes to the mirror-trick, but the winner has to be Dan Brown. In the opening chapters of The Da Vinci Code, Robert Langdon sits down in his hotel room and – you guessed it folks – studies himself in a mirror. The writer offers us this in his summary of the reflection. Langdon looks "like Harrison Ford in Harris tweed."

Brown must have been gutted when the director of the movie, clearly impressed by the quality of the characterisation in the novel, cast Tom Hanks in the lead role.

The Novels I Wrote ...in my Twenties

There were two. Both petered out at around 40,000 words. Let’s put aside ‘Bearded Killers’ for the moment and focus instead on the other, which was called ‘An Easy Read’, and its title – Wry! Ironic! Look at me, everyone, I’m arching an eyebrow! – pretty much said it all.

Being twenty-two I had nothing of consequence to write about. I mistakenly thought, and many others have made the same mistake I’m sure, that drinking and goofing around with friends had enough consequence to constitute a plot. After all my favourite movie of the time was ‘Swingers’.

So; my protagonist, Kerby Swales, was a wannabe writer. (‘Write what you know’ was the kind of advice you took literally in your twenties, this being a decade in which useful advice was generally pretty hard to come by.) His friends, Lewis Beechey and Gurnam Haire, were wastrels. One of them was a poet. I forget which.

One night, during a boozy party – and there were plenty in this particular tale – Swales comes across a cache of unfinished work by his poet friend composed during a drug-fuelled purple patch now long-forgotten. ‘Hmm’, Swales wonders. ‘If I pass these poems off as my own will the local hottie, Bonny Day, fancy me?’

Being the work of someone who hadn’t yet read enough let alone written enough, ‘An Easy Read’ suffers terribly from that disease of lurching from style-to-style depending upon what I was into at the time. It has a breezy, foul-mouthed Martin Amis voice, borrowed from ‘Money’ and ‘The Rachel Papers’ then really badly mangled. It goes faux-Dickensian in parts as I hopelessly try a bit of Victorian character study. And worst of all it has a post-modern prologue stolen directly from Dave Eggers (‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’) in which I point out the various ways in which the novel can be read. The prologue’s called ‘Easy Reader.’ Do you see what I did there, people?! Do you see??

I also made the clear-thinking and farsighted decision to fill the novel with poems and include sections where our hero redrafted poems in preparation for various showdowns with the female lead during which he would hope to woo her with the power of his (borrowed) words. That meant writing a bunch of deliberately bad poems – but hey, I was twenty-two; I had plenty of time on my hands, and the outcome would surely be genius, yes?

I worked slowly. But I did come up with ‘The Passionate Fever of Saint Sophie Celeste’, a long and dreadful Keatsian narrative poem; ‘If my Arse’, a scathing critique of Kipling; and ’T Stephen Shallot’, which was about small onions and the solar system. (Look at the title – it’s an anagram of ‘Holst: The Planets’. Do you see what I did there?! Etc etc.)

Looking back, I was a very slow learner.

I was slow to let go of the notion that ‘An Easy Read’ was going to set the world alight. The principle of continual and gradual improvement was anathema to me; I wanted it finished and brilliant and I wanted it now. I thought I was the exception to the rule that said you had to practice, practice practice. I wasn’t the exception to the rule. I wasn’t even disciplined enough to follow the damn rule.

As it turns out, I spent three years on it, dipping in and out between all the other stuff you do in your twenties before you realise writing is really hard.

I'm sure I'm not unusual in admitting that most of the three years was consumed in

a) devising the soundtrack for the inevitable movie version of the book,

b) working out a scene in which I could appear alongside my brothers in the movie version of the book, and

c) drafting and redrafting the speech I would give when my screenplay of the movie version of the book won an Oscar.

Three years, 40,000 dreadful words. And I'm not even going to go near 'Bearded Killers', a contestant for the 'worst idea for a book of all time' award. 

If you’re twenty-something and you’re reading this – take notes, my friend – take notes.

Every City is Political

J’s got this saying: “Every purchase is political.” It’s particularly effective at stopping me in my tracks when intent upon buying – I dunno, a new suit for example, or anything made of plastic. Or hiring a cleaner, investing in private health care or expanding my portfolio of stocks and shares. OK I’m kidding. But as a mantra it’s as good as any and it helps keep things firmly in perspective in a world obsessed with consumption.

Now - over the last week I’ve been dipping in and out of 'City of Dreams and Nightmare' by Ian Whates. In it, a fantasy city called ‘The City of a Hundred Rows’ is brilliantly rendered. As the blurb puts it, the city is “a vast, multi-tiered metropolis. The poor live in the City Below and demons are said to dwell in the Upper Heights.”

Now that’s a bit of a bummer for an unpublished writer like me.

Because my WIP is set in a fantasy city called Highlions. And it’s a vast, multi-tiered metropolis, funnily enough. The poor scrape a living in the Lower Circle, the rich breathe the sweeter, cleaner air of the Upper Circle.

Why, I ask myself, are these two imaginary cities so similar? Because like every purchase, every city is political. When we create a fictional society within which our characters operate, we build a political statement whether we intend to or not. As two characters converse for the first time the reader makes a million subtle judgements about relative status and power. Take those characters into the streets and describe the houses, the drainage system, the traffic, the smell, and there’s your political statement as clear as if it were your very own bullet-pointed, glossy manifesto.

My three-tiered city is nothing more than a feebly-veiled attack on a class system which punishes the poor; and my boys Sleepwell and Fly – victims of this inequitable regime, naturally – will fight their way upwards to ‘stick it to the man’. It’s lazily done on my behalf, I think – and stands no chance of being a fresh and interesting world for a pair of jaded eyes trawling a slush-pile.

It’s time to tear it up and design it again.

Before I start, though, I’ll need a new drawing board. And some really smart new pens – a nice desklamp, a bottle of good wine... Hmm. Political purchases, all of them.