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Are women hardwired to love thrillers?

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Paul Whybrow

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Jun 20, 2015
Cornwall, UK
After devoting most of 2014 to writing my first novel The Perfect Murderer, and having a few nightmares as a result of the gruesome research, I've planning to write something lighter and funnier next - a modern comedy of sexual manners, perhaps.

I was wondering how much I should include my own dating experiences over the last fifteen years, which is about as long as I've been using online dating agencies. I'm no heart-breaking Lothario, and have had some happy relationships (and several troubled liaisons), making several close and long-term friends along the way. I've found it moving to see lonely hearts trying to begin again in their forties, fifties and sixties following unexpected bereavement or divorce.

As I mentioned in the thread Literature Is About Sex, I fretted a bit about a kinky sex activity that I'd put into my psychological thriller as a bit of light relief (no pun intended), thinking that the reader would associate me with this strange deviancy. I'm not the only writer who has been troubled by such concerns, as this article shows, where a young, Indian female author found people casting aspersions about her virginity - because that's what her heroine was trying to lose:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/wo...nity-Im-sick-of-people-asking-about-mine.html

Have any Colonists encountered any tricky situations, as a result of what they wrote?

Personally, I'm thick-skinned when it comes to what readers might think about anything I've written that could apply to me. To adapt something that Eleanor Roosevelt said about being made to feel inferior, I cleave to the notion that ' No one can make you feel embarrassed without your permission.'

On the other hand I'm very circumspect in revealing any personal stories that people have told me about their lives. That would be manipulative and cruel. I did write a short story that featured my friend and beta reader Jacqui, who has travelled the world on her motorcycle, sending her to Mars in the 22nd century on her bike. This was done with her permission, and she loved it.

Some writers have used their novels to wreak revenge on people, but the closest I've come is stealing a few unusual names and characteristics from folk I knew decades ago.

How about you ? The pen is mightier than the sword, after all...
 
Characteristics of most of the heroes and anti-heroes in my books are based on a few true to life experiences. The rest I made up. Small parts of some of the sex scenes are also based on real life experiences. I've also used reader names (first names only) as heroines' names, but the readers knew I was doing it. I've never run into tricky situations from all this, but I constantly have readers ask me if I've actually done the things I write into sex scenes. LOL! That makes me laugh because most (about 90%) of that stuff is pure imagination. :)
 
No, though I wonder if there isn't potential, not for people to wonder about me, but for people to wonder is A or B is them. The finished novel involves a fictionalised police force in a fictional address, but it's based on the fact of a real police station in that location.
 
My two main characters definitely have pieces of me in them. Carter represents vaguely who I am (detail-oriented, determined), and Raine represents who I'd like to be (bad-ass, seemingly unafraid). Of course, both characters also have the others as well (Raine has aspects of who I am and Carter has some of who I want to be). But I do pour myself into my characters, because it makes it much easier for me to connect with them and live their experiences with them.
 
In my ms, most of the female characters are some aspect of myself; someone i was, am or always wanted to be. My mc at the beginning is me when i left home, happy to be free and independent but no idea what to do about it :)
 
My MC is probably how I'd like to be, apart from, well never mind!
 
I think there's a tendency for close family to try and equate this character with that person (especially yourself), and correlate entire events in the book with real life occurrences, inadvertently implying that you have no sense of imagination or inventiveness!
More distant readers probably don't care (other than perhaps to want to know that, if you're writing about Equatorial Africa that you have actually been south of Margate).
 
I think there's a tendency for close family to try and equate this character with that person (especially yourself), and correlate entire events in the book with real life occurrences, inadvertently implying that you have no sense of imagination or inventiveness!
More distant readers probably don't care (other than perhaps to want to know that, if you're writing about Equatorial Africa that you have actually been south of Margate).

The need to be truthful about one's travelling experiences when writing fiction is increasingly clouded. This is because of the internet, whereby one can explore remote regions with Google Earth and watch videos on YouTube of people walking foreign city streets and kayaking rivers in the Himalayas.

Such technology is a lot easier and more accurate than the old author's standby of going to the bookshelf to consult a travel guide for a country. Mind you, a writer's imagination holds much power. Lawrence Block wrote a novel in which his hero travelled widely in Europe. Block had visited several of the countries, so knew what details to include (he thought), and when writing about a couple of places he hadn't been, he wrote a rather generalised description of them based on stuff he'd read and seen on television over the years. His agent liked the story, but thought that some of the descriptions of foreign streets and local customs didn't ring true. They weren't for the locations Block had imagined, but for those he'd spent time as a holiday-maker.

He decided that his viewpoint as a tourist had influenced his writing, weakening it by making it too flowery, while at the same time having to make up stuff about unfamiliar cities increased the strength of his prose. This happened more by leaving stuff out, allowing the reader to fill in the gaps from their own muddled idea of a place.

It's often advised to write what you know about, but there's something to be said for writing about what your readers think they know about. Hints can have more power than exposition.
 
Some of the greatest, most haunting books I've read are presented as autobiographies and travelogues, and mix fable and fantasy with fact. It's not lying. It's poetic truth sitting cheek by jowl with diary truth, a magical fusion making for a story greater than the sum of its parts. A lot of the time, any one of us might appear to a casual onlooker to be doing nothing in particular, and maybe we're not, but it's likely we're actually deeply absorbed and engaged on inner adventures, problem-solving...
 
I love the challenge of writing about places I haven't seen — trying to gather enough information to portray it believably to a native of the area. For places where even pictures of the surroundings barely exist, like some areas of the DR Congo, that is a hell of a challenge.

It varies by book — one story might have next to nothing from life, in another I might identify in broad strokes with a character, and in yet another story a character might essentially be me, for all intents and purposes, and I'll use direct quotes from life (with permission).
 
The vast majority of my characters are off the cuff but there are some who are either a specific part of my personality or a friend's personality. Simmons is based on my old history teacher in highschool, other than his stature he's a pretty accurate description of the guy, even down to catchphrases he used to use in class. Man he was awesome. I wonder if he is still teaching, I'll have to ask when I pop in next week.

Places, at the moment it's 1/2 and 1/2 between what I know and historic landscape/altered landscape. In the 2nd series I go further afield to the US and Japan and such so that will be a challenge, lots of research on the horizon.

I do feel that real and genuine experiences transmit through the reading though and make the whole thing more personal to the reader.
 
I don't think I'm in any of my characters actually. They seem to have no objection doing things without seeking any permission whatsoever to do them. Maybe they're what I wish I could be.
 
I love the challenge of writing about places I haven't seen — trying to gather enough information to portray it believably to a native of the area. For places where even pictures of the surroundings barely exist, like some areas of the DR Congo, that is a hell of a challenge.

It varies by book — one story might have next to nothing from life, in another I might identify in broad strokes with a character, and in yet another story a character might essentially be me, for all intents and purposes, and I'll use direct quotes from life (with permission).

If you haven't read it already, Jason, I recommend Tim Butcher's Blood River. He travels through the Congo, and it's one of the scariest travelogues I've read :

http://www.amazon.com/Blood-River-T...pebp=1438017107156&perid=0RZQ8FA1ZY2HA0VNDRVN
 
Anyone
*shudders* I was forced to read this twice: once in high school and once in college....wasn't really a fan either time. But it is good on description...
Anyone reading Heart of Darkness after seeing Apocalypse Now would be in for a shock, as the novel is much more existential than the Hollywood movie. It forces the reader to go inside themselves alongside the narrator Marlow.
 
Little pieces of me and the people I know adhere to all of my characters. Yet, my characters are distinct from the people that inspired them. Dogs included.
 
Experience so often defines our work, but I try to avoid putting myself into writing - dear lord, is there anything more painful retrospectively than putting yourself into a 'romantic' tryst with another character? - because I always like to be objective. True, I have use characters who have spun off from me; my arrival in London has inspired a new section of my 'Hempen Jig' story for example but it's not me and I always make that clear in my brain.
 
I like to give myself little cameos in all my stories. In Demon Bound I was 'Fat pie seller at the market'.
Naturally I had to gain twenty pounds for the role.

You are the Alfred Hitchcock of fiction, as he famously inserted himself into crowd scenes in his movies.

images
 
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