Characters Taking Over by Fay Cunningham

Why do they do it? Just when I think I’ve knocked them into submission, there they go again, trying to tell me how to write my story. It’s my story, and if I want Laura to have fair hair and blue eyes she has no right to argue with me, but I find a few pages on she’s turned into a brunette and changed the colour of her eyes.

Sometimes you just have to give in. Alex obviously hates his name – he doesn’t feel it’s manly enough for him – so he calls himself Lucas. Those names are nothing alike, are they? It’s certainly not a typing error. Would he like to change his height as well, I suggest? Perhaps six feet isn’t tall enough for him. But no, he seems happy now I’ve changed his name, so perhaps I can get on with the rest of the book.

They’ve taken over my carefully written dialogue, as well. Laura is supposed to be really upset when Lucas drops an ice cream in her lap, but what does she do? She has a fit of the giggles and he joins in. This is supposed to be serious, I tell them, but they don’t listen. She’s kissing him now, and that’s not supposed to happen until halfway through the next chapter. I think I may have lost the plot altogether.

I did threaten to kill one of them off, or maybe drop Laura off a cliff, but they don’t seem bothered. They know it’s all going to turn out happily in the end.

Lucas wants to look like Michael Fassbender, but I tell him he can’t have everything he wants. It’s my story. 

Advent Hero - Day Three

Patrick Jane as Simon Baker - The Mentalist

Fay Cunningham shares her Advent Hero

Simon Baker, as he appears in The Mentalist, was the blueprint for my hero in my last pocket novel, called Dreaming of Love. Needless to say, the man on the cover illustration was nothing like him, but that didn't really matter. I like to have a picture in my head while I write, but the reader will also have her own idea, and that may not be the same as mine. Patrick Jane had the quiet but sexy persona that I needed. A man of few words, but gorgeous with it. I gave my hero the same wonderful hair (don't you just wish you could run your hands through it?) and the same bright blue eyes, so thank you, Patrick, for letting me borrow you.

Original Clichés

Now there’s an oxymoron ‘if ever I saw one’ – and, hey, would you believe it, I’ve used a cliché already. As any author will tell you, the damn things sneak in everywhere.

I have never understood why Bill Gates didn’t include a cliché finder in his Word package – and I have never understood why editors hate them so much. Clichés are part of the English language and most of us use them without even noticing. It has been ‘drummed into us’ that our writing should be original, but every word we use has been used by someone else.

Some time ago I tried to think up new phrases for old clichés. A task that is almost impossible and exceedingly frustrating. I did manage to come up with ‘about as useful as a knitted bucket’, ‘bleeding like a motorway rabbit’, and ‘the deep breath before the scream’ but I doubt they will ‘go down in history’.

The Internet can turn an original phrase into a cliché in a matter of seconds, so even if an author is clever enough to think up a brilliant new descriptive expression, it will probably be a cliché by the time the book is published.

Some new clichés (is that another oxymoron?) have already earned their place in the reference books. ‘The elephant in the room’ is one of my favourites – but, of course, I can never use it because it is now a cliché. One of the best I came across recently, and one I hadn’t heard before, was ‘as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs’. But you can’t use that either because I’ve just told you about it.

What would the thriller writer do if he couldn’t arm his hero ‘to the teeth’ before ‘all hell breaks loose’? The romance writer’s hero is often ‘blown away’ by his first sight of the heroine, while she thinks he has a smile ‘to die for’. Most of us know exactly what these phrases mean and don’t mind them a bit. In our novellas the lovers have to get together before the end or our readers would kill us, and sometimes a predictable ‘happy ending’ is as comforting as a warm blanket, even if it is a cliché.

Clichés are fine in conversation, because that’s the way people talk, but when writing a descriptive passage we have to use our imagination – not someone else’s.

All my books are available in the libraries and on line at Amazon, but please don’t look for clichés. I am sure you’ll find a lot of them. 

Fay Cunningham