02 August 2024
|
Susan Mallery, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Book Club and For the Love of Summer, on revealing the fascinating and contradictory perspective of families
When Finley and Sloane were young, their life was chaos. Their mom left them with her father again and again for months at a time to take bit parts in off-Broadway productions. Their mother and grandfather got into an ugly custody dispute, which led to him turning his back on the family.
While Grandpa’s abandonment rocked both girls to their core, they reacted very differently. Finley became a rule-follower who felt safest in her own regimented world. Sloane became a risk-taker, chasing love and stardom and every high within her grasp. She followed a path of self-destruction all the way to rock-bottom. Sisters, raised in the same household, side by side through the same formative experiences, became adults with little in common. In one heartbreaking moment, their paths diverged.
A playground of perspective
Families are a writer’s playground of perspective, which is the most fun you can have at a keyboard. Each family is made up of individuals who lived through many of the same experiences, but with a unique viewpoint. Each person’s reaction to those moments in a family’s life changes the way they approach the world, which then changes the way the world and the rest of the family interacts with them. We are a product of our thoughts and actions, which are shaped by other people’s behaviors toward us.
Perspective is reality, and reality is individual.
Family is forever
Early in my career, a friend said something that still resonates all these years and books later: It’s so much harder when you love them.
Meaning that few people will turn their backs on their families, even when they make us crazy, while it’s much easier to cut people out of your life when we don’t care about them. Family is the ultimate forced proximity, attached for life, no matter what. In many ways, we’re defined by our family’s presence in our life—or their absence from it.
What this means for writers
As writers, we must know how each family member feels in every scene, how they feel about what’s happening, and how they feel about the other people in the scene, even when the reader will never get into those characters’ heads. Why? Because how a person feels in that moment will drive what they say and do.
A character will only become real to the reader when her actions and dialogue are consistent with who she is, and not simply expedient for the writer. If you need a character to, say, let her ex-husband’s pregnant wife move into her house, you’d better make sure that she would. And if she wouldn’t, then you need to step back and do some character work to get her where you need her to be – or change the story. You cannot force a character to do something that’s against her nature, if you want readers to stay in the story.
Readers notice emotional discrepancies, even if they can’t name the niggling feeling of something being off.
4 TIPS FOR WELL-ROUNDED FAMILIES IN FICTION
1. When creating a family, develop a back story for the family as a unit. Brainstorm some events in their past that might influence their behavior in the current story you’re telling. Then consider how those events impacted the family as a whole and each individual. What is the ripple effect that connects the past to the present?
2. Think about each distinct relationship and how it’s unique. Which family members are the closest? Who has the same sense of humour? Who annoys whom? To which person would each character turn in a time of desperation – and why?
3. Spend some time thinking about how each family member behaves with people outside the family. Where one person might feel most comfortable around their family, another might feel judged and defensive. Which is true for the family you’ve created? Or rather, which is true for each individual in the family you’ve created?
4. Starting with the pivotal scenes in your book, and in light of your discoveries in tips 1-3, examine the characters’ actions and dialogue. Are they authentic and well motivated? Are the motivations clear to the reader, unless deliberately withheld? Are they consistent?
It’s possible that I’ve given more attention to my fictional families than a lot of writers might. Families aren’t intuitive to me because I’m an only child, and we didn’t live near our extended family. You might say that I have an outsider’s perspective. I find families to be infinitely fascinating and infinitely variable. No two families are identical, nor are any two individuals within any given family. Which means there is no end to the story possibilities.
Go tell yours.
For the Love of Summer by Susan Mallery is published by Mills & Boon (£9.99)
Read more on how to write about families in fiction from novelist Sarah Turner