All The World's A Stage

Tomorrow, I'm escaping my daily lessons - much to the chagrin of my Theology teacher - to hijack a trip to the Globe Theatre in London, to see an all-male cast do an authentic production of "Twelfth Night". Being the unashemed nerd and Shakespeare fangirl that I am, I'm beyond excited - not in the least because the brilliant Stephen Fry is playing Malvolio . . . I can only hope that the sight of him in tight yellow stockings doesn't send my brain into fits of disturbed hysteria.

However, as it's winter and the British weather is being true to form and blasting us with merry deluges if wind and rain every other second, the performance takes place in the Globe's indoor venue. I've seen the London Royal Shakespeare Company at work before, this summer, when my grandad took me to an open-air production of "Henry V".

It was one of the most brilliant evenings of my life. The actors were stunning, the costumes brilliant, the lines delivered with perfect pitch and timing. The audience, from the "groundlings" to the seats in the Gods, were invited to stamp along and cheer and roar as the combating armies of England and France. There was even a particularly amusing moment when "Henry" was busy lauding accolades on a "stout Englishman", only for the aforementioned to state quietly "but ... I'm German."

The look of false horror on the retreating monarch's face was a truly golden moment.

But it's not just the plays that bring millions of toursits flocking to Britain's most famous theatre every year. While I may be a devotee of The Bard, I was definitely the youngest person in the audience that night.

What makes the Globe special is its heritage, and what it means for people on the whole.


The Globe is a beautiful theatre, and the exhibitions in its cellar are among the most incredible I've seen anywhere - even though the audio guide had a horrible habit of loosing very loud trumpet noises at unexpected moments. Everything down there is authentic, and created with such an obvious passion and eye for emphasis and effect, that you can tell whoever set it up was positively barking mad about their job.

The displays aren't just about the plays themselves, either. They're about London, the London that Shakespeare and his companies lived and moved in, the people they met, the things they did and saw and smelt.

Every costume you see was once worn by someone.

Every rusty knife was once nestled in someone's pocket.

Every coin was once cursed over when it slipped from someone's purse.

And the Globe brings it all to life. You'll see replicas of those costumes, that knife, those coins, passing between the hands of the actors on stage just as they were a hundred years ago. And it makes it all so much more real.

It's not just men in tighst prancing about spouting colourful insults at each other. It's our past, acted out in front of us, complete with funny accents, even funnier swordplay, and jokes so lewd you wonder how people could ever call Shakespeare "sophisticated".

It's the present, bringing the past to life.

~ Charley R

Lessons from History

Some characters are a lot easier to work with on paper than others. I'm quite lucky in those terms; normally I'll have a pretty clear idea of a character before I start the story, and once I start working with them on paper, everything else falls fairly neatly into place contextually.

But sometimes that doesn't happen. And that's when things get frustrating.

I'm betting we've all run into at least one character that blatantly refuses to comply with us. You know what you want them to be like, but for some reason, every time you start using them, they won't do it. Pinning down their personality is about as successful as nailing jelly to a tree, and it shows in the writing. They are inconsistent, they are unrealistic, and they are thoroughly ruining your story.

Next to full-on Writer's Block, I'd say inconsistent and ill-defined characters are my biggest writerly hiccup.

The lead character of my 2011 NaNoWriMo project, the infamous Vidal, is a prime example. Sometimes he was quiet and unassuming, and sometimes he would be spitting so many insults across the room that it was a wonder he wasn't stabbed. He would go from calm, cool and deceptive to an insecure, hot-headed wreck in the space of a page. And in a story based entirely around his deceptive abilities, it was a recipe for disaster.

It only got worse when I realised he was following my moods, my rules, and my idea of morality. Heck, he was even talking like me. I didn't want a self-insert. I wanted an independent personality for people to love, hate and silently wish to hi-five in his more devious moments.

So where did I look to solve the problem? My history textbook.

People in history have been copying the performance and strategies of others since the Romans embarked on their quest for world domination, and there are so many wonderful personalities and catastrophes roaming about that inspiration is endless. For Vidal, I found the perfect match - the infamous Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII's first minister and iron-handed ruler of France. For a character  who would later become known as the Kingmaker himself, Richelieu was a wonderful reference point for character and strategy in a dangerous political environment. Vidal's own namesake, writer Gore Vidal, was also a massive help when it came to working out how my canny plotter's idea of humour worked (which is more important than it sounds in the context of the actual story).

And so it went on, looking at similar historical situations and political systems to get myself out of the puddle of I-Have-No-Idea-How-To-Do-This into which the story had sunk.

Of course, I'm not saying that one should simply go around and mash up bits of history in order to create a character - I don't know if plagiarised personalities are punishable, but trying to throw in too many elements to create an ideal character for your story certainly runs the risk of simply making them overcomplicated, and even more prone to schizophrenia than they were before.

However, especially if you're writing a story that is set in a time or place you do not have any direct knowledge or experience of, historical reference is a fantastic way of making it easier to bring a place to life. Got a tough feisty farm girl about to embark on a quest? Why not get some tips from Joan of Arc, or one of the Medici girls? What about that priest who's sure there's something wrong in his institution? Martin Luther might be a good starting point there.

You don't even have to use famous figures from any period of history, either. Why not imbue your character with bits of personality from your grumpy aunt, your caustic grandfather, or your eccentric newt-collecting cousin?

After all - people are just as weird in real life as they are in books.

What about you, readers? Have you had similar problems with inconsisten characters? How do you resolve problems like that? Has anyone else followed the path of borrowing traits from others to help pin your little darlings down? Or do you have a different strategy altogether?

~ Charley R