# Transcript

Narrator
Here, writers discuss how they develop their fictional characters using a mixture of methodical research, accident and empathy. The speakers are Tim Pears, Monique Roffey, Alex Garland and Louis de Bernie`res.
Tim Pears
My first book was written from the point of view of a 13-year-old girl, and I never felt when I was writing it that I had to make some kind of special effort, you know, to get into the mind of a female, or a young person, whatever. I think I just thought how I would think about things, and with a little bit of sympathy, empathy towards somebody else and that was it.
Monique Roffey
I think it’s very much a mixture of accident and design. I think your characters find you in the same way that your ideas find you. I think they settle on you – snatches of people you’ve seen in the street, sometimes, or snatches of someone you might have met, someone you might have, you know, have had a brief encounter with, and they tend to kind of morph, they tend to kind of mix. You’ll have somebody’s hairstyle with somebody’s height, and somebody’s vanity with somebody’s nose, you know, so you kind of have a mixture come to you. But once that’s happened I then, absolutely, treat it in a research-like, a sort of scholarly way. I use a character outline and I, I work on that and develop and, so that I’ve got sometimes 7, 8, 9, 10, 15 pages, so that I know everything about that character. I know what the character’s grandmother’s maiden name was, whether they’re good at dancing, whether they like Marmite, you know, I know everything about that character by the time I’ve worked on it. So I use both, I use conscious and the unconscious to sort of, to make someone.
Alex Garland
Characters came from all sorts of different places. There’s this gangster in The Tesseract called Don Pepe who was sort of based on a guy I ran into in a very remote part of the Philippines, who came from Spanish ancestry and had never been to Spain but was obsessed with Spain and he’d lost all his money, he didn’t have a hacienda or anything. But he still somehow clung on to that colonial past even though it was a long, long time ago. And there was something about that that just interested me and I kind of lifted him out and dropped him in there and some you just invent.
Louis de Bernie`res
There seem to be two different types of character. There’s the type that just turns up at your shoulder like a ghost and insists on being written. This is rather spooky, it’s a bit like being a medium. The other kind of character is the sort that you invent more or less from scratch or create as a composite of various people that you’ve noticed or come across. And the one thing that does happen though is that as soon as the character begins to become real, he or she starts misbehaving, and they don’t do what you tell them to do. You often find yourself altering the story to accommodate your characters. Your plans always go wrong [laughs].
Narrator
And now Alex Garland talks about ways of handling a large cast of characters.
Alex Garland
I did have a problem with some of the minor characters, of losing track of them. I remember when I was copy-editing the book, finding that people switched nationalities halfway through and having to sort of make a little list, you know, this guy’s from New Zealand, this one’s from Israel. But I think in the case of The Beach, often what I did was a kind of cheap trick in a way, which was you pin a particular characteristic on a character. So there’s this guy, Bugs, who is the boyfriend of the woman that runs the camp and his thing was that he’s stoical but he’s also a bit of a bullshitter, that stoicism is his thing that he gives out an impression of being a terrific stoic but actually he’s not, and then everything just follows from that. Yeah, you find a little peg to hang them on and leave them on it.