Show #1

Thanks to everyone who listened to the first show, I hope you enjoyed it.

Just a brief recap - the Dartington-set short story was followed by the question, what can writers learn from genre fiction?

Using "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" and the trilogy it spawned as an example, I argued that even if you dismiss the books as over-hyped, badly crafted, exploitative tosh, more akin to typing than to writing, the author must still have got something right, something to pull so many people through so many pages.

I think, above all, Larsson understood the essential combination of character and plot.

The Millenium trilogy succeeds because underneath all the reams of Swedish political history, the outrageous conspiracies and the extreme physical action, it is a character-driven story, propelled by Lisbeth Salander, a jagged, antisocial heroine who behaves in extreme ways according to her own moral code. Unlike every other character in the book, who arrive on the page with their biography and cv attached, information about Salander is given out sparingly. As readers we are fascinated by her behaviour but only gradually come to understand the horrifying background that made her this way. And that the plot eventually turns out to be inextricably linked to the resolution of her own personal battles actually makes the books work.

“Plot is character and character plot,” according to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Without character, plot is just one thing after another. The information we often seek is not how something has happened, but why characters behave the way they do. In his “Letters To A Young Poet” Rainer Maria Rilke wrote “The future enters into us, long before it happens,” later adding “that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without, into them.”

We then moved on to a short writing exercise to come out of this idea of character and plot and destiny entwined.

Think of a traumatic, life changing childhood experience for a character, the more imaginative and unusual the better. Then think of an event in adult life that forces that character to confront the past. How does that character react? How does that character change? Does it sink them, or redeem them?

Be careful how you do this, or before you know it the exercise could bloom into a novel.

If you find the idea of submitting a short story too daunting, feel free to send in completed exercises you have found interesting. It would be fun to read them out on the show.

Anyway, be sure to tune into the next show on 8 February at 9pm.

Until then, keep reading, keep writing, and, above all, keep seeing.