Character Building
A Short Story
by
Jessica Grace Coleman
Copyright © Jessica Grace Coleman 2015
Published by Darker Times
Stafford, UK.
Ebook Edition September 2015
Jessica Grace Coleman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved in all media. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author and/or publisher.
Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com
This story is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events or localities is entirely coincidental.
This story is dedicated to all of my writer friends
Also Available From Jessica Grace Coleman
Little Forest Series
The Former World
Memento Mori
The Exalted
Carnival Masquerade
The Gloaming
Short Story Collections
Grown By The Wicked Moon
Non-Fiction
Creative Ways To Start Creative Writing
Volumes 1, 2 & 3
Table of Contents
Character Building
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Acknowledgements
About The Author
Also Available from Jessica Grace Coleman
Character Building
Robyn Reddick was an award-winning novelist, a master (well, mistress) of her craft, an inspiration to countless writers all over the world.
She was also well and truly bored out of her mind.
Having released twenty books in her ‘Hunter Bloomberg’ crime series, she was financially stable and yes, she was proud, but now it was time… time to kill off Hunter and start on something else.
OK, so maybe not kill him, just put him on the backburner for a while. If she killed him, she had no idea what her fans might do (‘Misery’, anyone?), and if she was really being truthful with herself, it wasn’t the character of Hunter she was fed up with; it was her.
Robyn Reddick just didn’t know what else she could do with Hunter and his world of insane crime fighting and punchy one-liners. She’d dragged it out until there were no more ideas left, and it didn’t seem right to keep pounding out rubbish novels just so the Hunter fans could read more about his troubled love life, his ripped muscles, and his habit of always catching the bad guys just in the nick of time. It was always the same, and it was getting old.
It was time for a change.
Robyn had come to this conclusion a month or so ago, and had immediately closed down the Hunter Bloomberg book she was working on, opening instead a fresh document in her word processor, on which she typed out ‘New Project’ at the top of the page.
It had stayed as a blank page for an hour or so while she pondered what she really wanted to write.
Her first thought was that she didn’t want to write another book from a male first-person perspective; she’d been there, she’d done that, and she was so over it. The idea of telling a story purely from a female character’s point of view flashed through her mind, but she dismissed that, too. There was only so much you could do with first person (something she thought every time she wrote a new Hunter Bloomberg novel), and she wanted to do something bigger in scope.
She wanted to know what several characters were doing at once, she wanted to know how each of them felt and why they reacted to each situation like they did. With first person, the reader was always left to guess what was going on inside the other characters’ heads. So, Robyn would write third person (the thought of second person had never really occurred to her as a viable option), and that left the possibilities wide open.
Why tell the story from just one character’s perspective when you could tell it from two? Or three? Five? Ten? How about a whole town?
Then it came to her: this was her chance to do what she’d always wanted to do. This could be the big, epic saga she’d always wanted to write; featuring several generations, with a cast of hundreds and the opportunity to deliver something really special to her avid readers. A real beast of a novel that would stay with them for the rest of their lives, not just the rest of their week like the relatively short Hunter Bloomberg books did. It would be her pièce de résistance, her crowning glory. The culmination of her life’s work.
God knew, she wasn’t getting any younger; if she wanted to do this – and she definitely did – she had to do it now.
Taking a sip of tea (she couldn’t write without tea), Robyn deleted ‘New Project’ and replaced it with four words: ‘The Crickley Bay Chronicles’.
She wasn’t sure where the name had come from, but she hadn’t been sure where the Hunter Bloomberg name had come from, either, and that had worked out pretty well for her. Robyn did a quick Internet search for ‘Crickley Bay’ – just in case it was already a successful novel which she didn’t know about – and was encouraged by the lack of results. Crickley Bay it was. She would set it in Wales.
After another sip of tea, Robyn started typing.
She started typing, and she didn’t stop for another two hours: she just emptied her head out into the document, writing places and names that she hadn’t even thought of before without hesitation, creating characters out of snippets of memories here and her own discarded writing ideas from the past there. It was something that Robyn had never really experienced before; usually she hated planning her work, preferring to just type ideas as they came. But this was different; this was fun. She was creating a whole world, and she could do whatever she wanted with it.
She could magic into existence a charming little B&B, family-run, and located just feet away from the beach. She could invent a primary school full of snotty-nosed children, a high school full of confused adolescents, a large university full of drunk students. There could be several supermarkets, competing not only with each other but with small, family run shops that sold local produce and personalised gifts. She could invent town halls, banks, cinemas, pubs, families, friends, lovers, enemies. She could create old family secrets and legends of the Bay, suspicious tourists and creepy local hermits. The darker side of the town could feature crime, adultery, fraud, murder. She could create chaos.
Robyn could do all of this, and she did. She sat typing at her computer for the rest of the night and into the early hours of the morning. Her head was swirling with ideas when she finally lay her head on her pillow, and it was still full of them when she woke up the next morning. She’d even dreamt about Crickley Bay, but that wasn’t too much of a surprise considering the circumstances.
After doing her usual morning routine, the doorbell rang and Robyn opened the front door to find her writer friend, Maggie, on the doorstep. Ushering her into the hall, Robyn closed the door behind her.
“Morning Maggie.”
“Morning Robyn. I would say good morning but… well, you look terrible.” Maggie threw her a sheepish smile before following her down the hallway and into the kitchen.
She knew the routine well: cup of tea, biscuit, catch up. They did it every couple of weeks (as well as meeting up at their local pub every weekend), and they did it to keep sane. As a novelist herself, Maggie was very aware of how solitary the job could be. Working on your own at home for weeks on end, you could start going mad if you didn’t regularly stop and communicate with someone (a real someone, not a character) in person.
Robyn put the kettle on and turned to face Maggie. “As a
lways, thanks for your honesty, Mags.” She smiled. “Actually, I’ve just started on a new project and I was so into it, I was up half the night.”
Maggie sat down at the little kitchen table and put her handbag on the floor. “Wow, must be a good one, then. So you’re finally doing the twenty-first Hunter Bloomberg book?”
Robyn turned her back to Maggie while she took the teacups out of the cupboard and arranged everything on the tray. “Actually, no. This is a new new project.”
“No Hunter Bloomberg?”
Robyn shook her head as she took everything over to the table. Maggie was one of – if not the – biggest Hunter fans Robyn knew. “I’m not killing him off or anything, don’t worry. I just need something new, a change. A challenge.”
Maggie took the teapot and started pouring. “Wow, OK. So can you tell me anything about this new project of yours? Or are you going to be annoyingly vague about it as usual?”
Robyn took her teacup and placed a biscuit on the saucer, smiling to herself. She had this thing – a superstition, she supposed you could call it – where she never told people about her work in progress. She usually kept the details to herself until it was finished, not wanting to jinx it or inadvertently give too much away; most of her friends were writers, and while she knew they’d never steal her ideas on purpose, it was all too easy to take in what someone else was saying and regurgitate it later on into one of your own pieces of work without realising. It was easily done, and that was why Robyn was careful about what she said.
“I’m not going to tell you any details, Mags.”
“Oh, come on! Just a few hints. Is it going to be anything like Hunter at all?”
Robyn shook her head, sipping her tea at the same time. “No. I can tell you, though, it’s going to be big. And I mean, huge. It’ll be based around a town, and it’s going to be set near the coast in Wales.”
“Ooh, lovely. Romance? Thriller? Horror?”
Robyn rolled her eyes at Maggie; she was always on the hunt for clues. “Thriller, I think. I haven’t totally sorted out the plot yet, just the town and the main characters.”
“So can you tell me about any of the characters? Any of the places?”
Robyn groaned inwardly. “Well, not really. To be honest, I don’t really remember a lot of what I’ve written…”
Maggie was staring at Robyn, her eyebrows raised. “You just don’t want to tell me, do you? There’s no need to lie about it!” She was only half-laughing.
“I’m not lying! It’s just I’ve had very little sleep and it was like…” she trailed off, trying to think of the words to explain exactly what it had been like. So much for being a writer; she couldn’t even express her feelings. “It was like all of these ideas were pouring out of me, and as soon as I typed them up, I forgot about them, because there were so many other ideas waiting to get put down on the paper, you know?”
Maggie was still staring at her. “No, I don’t know. That’s never happened to me. I’d kill for that to happen to me. You’re lucky, Rob.”
Robyn shrugged. “It was exhausting.”
“So, do you have a title?”
“Come on, Mags. You know I never tell anyone the title until it’s ready to be published.”
“Fine, fine. So why Wales?”
Robyn shrugged. “I’ve been to a few places on the coast; it’s nice there. I wanted to set it somewhere other than England – to get away from the whole Hunter Bloomberg thing – but I didn’t want to go too far afield, you know?”
Maggie was nodding enthusiastically. “You know what you should do? You should take yourself off to Wales for a few weeks or so. Stay somewhere by the coast, soak up the atmosphere, picture your characters there. It’s about time you had a holiday. Hang around for a week or so, relax, and then start writing.”
“You know? That’s not a bad idea.”
“Oh! You should go where I went to a few years ago. I can’t remember the name off the top of my head, but it was a lovely place. Really quiet, really soothing. Lots of lovely little restaurants and pubs, a gorgeous beach. I can look up the details for you if you want?”
Robyn nodded, picturing a quaint little town where she could stroll along the sand, putting the finishing touches to her characters and her plot. “That’d be great, thanks.”
“Good! I really think it’ll help. You know, I wrote my entire sixth novel when I was there. Finished the whole thing in a month; I think it was being near the sea that did it. The fresh air must have cleared all the rubbish out of my head and left just the good stuff.”
Robyn laughed as she finished her tea, but if the truth be told, she was only half-listening to her friend. Now that the idea of a break in Wales was in her head, she couldn’t think of anything else.