Hello, Bob;

23 Aug 04 15:09, Bob Lawrence wrote to Robert Bull:

 RB>> So how do you get ideas for characters, and know which
 RB>> particular mix is going to spark?

 BL> charicatures. The *real* people have to act and interact as real
 BL> people do, and there are not too many you know well enough to make
 BL> that work... maybe five.

 BL>  At present I'm reading Neal Stephenson's CRYPTONOMICON (the whole
 BL> 900 gages of it - I'm rapt in this bloke), and he obviously has the
 BL> same problem he solves in a simple way... he recycles the same
 BL> characters in all his books, using the same names! The last one I read
 BL> was THE CONFUSION set in the 17th Century, written last year. This one
 BL> was written  in 1999 set in WWII and the present, but the characters
 BL> recur (same surnames) and one of them is possibly the same person,
 BL> immortal.

You might compare Michael Moorcock's "Jerry Cornelius" books, where he 
starts with exactly the same characters, and sees how they react in 
different situations, without any refernce whatsoever to their previous 
adventures.  Alan Garner's "young adult" book RED SHIFT (which I never 
finished, but maybe should look at again) had something like the same 
characters going through the same motions in the same part of 
Cheshire in Roman, Civil War and modern times, as if some spirit was doomed 
to reenact the same problems until some distant time when a resolution 
might arise.

 BL>  Stephenson is the only American author I know who successfully
 BL> writes about England and gets it right... and to cap it off he writes

Americans tend to complain that British authors aren't too good on America, 
and the few who do it well have generally lived there for a while, like 
Paul McAuley and Michael Marshall Smith.

 BL>  Aha! I found a mistake! The hero is in Oz, having shipped into
 BL> Brisbane from New Zealand via *Fremantle*... which is on the other
 BL> side of Oz, 3,000 miles away! Found one!

:-))


 BL>  A minor flaw was that he called the hotel in Brisbane the
 BL> "Canberra." I have no idea if there was a hotel called that in
 BL> Brisbane in 1941, but I do know that Queenslanders *hate* Canberra
 BL> (our national capital) with a passion, and would have been more likely
 BL> to call a hotel the Tojo or the Hitler. I notice that he does not
 BL> mention any Brisbane street names. My guess is that he couldn't find a
 BL> street map of Brisbane on the Net, but at least he knows that General
 BL> Macarthur had his headquaters there.

He might have decided to protect the innocent, of course, or maybe the 
street names just weren't worth bothering with.  There's an author called 
Michael Z. Lewin; he's American and writes whodunnits set in his native 
Indianapolis, not the most fashionable part of the U.S.  They are mostly 
set in a suburb called Selwood.  There's no Selwood in the real 
Indianapolis - but there is one in the small town of Frome here in the UK, 
where he lives.

 BL> Bletchley Park with Alan Turing. That's the trouble with authors, they
 BL> are really good liars.

Well...  more kindly, they are adept at stimulating willin suspension of 
disbelief...

     Regards,

              Robert.

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