Russell was explaining the idea of ‘Mary-Sues’ to Jeanette,
who’d never heard of them. It was all about how people are being put off from
writing before they even start by online bullying in writing forums. People –
women, mostly – were being accused of creating ‘Mary-Sue’ characters.
‘It’s a pejorative term, apparently. For when people use a
version of themselves in the fiction.’
‘Like an avatar?’
‘Yes, exactly. And they’re being told they shouldn’t be
using them in their stories.’
Jeannette looked appalled. ‘But what else do you have? What
else is there but yourself? That’s what we were just saying before. That the
question of autobiography and what’s real and made up is just such a mess
because it’s all you, isn’t it? It all comes out of you.’
‘Well, yes. But you can’t win. These women who were being
put off from entering this writing competition, or posting their fiction
online, they were being told that – even if you made your character quite
unlike yourself – you could be a Victorian nun with a limp – it’s still you, in
disguise. They’re being told: it’s still all about you!’
‘But it is!’
‘I know!’
Russell and Jeanette in conversation. Two absolute heroes of
mine, on stage at the Cornerhouse in Manchester on a Sunday afternoon. Two
hours of them talking through a collection of clips from Russell’s shows, and going
through the whole, grand shebang – the big themes and ideas: love and
aloneness, apocalypse and fan fiction. It felt like they were putting the world
to rights. It was inspiring and a bit amazing to hear these two. I have read
and watched everything they have written for twenty years or more. And to hear
them in Manchester, too – as two writers who live and work here. It made
Manchester feel to me like a place where writing happens and big stories can
come to life.
Russell went back to the start and described being a kid who
liked to be alone in his head. A sociable family and a houseful of people,
where the telly was always on and the butcher brought the meat round and
stopped by for a drink. His parents taught Classics and there were shelves of
books about the decline and fall of civilizations (‘Ah, that’s where the
apocalypse comes in, then!’ Jeanette decided.) The telly was always on because,
to his parents, it was just another opened book.
He talked about liking being alone in his head. He walked
home from school, furiously making up Doctor Who stories. Like everyone writing
Doctor Who professionally today, he said, it all began with fan fiction in his
head. He didn’t even have to write it all down. He didn’t have a typewriter
even, nothing like that. Just fleets of Dalek space ships streaming out of his
imagination, like they couldn’t get on TV at the time – but which, eventually,
he put there himself. He had a mile to walk home from school and would choose
the route that would ensure none of his friends interrupted his complicated
train of thought.
Aloneness was quite a theme throughout the talk. Watching
the clips from ‘Bob and Rose’ and ‘The Second Coming’ in sequence he remarked
on how he was only just seeing the recurring idea of the character who asks: ‘What
happens to me if I’m not loved?’ When asked, he said Holly from ‘Bob and Rose’
is his favourite character in everything he’s done – if he had to choose one of
them. She’s the secondary character who takes centre-stage when the main
characters pair off and their story is on hold while they’re busy being happy.
Holly is another of his characters who asks, sometimes angrily: do I even exist
if I’m not loved?
Jeanette had thoughts about this. She dropped even Dante
into the chat. Her own work is always about being the lover and / or the beloved
and, really, in her books, characters only start when love comes into their
lives. It ‘draws them out of themselves’, and she said as much today, too. But
that’s bleak, isn’t it? Russell mentioned the old Dean Martin song: ‘You’re
nobody till somebody loves you.’ He described it as the cruelest piece of
easy-listening there ever was. The two of them agreed about love being at the
heart of everything they write, but I think, in the end, they’re saying different
things about it. Jeanette always writes about how people are transformed by it.
Russell often seeks out in his writing those who can never give in to it. He
writes about the Doctor, who – as Jeanette said – never can let himself love.
They covered a lot in two hours. I loved the stuff about
how, yes, drama might be about conflict, but really characters should be more
nuanced and muddled than that. They can’t always be at loggerheads like they
are in bad soap operas and just batting away in a fakely polarized way. I loved
the stuff about apocalypses on council estates and how it’s always about
saying, yes – in fact, the worst could
happen here, because it’s always happening somewhere. But at the same time,
someone will always find the means to become heroic. And I loved that stuff
about gay visibility in art and how we’ve had thousands of years of a vacuum.
No queers in Dickens or all of Western painting, in all that time. No queers
anywhere. Just rubbish ones. And so they need putting into everything we write.
It’s about getting people used to the visibility, until no one is even
surprised anymore.
All that stuff I loved. But what I loved most of all was the
stuff about the mechanics of writing, and how what he – and Jeanette – said
made me feel brave about writing all over again. Like I do when I watch or read
the pair of them.
Russell seemed to being saying that it’s all about following
the emotional truth of your characters above all else. And that nothing else
matters as much. You need to have them very clearly before you and know what is
great about their story that you want to tell. Don’t let the self-censorship or
false conflicts or even your lovingly-prepared synopsis get in the way. If you
write them and write them till they are real and alive on the page, all the
rest of it is just mechanics and technical, logistical stuff that you can fix
up in your next draft.
Also: never write anything for someone who doesn’t get it,
or want it, or really like what it is that you do. There is no point to that.
Jeanette asked him what it was like, after a childhood of
making up Doctor Who in his head, to be finally handed the keys to it all, and
to sit down in 2004 and actually start writing it. A full ten years ago. Was it
bliss?
Not quite. He said that, at the time, he had a quotation
from Jeanette herself pinned up above his computer. About how when she was
writing it felt like flying. But to him, just then, he realized it didn’t feel
at all like flying. It was more like falling. Plus, that slip of paper with the
quote vanished. It must have fallen down behind the radiator, in the bit of the
room that never gets cleaned.
‘Maybe it flew?’ Jeanette asked.
Yeah, it flew.
The Grand Shebang? That's a cruel nickname even for Russell.
ReplyDeleteThe whole Mary Sue thing has always been pretentious nonsense from people who once read a prospectus for a Literary Studies course. But the sort of nonsense you'd expect from people with narrow minds. Everyone has so many aspects to their own personality that it'd be impossible to write a character which didn't reflect a part of that personality.
I suspect that all these people crying "Mary Sue" have never met the authors in question so one wonders how they know so much about their personality.
But I do think that there's a little too much self-pity in saying that you won't write because a fool somewhere will criticise it.