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This is my last post on this topic for awhile (promise!) because I have other things I want to talk about, including the preponderance of packages I received this week, including a couple of real goodies.
First, however, I want to, once again, thank everyone who has sent prayers and good wishes for Rachel’s illness and Phyllis’s back problems. Phyllis is improving; Rachel has stalled in a place of low-level and occasional wheezing, with congestion we just don’t seem to be able to break loose. So we’re off to the doctor tomorrow. Will keep everyone posted.
Now, to the final stage of my creation of a hero, which I think of as the movement from intrigued fascination to creative fruit. The beginning, of course, is the “raw material.” And to borrow a phrase from a recently enjoyed show . . . .
I think Trevor Eve is bloody brilliant.
And not just because I thought Jonathan Harker and Denys Finch Hatton were sexy beyond belief or that Peter Boyd is one of the more fascinating characters on tv. It goes much deeper than that, and over the past few weeks, I’ve been studying Mr. Eve’s acting technique with the same intensity of a scholar with a newly discovered Shakespearean folio.
Most viewers don’t think about (nor should they) the choices that go into every frame of film. Not only is the scenery, each prop, and every camera angle an intentional choice, but so is every twitch of muscle, raised eyebrow, or twiddled thumb. A line’s delivery is rehearsed more than once, with different inflections, until it fits the character just so.
What has caught my attention with Mr. Eve is how remarkably he alters his choices, even within a similar range of emotions – thus the fury of Duncan Matlock at the end of The Politician’s Wife is quite different from any of Peter Boyd’s explosive outbursts in Waking the Dead.
And if you really want a treat, take a look at these clips of his performance as Hughie Green, where he has captured a whole new level of smarmy creepiness.
What this does for me as a writer is to provide a visual smorgasbord of hand and facial gestures, hand movements, body slumps and stretches, struts and strolls, vocal inflections and emotional ranges. And, unlike people watching at the mall, I can freeze, rewind, and watch them again. All without the security guard at the mall thinking I’m creepy because I’ve been watching the McDonald’s counter for an hour.
As I created the plotline for The Bones of Gregory Miller, as I wrote more about my hero and heroine, the more I realized the hero was beginning to look like Trevor Eve. So some of his body movements and voice inflections (although not accent) will resemble Mr. Eve’s. But my Detective Carpenter will not be Peter Boyd or Albert Tyburn or Jonathan Harker.
He will be my own. That’s where “study” leaves off and “creation” takes over. He’s older and is a rare native Nashvillian, so he has childhood memories of the Parthenon at Christmas . . .
the Ryman when it was still the home of Opry. . .
and Opryland when it was still a park.
He’s a little bit obsessive, and has a thing about . . .
You get the idea.
Recently, I mentioned to a friend that I missed Tyler and Dee, the hero and heroine of The Taking of Carly Bradford. She looked at me quizzically and said, “You know they aren’t real, don’t you?”
Well, yes. Sort of.
But when you start with real people and all their foibles, you build real characters.
And that’s the goal of every good novelist.
So good night, Mr. Eve and Detective Carpenter. I know you’ll be waiting when I finally get to Chapter One of The Bones of Gregory Miller.
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