Unmanned
Rachel Cusk
Ooh, GOODNESS. You know, writers get asked all the time, ‘do you use people you know in your writing?’. And we have to patiently explain, repeatedly, that we magpie.
You will use tiny little bits of people here and there. I was on a course once with a roboticist who kind of spoke in science, and it was amazing. I couldn’t stop asking him stuff (how does that bank card thing you have at home work? Should you leave lifts on the bottom floor? Why can’t my dog reverse around a lamppost?) and he treated each question seriously and gave measured answers to everything, including what was for dinner.
So I nicked this characteristic and gave it to Gregor in Summer Skies, but everything else about him I left well alone1. And that’s how you do it really. You take a gait here, a tone of voice there. I was working in Costa once and a women came in with an older woman, clearly mother and daughter. And the mother complained about the cakes and the seats and the draft and you could see in the daughter’s face their entire lifetimes, in thirty seconds. And in it goes.
My other tip, if you ever are going to base a character on someone you know (I don’t think anyone would recognise themselves anyway: as Burns knew, we’re all terrible at understanding how we’re perceived. Eg, people often describe me as ‘quirky’ when I am in truth a very dull happily married mother of three who likes crisps, or ‘delightful’ when I am in truth a stealth fucking wolverine) is, they can be a total psychotic serial killer just as long as at some point you describe them as Very Very Goodlooking. Then they will be delighted. There you go, don’t say you don’t get good professional writing advice from this newsletter.
OR you can be Rachel Cusk and ignore the crap out of all of that. She has written a book called The Life of M which she is calling a novel. I can’t afford a lawyer so I shall instead invoke the time-honoured Jimmy Hill defence.
It is a thinly veiled portrait of the life of a very famous actress/ model who started acting as a child, won an award for being in a ballet film and advertises a french luxury fashion house.
It is a compelling read- that’s Rachel for you. Never cheery, no gags, but always completely involving and intense. I finished it in an afternoon. You, the reader, get a huge insight into the claustrophobia, the bubble, the constant trade offs of fame2.
But IF TRUE CAVEAT oh man, it’s a mean bloody thing to have done. Really, really mean. Almost the whole point of the book is how hard it is to make real friends when you’re super famous. And then a so-called real friend does this. Unbelievably horrible behaviour for a human. I would say goes too far even for a writer. Will be absolutely huge this Autumn.
So I realised in my last newsletter, now I am back at work after my time off , that it was perhaps a shame not to have achieved more with the free time I had. So I thought, what is one of my genuine lifelong dreams? What is one of the things I have ALWAYS yearned to do before I die? Then I went and did that.
And finally, IF, and only IF you have taken my advice and finished Whistler , you may read this excellent conspiracy theory about it.
Love, Jen xx
I heard later his robot company got bought out by Apple and he’s now worth a gadjillion dollars and bought a castle in Italy or something, which is so much more romcom than anything I could have come up with it’s ridic.
Kathy Burke summed up fame rather more succinctly in her excellent memoir: ‘I stopped going out. If you go to the pub and you want to talk to your mates rather than strangers, you become the pub arsehole’