Please Don't Kill Our Darlings

 

David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, courtesy ITV

I have a confession to make. I have never, not once, watched those 'final episodes' of long running series where the main character dies. I was thinking about this earlier this week when I switched on the TV in the kitchen, as I often do to alleviate the sheer boredom of cooking, only to find that it was showing the Remorseful Day, in which Morse pops his clogs. I've never watched it and I never will.

I feel the same about that appalling episode where Hercule Poirot dies. Not only have I never watched that, but I avoid those episodes where he ages, episodes that I notice tend to be accompanied by doom laden background music. Poirot is the original cosy crime series. Christie herself may have been fed up of being lumbered with her wildly successful creation, but in his David Suchet incarnation at least, I love him. I don't care if he's a perjink little man. I don't care if his denouement speeches might be unbearable in real life. This is patently not real life, and I love him to bits. In my mind, he goes on forever, and I'm never ever going to be persuaded to watch his final moments.

I should perhaps also confess that I've killed off more than enough darlings of my own. And mourned them too, mourned with those who are left behind. But that's different, because I'm not writing cosy crime. Sometimes I'm writing grown up love stories, literary fiction, explorations of real life, whether historical or contemporary. And for the writer, in an odd sort of way, even though you may have killed them off, those characters live on in your internal world. I'm thinking of two novels in particular: Bird of Passage and The Amber Heart. Without going into much detail, in case you haven't read them and want to, some darlings didn't quite make it. But don't worry. They're here, living their best lives in my head and heart. 

That phrase 'killing your darlings' was attributed to William Faulkner, but was used earlier by Arthur Quiller-Couch who wrote of murdering one's darlings. Essentially it means that as a writer, you may well find yourself having to delete the passages that you love best, the parts of a book that don't really advance the story. I used to think they were right. Now, as I'm reading swathes of tremendous classic fiction where people didn't feel the need to edit out all the best bits, I suspect they were probably wrong anyway. Imagine Dickens or Emily Bronte killing their darlings. Well, of course, she did. But just imagine (as I did here in this blog post!) if she had had an editor who told her to make radical changes. 

But I digress. Along with a sizeable chunk of the older female population, I loved Mamma Mia. We didn't get to see the sequel in the cinema so my husband bought the DVD for me. I got only a little way into it to realise that - horrors- they had killed off Donna. (Presumably because Streep didn't want to do it.) 

I donated the video to somebody who wanted it, but I still feel cheated. I wish somebody had warned me beforehand. The songs may have been great but it meant that the whole thing shifted from being a joyful film about wonderful middle aged men and women to focusing yet again upon the young. Not only that, but removing that brilliant central character was like chopping down a mast on a sailing boat. It took a whole lot of rigging with it, and crippled the vessel. 

The point of these ongoing characters is that in our minds, they don't die. They just are. Which is, now that I think about it, very like the way writers feel about their characters, even if we may have killed them off. They don't die. They are still there, popping up from time to time to remind us of their existence.

Can you imagine a grown up William Brown, struggling with mortgage payments and divorce? Can you imagine him ill and lonely? William - whom I love quite as much as Poirot - changed with the changing times, but he never grew old. That wasn't a tragedy. Peter Pan this isn't. Richmal Crompton created a world into which we all, from time to time, need to escape - hilariously funny, wise, wicked, badly behaved (he'd definitely have been hit with an ASBO now) and completely outside time and its sorrows. That's why I still feel the need to read those stories all over again from time to time, and why I still, all these years later, take so much pleasure from them. 

Bird of Passage is available on Kindle at the bargain price of 99p until 31st July.

Is this the most seductive movie scene of all time?

I've watched a lot of movies over these two wretched pandemic years. In fact I find it extraordinary that I have so many friends who don't watch films. I first noticed it when we were doing mid lockdown quizzes and realised that so many people, when confronted by quotes like 'nobody puts Baby in a corner' and 'Shoot the hostage!' couldn't begin to name the film.

How do you survive without watching Dirty Dancing and Speed at least once a year? 

I love films. Although I'm not keen on graphic gratuitous violence or women in peril or Westerns or old war movies or those films where the director seems intent on making real live actors look like animated characters in a video game. Which narrows my choice a bit. 

So what does this have to do with writing? 

The nicest thing anyone ever said to me about my own writing came from another woman, a bookshop owner. 'Catherine,' she said, 'You write female desire so well!' 

It was a remark to treasure, and I have. She didn't mean 'sex scenes'. She meant something else entirely. Hard to define but you know it when you see and feel it, and you know it when you're writing it. Male writers very seldom do it well. Instead, female characters gaze at themselves in the mirror and fondle bits of themselves as they never ever do in real life. But all too often female writers don't even try to investigate this nebulous idea of desire. They find it embarrassing, or are afraid of crossing the line into prurience, so they avoid it altogether. Dot dot dot, as the girls in Mamma Mia said. Or our hero and heroine go to ever more ridiculous and frankly unbelievable lengths to avoid the overwhelming sexual attraction that is staring every reader in the face.  

At the other end of the scale, women and men write erotica which isn't, as it turns out, very erotic at all. Mind you, it sells extremely well, so who am I to argue? But it never quite feels real does it? 

Anyway, to go back to the movies and what we, as writers, may be able to learn from them. (And I'll bet you really want to know about that seductive scene now, don't you?) So many depictions of passion on film make the whole thing look, from a female point of view anyway, profoundly unsexy. A visiting Martian would assume the couple were involved in some unpleasant and painful interaction that had to be got through as quickly as possible. You've only to watch the wonderful, intense, passionate love scene in Desperado between Banderas and Cruz to then notice how dreadful some supposedly sexy movie scenes are by comparison. And I know I said I didn't like violence, but there are exceptions and this film, violent as it is, is one of them, mostly because the sexual chemistry between the two beautiful leads is so enticing. 

Writers, we can learn from movies, how to do it, and how not to do it. Write about it, I mean. What you do in your own time is entirely up to you. 

So here's what is probably, from a female point of view, the most seductive movie scene of all time. I love this film. It's gentle and funny, it's about female friendship and small town life and aspirations and real things. And the guy, this big, good looking guy, loses patience, tells it like it is, climbs aboard his boat and just motors off into the sunset. 

Why is that seductive?

Partly it's that it probably wouldn't have worked with any other actor. It has to be somebody who can play tough and caring and attractive and a wee bit vulnerable, all at the same time. Somebody who looks as though they could be a fisherman, could have that gentle side, could get really fed up of being used. One who is not afraid of the direct, honest, but oddly unthreatening gaze. Watch how he does it. It's truly and very deeply desirable. See for yourself.  

'I don't want to,' he says. Fine bit of acting too. Don't you just love it? Not the endless postponement of fulfilment to be followed by the final unsatisfactory clinch, but the realisation that love and - yes - desire has to mean more than that on both sides. You can take it or leave it, but you have to at least try to engage with that notion. 

Now when you can write that, you'll be onto a winner.