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Author Peter Benson lived in my village in the 1970s, leaving before I arrived here forty years ago. In Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke he writes engagingly about Ashbrittle as the kind of village where:

“Everybody knows everybody, and everybody knows everybody’s dogs, cats and cars. If you take a letter to the letter box someone will ask if you’re going to post a letter, and if you don’t peg out your washing on the day you usually peg out your washing, someone will tell everyone else you’ve had a heart attack while listening to the news.”

The secret marijuana crop – Hashbrittle? – a corrupt policeman, first love, second sight and wonder combine to offer much more than a rural romp under the influence. I recently attended the Zoom launch of Peter’s latest book, The Stromness Dinner, an offbeat, beautifully observed and gently humorous novel about relationships and what happens when two people follow their dreams. I particularly liked what he had to say about the craft of writing and I keep returning to something he said about the characters that inhabit his novels. For a start, he doesn’t use the word ‘characters’. He refers to them as ‘people’. Does the distinction matter? I think it does, because observing it compels us to create more rounded, believable beings and avoid lazy stereotypes. A writing exercise I give my students is to answer a list of left-field questions about their creations. In all probability, the responses won’t make their way into the novel, but the exercise should deepen and enrich the writing, bringing the characters (yes, I know!) more vividly to life.

Having created a whole bunch of people – who will sometimes clamour to be written and sometimes indulge in sleeping like the dead – how do you feel about them? Suppose you met them in real life? Would you like them? Unless you are writing something very bland, the odds are there will be secrets, lies, dark deeds, wickedness and worse. What’s your stance as you introduce these people to your readers? Are you issuing an invitation to admire, mock, disapprove, despise or secretly applaud? Faced with appalling behaviour from a fictional villain – whether of your devising or another author – do you take their misdeeds at face value, or look beneath the surface? (I should say here that someone once told me I was so busy reading between the lines I couldn’t see what was under my nose but I am unrepentant as that trait has added depth and consequent enjoyment to many a book.)

You’ll probably guess that ‘face value’ doesn’t cut it for me. I read for the pleasure found in meaning and deeper understanding of the human condition. If that sounds lofty, I should add that there are exceptions. For instance – take Boris Johnson. (Please.) I would take great pleasure in reading a short, sharp, satirical piece on his political progress, skewering his absence of honesty with forensic accuracy and sardonic wit. However, if someone like him made his way into the pages of a novel, I would feel short-changed if there was no examination of the journey from the maternity ward to the corridors of power.

I’m currently enjoying Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, examining the regrets and choices and the roads not taken by Nora Seed. As a young reader, I graduated very quickly from Enid Blyton to Agatha Christie and later to crime writers like Ross Macdonald where motivation was key. In real life, I wonder how a penniless would-be art student came to order the deaths of millions of fellow humans. I’m not sure I agree with Blaise Pascal that to understand is to forgive – forgiveness is often beyond my grasp –  but above all, I do want to understand and perhaps accept. If someone in a book acts out of character, I want to be convinced that their reasons hang together. I don’t want to finish the book feeling short-changed.

Given that I want to read and write books containing the full range of human experience, is it unrealistic to expect writers to like the people they create? Frankly, yes, to answer my own question. (I could go all Victorian about loving the sinner, not the sin, but that’s a very tall order.) I enjoy writing villains for reasons that would give a therapist a field-day, no doubt, but what really matters to me is that a writer understands the people they release into our imaginations and gives us the tools to understand them, with all their complexity and contradictions.

Which brings me to a particular bee in my bonnet. There are writers I don’t enjoy because I find their tone cold (Don’t get me started on Jane Austen). They really don’t seem to have much liking or respect for their characters. I am fairly certain that were we to meet, I would find their view of humanity to be bleak and comfortless and depressing. Of course I can see why people get to feel that way – there is suffering and shadow wherever we look.  The older I get, as I watch my youthful optimism disappear in the rear-view mirror, the more I see that psychologist Erik Erikson was right – we cannot give way to despair.

Ego integrity versus despair is the eighth and final stage of Erik Erikson’s stage theory of psychosocial development. This stage begins at approximately age 65 and ends at death. It is during this time that we contemplate our accomplishments and can develop integrity if we see ourselves as leading a successful life.

Individuals who reflect on their life and regret not achieving their goals will experience feelings of bitterness and despair.

Cool, clinical writing, however accomplished, leaves me cold. What I want is the compassionate eye. This doesn’t mean that I want authors to condone monstrous behaviour any more than I want real-life serial killers to be given community service. I’m not talking sentimentality (which gives me the heebie-jeebies) or the glorification of evil. It might only be a rise in emotional temperature of a degree, but it will have warmth and that warmth, like a candle in the darkness, will illuminate, offering a flicker of hope. Christy Moore wrote: “… look for a spark that lights the dark…”. During the first lockdown I was not alone in discovering an affection for novels that raised my spirits.

When we write, we reveal ourselves – sometimes intentionally, often unwittingly. How we view the people of our imagination may be uncomfortably revealing of our real world view.

The writers I love all have the compassionate eye. A particular favourite is Sir Terry Pratchett (though, for me, not the earlier Discworld Books – start with Mort.) All human – and not so human – life can be found walking, sidling and slithering along the streets of Ankh Morpork. The books, like the man himself, are warm, witty and wise and his female characters, particularly the witches Esme Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat lead me to believe he had many and varied aunts.

I just encountered a good online spat provoked by Jonathan Jones:

“I’ve read Pratchett now: it’s more entertainment than art. My dismissal of the literary merits of the late Terry Pratchett raised hackles among fans. Now I am better read, and can admire his clever wordplay. But I still believe the best prose lives in the real world.”

I prefer A. S Byatt’s assessment:

“He gives you more information and more story than you need, just because he can… He is a master of complex jokes, good bad jokes, good dreadful jokes and a kind of insidious wisdom about human nature (and other forms of alien nature).”

Despite my affection, I know fantasy is not for everyone, so let me finish by recommending Larry McMurtry – another male writer who created memorable women – witness Terms of Endearment. He also wrote Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo, and if you had told me beforehand that, having read nearly nine hundred pages – nine hundred pages! – of Lonesome Dove, I would be weeping because a very long book about frontiersmen driving cattle through the American West was coming to an end, I would not have believed you. I wept again when I discovered there was a sequel. With joy.

Who are the writers who light a spark for you? As a writer, do you offer comfort, or challenge, or both?

This post originally featured on the Enterprising Writer blog on the 9th of June 2021.