Auden (right) and Isherwood, Piers Fawkes's heroes
A friend of mine who is a filmmaker once commented to me that she envies book writers, because they get to write and direct right there on the page.
I spent a lot of time being cinematographer to The White Devil. I wanted The White Devil to have a distinct color pallette. Dark clothes against white faces. Dark stone against a white-grey sky. White hair and white skin for the ghost. Even the disease that dominates the book, tuberculosis, used to be called the White Plague. Lights and darks, darks made darker by rain. A few splatters of blood.
Of course I cast the movie in my mind—only mainly with real figures. This is dangerous and useful. Useful, for me, mainly with dialogue. Often I imagine a real-life inspiration for a character (seldom an actor or actor’s persona—more often someone I knew or have read about) and test dialogue: “Would XYZ really say this?”
It’s dangerous because if you get too hung up on being true to your “model,” you end up being too tentative about motivations. “How would I know what XYZ wants? They’re a real person. Ask them.” This is a trap I have stepped into in both books. At a certain point I have to pull back from the model, and make the character my own.
I am very happy with the Fawkes character now, but he gave me a lot of trouble. I started with him as a carbon copy of my literary hero, WH Auden… drunk, a writer, a former teacher, an iconoclast of sorts… but then I struggled to make him his own person. At last his selfish personality emerged in full, callow fruit.
I also had a soundtrack. Garbage’s #1 Crush was Harness’s music. The Cure (the pop stuff—In Between Days, Lovecats) and Lady Gaga (Speechless) was for Persephone. Andrew was trippy, doomed 60s-70s music (I Am the Walrus, Comfortably Numb). Most of the novel emerged while listening to these songs over and over, and daydreaming.