Kate Morton On Bringing Characters to Life and the Importance of Readers

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A friend asked me recently what I love most about writing; I had to stop and think for a minute, searching for a way to explain. There are, of course, many parts of the writing process that I love. There’s a week, at the very end of the structural edit, when all of the efforts of the preceding year or two spent building the book, the copious drafts and revisions, and scribbled out lines and rewritten scenes, come together at last to enact a magic—the flicking of a switch so that the story leaps to life, a three-dimensional world, with moving parts and real people, that can be looked at from every angle and reveal no holes, no leftover scaffolding, no walls waiting to be finished. The thrill of that moment is worth every second of the long and winding road to get there.

I also love having written. It’s a great feeling at the end of the day, to know that I have managed to lock down in words an emotion or a thought or a complicated idea that’s been flitting through my mind, all effervescence and light, resisting capture. Sometimes, there are even rare, precious instants when I am a magician, and all of the world’s secrets and mysteries are known to me—that flash, when the roller-coaster grazes the high point before submitting to the rush of free fall is pure exhilaration.

But then, there are times when writing a book threatens to drive me mad. For one thing, it takes so long to get the whole thing out of my head and onto the page. There is no instant gratification. It’s like doing a puzzle that requires over a year—sometimes two— form a larger one, that then needs to be solved, frequently involving the undoing of the previously completed parts, with no guarantee of success. There are countless tiny ideas to be wrangled with. Hundreds of decisions to be made each day. For someone who sees every shade of grey, this can be a special kind of hell.

There’s the challenge, too, of illustrating the inner lives of characters. Animating them with desires and doubts and self-regard and self-pity, of showing them to readers without telling too much, of revealing the parts of their nature that they don’t wish to share. Of creating settings with a sense of place so vivid that the reader believes they’ve been there. Of conducting meticulous research and then concealing all evidence of it. Of choosing the right word, the best word, in every instance; of going back and fixing, changing, improving, ensuring things are as tight as they can be. Of making it look easy. Of never reaching the lofty standards one sets; of knowing that the reality will never, ever match the sheer, unbounded potential that the project promised at its inception; that one cannot help but fail simply by attempting to move the story from the dream world to the real.

And it’s relentless. I never stop thinking about the book I’m working on. If I do, the world I’m trying to build falls away. It can make for a very busy brain, particularly when one adds in all of the real-life people and things that are going on simultaneously and want—need!—attention. For months, towards the end, I long to be finished and to have a break. And yet. When I’m not doing it, the sense of something missing is profound—not once ever, no matter how desperate I was to complete a book, have I typed ‘The End’ and managed to pass a full twenty-four hours without procuring a notebook for the next set of ideas. . .

Listening to this description of the process, my friend seemed perplexed; she wanted to know how I managed with all of those characters and storylines in my head each day. She said it sounded stressful. I’d never thought about it that way, but suddenly I looked at her and perceived the alternative: How could she bear to be without them. It must be somehow . . . empty.

And then I realized that she wasn’t without them; I also knew my answer to her original question. My friend is a reader. Both writing and reading are considered solitary pursuits, and it’s true that I sit alone for most of the day, every day, communing with figments of my own imagination and doing battle with my limits as a wordsmith. But the act of publication is, as the root of the word suggests, ‘public’. And this is where we enter that much-mythologized realm of storytelling, for which at least two people are required: one to tell the story, the other to receive it. A book is merely a series of words on a page until somebody picks it up and begins to read; and, of course, a reader does far more than just receive. It is they who bring the story back to life, a unique version of itself, fueled by their imagination, dependent for color and nuance on their life experience.

My words, their interpretation, a joint creation.

To be part of this marvellous alchemy is a wonder indeed. It’s been almost twenty years since I started writing the manuscript that would become The House at Riverton. Seventeen years since I first saw my name on the cover of a book. I’ve published seven novels, over one million words of fiction. There are at least sixteen million copies of my books in thirty-eight languages spread across forty-five countries. By any definition, I am not new to this. And yet, it never grows old.

I cannot truthfully say that I love every moment of the writing process—it can be demanding, and by turns exhilarating and awful (and everything in between)—but I do love being a writer. It is a joy to create something out of nothing, to put my own thoughts and feelings about the human experience into words, and then send them out into the world where a reader might say, ‘I feel that too’. And it is a true privilege to be part of that meeting of minds that occurs each time one of my books is read, no matter where, when, or by whom, and the worlds that I dreamed about and built, the people and places I have loved, come back in brand-new forms, living and breathing once more.

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