By way of Festschrift for a very dear friend of mine in fandom – so ageless as to be of (wait for it) no æon – I wish to say a few words w/r/t the writer’s unconscionable habit of filching (note to printer: keep as written. ‘Felching’ is another thing entirely), from his connexions and people on the telly or in the news and Rabbit’s-friends-and-relations, personal quirks and characteristics with which to dower his fictional creations. This occurs even in derivative works (for and to minor characters and Next Gen sorts, particularly).

One of the advantages of being my sort of weight is, when you lean on a garlic clove, it stays leant upon. [Crushes garlic] There was a time on my life when I used to get rugby forwards to come and roll out my pastry for me. I don’t need to do that anymore. [Pause; grin] One met a lot of nice rugby forwards….

– Clarissa Dickson Wright

I make no bones about the fact that my Millicent, even though I write her as being a Lesbian, has a good deal of Clarissa to her (and a dash of Ann Widdecombe). Similarly, despite issues of canonical age and canonical looks, Andromeda, to me, ought somehow to be played by Penelope Keith.

We all do it. I cannot and dare not mention people known to me and not otherwise known to the Great British Public who have lent, unwittingly, their quirks to various characters as I write those characters; but I confess that there are public figures who have informed markedly my conceptions even of Potterverse characters.

Albus Severus Potter, for example, at school-leaver / undergraduate / recent graduate age, has come to take on some of the Floppy-Haired, ah, Skinny Idiot (as the Fifth Doctor called the Tenth, in ‘Time Crash’) integument that is the public persona of one Mr H Styles. But of course he’s also become informed by the insuperable Harries twins as well….

Teddy – whom I write as straight, mind you – may take his willingness to hide behind words and paper and letterpress from Remus (and me), but he has his Mika and Nigel Slater elements as well, and not only in looks (a passing phenomenon for a Metamorphmagus in any event). And Hugo has a touch of the Michael Sandses, to me.

Post-epilogue Harry…. Well. Obviously, he is canonically an Auror, although JKR has never told us – quite probably because she’s never bothered to think about it – whether that is meant to be more like the Forces or the Old Bill or, as in the days before Peel, both. I tend to think it more akin to soldiering because, although Harry’s quite clever – the Hat was as willing to sort him Ravenclaw as any other House – I find it easier to imagine his virtues, and Ron’s, in senior ornaments of HM Forces than in senior coppers (imagine those two in any CID). There are ample portrayals of that classic British type – Geoffrey Palmer does one very well – but there’s more to Ron and Harry than that. I have allowed Harry to be influenced by two savagely competitive hearties who are a lot cleverer than the opposition realise until it’s too late, Jimmy and Chef. As for Ron … Freddie and Swanny.

(I confess that, although Swanny and various Baggy Green sledgers may have brought the idea to public notice, I fear I may be, in fandom, responsible for the Adult Draco as Broady trope, not least by bringing the Gospel of Stuart to Femme.)

Speaking of post-War (and redeemed) Draco, I can only say that for me as for the Tenth Doctor (and David Tennant himself), the Fifth Doctor was, is, and ever shall be my doctor, and that has not failed to inform my concept of Draco.

I could go on: my Nev as stealing quirks and quiddities from John Cushnie, Eric Robson, and most of GQT, alongside defiantly ‘Northern’ intellectuals such as Alan Bennett and Simon Armitage and AJP Taylor and JB Priestley, say, (and of course Wainwright himself) – with touches of Hague and dear Eric Pickles: note, please, that these are all persons who should have nothing to say to one another, just as one’s character needn’t share a sexuality with any of those whose mannerisms one has plundered in making her: but I must proceed to my point.

Just as we are all the sum of our several genes and circs, so too is every character the product of a lineage: in the case of fictional characters, the tropes and archetypes as made new by borrowing from those we know or have observed. Just as it is not in fact true that ‘all words are awesome words’ – an amateur’s philosophy, I fear, that risks teaching aspiring writers that quantity is superior to quantity, and risks not teaching that in fact, quite often, the sparer, the better – so is it false to believe that characters can be cut from whole cloth and whipped together from archetypes. It is in the observed details which the observant writer steals from chaps at his club or folk in the shops, that they are given life.

So I ask you, all of you, to think seriously about this. Are you observing sufficiently? Are you willing to put aside ‘niceness’ and all that rot and gleefully steal what you can from every source you see in your fellow men? Who influences your conceptions of your characters or of JKR’s? Do you know? Examine them and yourself: can you say? (And if so, do feel free to tell us in comments.) Because this an indispensable exercise: for the writer specially, the unexamined life – one’s own, and still more one’s characters and their characterisations – is not worth living.

Which is why my timeless and ageless friend in whose honour I write is one of the best in – or out – of fandom. Cultivate, I implore us all, a similarly seeing eye.

An Habitation Enforced, for the 2012 Next Gen Christmas do, in which Teddy realises at last his place in his family;

Lessons at Christmas, an Evelake service of lessons and carols;

Evensong on a Thursday in ordinary time, for 2012’s Dudley Redeemed;

The Eve of the Feast, a bit of All Hallows’ humour;

The Road to Roundabout, for the 2012 HP Friendship fest, featuring Our Dud;

And it could be me, and it could be thee, also for the 2012 HP Friendship fest, focussing on the long friendship of Griselda Marchbanks and Augusta Longbottom;

Angels and ministers of Grace, defend us, a Wizarding-cricketing fantasia for Femme;

The Secret Ministry, a vignette for Noe;

Fierce Light, for the 2012 HP Next Gen Fest;

and of course the 2012 Career Fair fic,

Bezique (being posted properly at AO3; and of course up at the fest).

Bezique is rather over 120 thousand words. Eve of the Feast and Secret Ministry are just under 300 and just over 400, respectively. All told, the fictive efforts for the year totalled between 196 and 197 thousand words. The legitimate work of publication in the year ran to 301470 words – not all of them mine, but my co-author and I do edit one another as well as ourselves, so….

HD Writers have their own template, for what it’s worth (I have excised almost all the – largely American, in my view – balls in it (‘who was your telly boyfriend’? Oh, really)):

Statistics:

Calendar Year: 2012

Total Stories Written: 10.

Total Words Written: 196 to 197000.

Shortest Story: The Eve of the Feast.

Longest: Bezique.

Fandoms written in: HP.

Your biggest fandom disappointment(s) of the year: Too little from Noe, Femme, and Brammers.

Your biggest fandom anticipations for the New Year: Lashings of fic from Brammers, Femme, and Noe.

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted? I never anticipate.

My best story this year: Not for me to say.

Most fun story: Not for me to say.

Sexiest story: Not for me to say.

Story with single sexiest moment: Not for me to say.

Kinkiest story: Ha.

Sweetest story: Not for me to say.

Saddest story: Not for me to say.

Most horrific story: I’m not sure you mean to use that word.

Story with the best premise: Not for me to say.

Best Use of Language: Not for me to say.

Most unintentionally revealing story: Not for me to say. How in buggery wd I know?

“Holy crap, that’s wrong, even for you” story: Not for me to say.

Story that shifted my perception of the characters: Don’t be puerile.

Favourite OC: Not for me to say.

Favourite portrayal of: Not for me to say.

Favourite opening lines: Not for me to say.

Favourite closing lines: Not for me to say.

Other favourite lines: Not for me to say.

Hardest/Easiest story to write: All of them.

Story I didn’t write but will shall at some point, I swear: My various fest-prompts that weren’t taken up. And someday, Brammers and I shall take on our Aurors-at-the-Ashes epic, I assure you.

What story do you want to have written? The next one, as a matter of course.

Most underappreciated/over-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion: Not for me to say.

Biggest disappointment: Not for me to say.

Biggest surprise: Not for me to say.

A story I want remembered: All of them, obviously. What an idiotic question.

This year’s theme and the story that demonstrates it most: Not for me to say.

My favourite story this year (of my own): Not for me to say.

I don’t mean to be unkind, truly, but the tenor of mind that is reflected in some of these questions – and those I cut altogether (jossing, telly girlfriends, favourite bloody songs) – is disturbing. It is disturbing because many writers in fandom who aren’t already dream of being Real Writers (whatever that means). And the whole set of unspoken assumptions underpinning that questionnaire is almost precisely calculated to prevent their achieving that goal: those are questions, predicated upon assumptions, that are absolutely those rather of amateurs than professionals.

But I’ve said that at length, a year and a bit ago.

[Dr Johnson] treats with the utmost contempt the opinion that our mental faculties depend, in some degree, upon the weather; an opinion, which they who have never experienced its truth are not to be envied, and of which he himself could not but be sensible, as the effects of weather upon him were very visible. Yet thus he declaims: ‘Surely, nothing is more reproachful to a being endowed with reason, than to resign its powers to the influence of the air, and live in dependence on the weather and the wind for the only blessings which nature has put into our power, tranquillity and benevolence. – This distinction of seasons is produced only by imagination operating on luxury. To temperance, every day is bright; and every hour is propitious to diligence. He that shall resolutely excite his faculties, or exert his virtues, will soon make himself superiour to the seasons; and may set at defiance the morning mist and the evening damp, the blasts of the east, and the clouds of the south.’

– Boswell’s Life, citing The Idler, XI.

The notion that one can write better during one season of the year than another Samuel Johnson labelled, ‘Imagination operating upon luxury.’ Another luxury for an idle imagination is the writer’s own feeling about the work. There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

That is all on earth ye know – or need to know. This notion that one must, darling, simply must, my dear, have a special cocoon with things positioned just so and a north light and, I don’t know, a cloisonné mouse pad or some damned thing, is utter balls. Writing isn’t a sacred trance or a sacrament or a mood or a Mysterious Communion with the Anima Mundi, it’s a bloody job, damn it all. Get on with it. Get, in fact, on yer bike.