Leaving a little something to the imagination

One of the arguments you always hear when a novel is televised or made into a film is: ‘it’s not how I imagined it to be when I was reading the book’. We all know the disappointment of seeing our favourite character badly translated onto screen: I know that, for me, much of the disappointment of The Hunger Games film was that I felt it was badly miscast (as fine an actress as Jennifer Lawrence is, to me she was too Amazonian to play scrappy, starving Katniss) and I am, frankly, dreading seeing well-known short-arse Tom Cruise playing the 6’5” hero of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels when the film hits our screens this year.

But how does that issue affect you when you’re actually the person who wrote the characters? I’ve been spending a lot of time promoting my book Dark Dates, lately, while also starting to work on the sequel. One of the questions that regularly comes up in interviews is ‘who would you want to play the main characters on TV/in a movie?’ – and I admit it’s one which has me stumped. I can think of a few ideas to play the central male figures, Cain and Laclos (and the secondary male characters, like the Counsel) – Charlie Hunnan, Tom Hiddleston, Ben Browder, Timothy Olyphant , Jason Isaacs – but if I’m honest, this is just me drawing up a list of men I fancy and would like to be in the same room as (I’d get to do that as a writer, yes? Yes?) When it comes to the central female character Cassandra, I’m utterly clueless: and in part, that’s because I was deliberately vague in describing her. There’s hardly any clues to her physical appearance in the book, because I wanted her to be an ‘everywoman’ of sorts: someone we can all imagine being. Tying that down with lots of concrete details would have spoiled it for me.

One area where this has practical implications, though, is when you start thinking about the book cover, and promoting the book. Often, particularly in the urban fantasy genre, covers have figures on them: in much the same tradition as romance books, they like to draw you in with gorgeous people. Of course, if you’re going down the self-publishing path, as I am with this book, that gives you the issue of paying for models (or roping in your most photogenic friends and using very good lighting) – but I think even if I had the money to do that, I think I’d be against it. It’s far too easy to slip into cheesy; to make your heroines look like glamour models and your heroes look like Fabio, or  to make your monsters silly rather than scary - and then you've scuppered your book before anyone has read the first page.

When I was working with my cover designer, Caroline Goldsmith, we deliberately chose to use things that were significant to the story, but steer away from actual people. In working on the promotional material for the new book – you can see the teaser below, and a trailer for it here – we worked with images of London, as the city is such an integral part of the action. If you’re going to use one of the world’s most striking cities as a backdrop for your book, surely it makes sense to utilise that – and leave the rest up to the readers’ imagination?

Using the London skyline - based on a photo by Caroline Goldmsith

As a closing note – if you’ll excuse the geek out – I’ll include this warning about book covers from one of my favourite TV shows, Supernatural: which has the wonderfully meta storyline of the main characters, Sam and Dean, having their lives turned into a series of novels within the show. Which turns this…

Into this...

See what I mean about putting people on the cover?

What do you think? Do you have favourite covers which feature characters from the book? Let me know!

Judging a Book by its Cover

When we write, we create pictures in our heads. Which of us has not felt that a character’s face is as familiar to us as that of one of our own family, or “seen” a particularly dramatic scene as if it were unfolding inches away from us? This kind of creative visualisation is key to what we do – in a sense we’re not simply writers, but painters too, and without even having to pick up a brush. These mental pictures may be vivid to us, but they are also very personal. No matter how skilfully we describe a scene, or seek to capture the exact colour of a character’s hair in words, the chances are that we will never truly replicate what we see in our mind’s eye. Readers have their own pictures, and what they see in our writing may be a world away from what we ourselves believe to be truly there.

Of course, most of the time, the very privacy of these pictures in our heads prevents them from becoming an issue. What does it matter if one reader sees our MC as slight and brunette, another as curvy and blonde? – the chances are that we will never know. But there is one exception - one occasion when imaginary images become concrete – the moment when a book is given a cover. Cover designers have a daunting (and considering that most writers have strong views on their own work, an unenviable) task. They must effectively sum up a book in a single image. They must find the perfect picture to symbolise the conflicts, passions, themes and nuances that make up the complex tapestry of a novel. And because they have not written the book, they must interpret it through impartial eyes.

The picture that I have chosen to illustrate this post is an example of a cover designer making so bold a statement that almost no statement is made at all. I must confess I haven’t read the book, but I wonder what Eric G Wilson made of the fruits of the designer’s labours. Did he stare at the page, disbelieving, outraged that his work had been reduced to a slick of yellow and a semicircle of text? Or was he elated? – had the very simplicity of the design “got” his novel in a way of which he had barely dreamed?

I must confess that when I saw an initial cover design for my own novel, I was unsure. I looked at the image, and I couldn’t relate it back to the book I had created – couldn’t imagine that picture in my head. Luckily, the design was eventually changed, but I was surprised at how much it had disturbed me. I had not thought that I was “precious” about covers, but I soon discovered that although I had had no clear idea of what would fill that blank space, I instinctively knew what wouldn’t.

I’m already trying to imagine the cover for my second book – but whilst they say a picture paints a thousand words, perhaps expecting it to paint ninety thousand is asking a little too much. Could your book be summed up by an image… and if so, what would it be?