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The Posh, the Privileged and the Paranormal

The Posh, the Privileged and the Paranormal

Tag Archives: vampire diaries

My inspiration for characters in the Cavaliers – Part 2 – Lord George Stewart

26 Monday May 2014

Posted by georgianaderwent in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

bad boys, characters, civil war, george osbaldeston, george stewart, grisha, inspiration, lj smith, mill and boon, thesis, vampire diaries, Writing

On Saturday, I kicked off my mini-series on the inspirations for my characters with a look at the ideas that came together to create Augustine Piso. Today, I’m focussing on George Stewart, who judging from comments in review, is almost certainly the most popular character in the Cavaliers. The powerful, womanising part love interest, part borderline villain is certainly the character I most enjoy writing. 

As I explained in the previous instalment, this will be of most obvious interest to fans of The Cavaliers, but I’d like to think that it would also appeal to writers and anyone interested in how characters are developed.

 Lord George Stewart

Age: Born in 1618. Turned in 1642, aged 24.

Place of birth: Aubigny, France.

Maker: Richard

Offspring: As a Senior Officer of the Cavaliers, he’s created huge numbers of vampires over the centuries, though (at the start of the series, at least) he’s never turned anyone on a one on one basis. 

Current Role: Student of Classics at Christ Church, Oxford. Senior Officer of the Cavaliers.

Special powers and talents: Generally regarded as having the strongest mind control talent of all the Cavaliers, and is able to use it in different ways to most vampires, such as controlling mobile phone signals. 

THE INSPIRATION

Shortly after I’d published Oxford Blood, I met up with a university friend and fellow former history student who I hadn’t seen in a while, and inevitably, I dropped the existence of my book into the conversation.

“Let me guess,” he said. “I bet you called the main male character George.”

And grudgingly, I had to admit that while there was some room for argument over who exactly the “main” male character was, the series did indeed have a fairly high profile George.

The reason he guessed went back to the time when I’d been writing my thesis. I’ve vaguely mentioned this before on this blog, but in essence, my thesis was on women’s influence in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century politics. Harriet writes a seventeenth-century version of it in Ivory Terrors. It focussed specifically on a gentry woman called Jane Osbaldeston, who, following the death of her husband while her son is a young child, single-handedly controls the political environment in her area and the surrounding towns.   Jane is awesome. A total feminist heroine who tends to be something of a footnote in most texts dealing with the period, even those focussed on female history. My next writing project may well be a fictionalised and romanticised version of her life.

The trouble was, there were two main primary sources for researching good old Jane. One was letters between her and the local aristocrat, Earl Fitzwilliam, which I tracked down in the Sheffield archives and painstakingly transcribed. The other was her son’s autobiography, which is extremely rare, but which I found  in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. In many ways, the book was an excellent source of information on Jane. The trouble was, it was a better source of information on her charming cad of a son. Enter George Osbaldeston into my research. Exit any claims to any one taking my thesis at all seriously. Okay, that’s not entirely true. The thesis itself  remained perfectly serious and sensible and my tutor loved it. It was just that whenever anyone asked me about it, I tended to talk about George in an adoring tone rather than Jane in a scholarly one, which led to a certain degree of good-natured mockery from my fellow students.

File:George Osbaldeston by Sir Francis Grant.jpg

A few days before the thesis had to be submitted, I was fairly seriously stressed, as tends to be the case in these situations. Now, the friend who I mentioned in the opening paragraph and I had a rather strange standing joke. Basically, we’d buy each other old second hand Mill and Boon books (I think the American equivalent is Harlequin)  and compete to see who could find the ones with the silliest title – I think “The Viking’s Defiant Bride” was pretty much the winner. And so, to cheer me up, he wrote me a little Mills and Boon-style story featuring George Osbaldeston. I don’t think I’ve ever been so amused by anything in my life, and it reinvigorated me just enough to get the thesis safely submitted.

So in short, George was originally named for the guy from my thesis, and in his charming but womanising ways, they share certain personality traits. Unfortunately, George Osbaldeston was born in 1786, whereas my character absolutely needed to have been young during the Civil War, which began in 1642.

When I was just beginning to plot Oxford Blood, I went for a wander through the National Gallery, and I spotted this painting of two young Cavaliers, just before the war began. I thought it was a beautiful painting, and that despite the way historical figures often don’t look attractive to modern eyes, the men seemed very attractive. There was also an astonishing pathos about the painting. Here are two very young, very rich brothers, showing off in their finery, looking absolutely happy with their lot in life. According to the description of the painting, within five years, both of them would have died in the war.

And I just thought that one of them (the one on the right, in blue)looked just like i wanted my key civil war vampire to look. The only problem was that his name was apparently Bernard, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to have a romantic anti-hero with such a stupid name. And besides, I’d already pretty much settled on George.

So I merged their names, and went with George Stewart, and in my mind, the character looked like the one from the painting (albeit having modernised himself a  bit for the current period) and acted more or less like the one from my thesis.

And I wrote allsorts of things about him, including that he had an older brother called James who died at Edgehill, leaving him as the heir – which I totally made up. If you were to re-read Oxford Blood, however, you’d notice one strange thing about George – he’s never referred to by his surname and never uses it himself. The reason was that although in my notes I had him down as George Stewart, I still sort of thought of him as George Osbaldeston.

And this is where it gets a bit strange. One day, I did a bit of research on Bernard Stewart, and I discovered something mind-blowing – he had an older brother called George Stewart. And so I looked into him, and lo and behold, everything about the real George was absolutely perfect. He had an older brother called James. He fought for the king in the Civil War and died at Edgehill in his early twenties. He’s buried in Christ Church College, where my character has rooms. He was so ridiculously passionate that he defied his uncle the king to marry the woman he loved against his wishes. He had a cool title. I read his Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Stewart,_9th_Seigneur_d’Aubigny) with an increasingly dropped jaw, and from then on, the character tended to be referred to by his full name, and I started to think of him less as the man from the thesis, and more as the historical George Stewart – though he seemed slightly less blond and attractive than his little brother Bernard, so I retained him as the mental image and merged together a few points from all four of the brothers’ personalities and biographies.

So that’s the weird and fortuitous mix of historical characters that came together to give George his name, background, and the basics of his personality. But that’s still only half the story. Firstly, there were the real life inspirations. Unlike some characters, George was not  directly heavily based on any one – or even any two or three – real life acquaintances. He was, however, based to some degree on a certain type of person I often came across at Oxford – extremely posh, very good-looking, utterly charming but ultimately not very nice people. One of my favourite lines in one of my favourite plays is the following from a Streetcar Named Desire:

“A man like that is someone to go out with—once—twice—three times when the devil is in you. But live with? Have a child by?” 

It sort of sums up the people I have in mind. By all means ogle them and have some fun, but don’t let your heart get involved and don’t be upset when it inevitably goes wrong. From the safety of a long-term relationship, I have a certain amount of admiration for people who can effectively turn on the charm at will, but I was always horribly pervious to their charms once upon a time.

I’ve always believed that a key theme in romance novels is the idea of the man who is adored by all women, acts like a cad towards most of them, but truly loves the heroine. I think it plays into some near universal fantasy of being special, and on the whole, I think it’s a dangerous one – people may get a bit more mature as they age, but I’m pretty sure that it’s rare for someone to completely change their personality, outlook and behaviour.  

As you can probably tell, i’m ambivalent at best about the “bad boy gone good” love interest. 99% of the time, when it’s done in a contemporary, broadly realistic novel, I hate it.  Somehow, however, in the context of a fantasy or paranormal tale, it quickly becomes more palatable, and when done well, these sorts of characters are some of my all time favourites. For me, the key is that they have to not just be “bad boys” in the sense of attractive men who drink, fight, and womanise. They have to be bordering on actual villains. And this was the sort of character I wanted to write here. 

I mentioned in yesterday’s post about Augustine that my favourite character in Gladiator was the evil emperor rather than the heroic legionnaire and gladiator. I tend to fall a little bit in love with the charismatic, scheming, unpredictable villain (far more than the staid hero or heroine), resent their lack of screen time, and feel a bit disappointed when they are defeated and die unmourned. So when a character like this gets to be a love interest too, I rejoice. Screen time! Romantic scenes! Ambiguity and a chance for redemption! Though hopefully not too much redemption – I liked them because,  not despite of their dastardly plans, after all.

My all time best example of this sort of character is Julian in the Forbidden Game series, one of my absolute favourite reads as a teenager, and still a firm (if guilty) favourite now. To attempt to summarise what quickly become a fairly involved plot, Julian is some sort of demon from northern mythology. A scorchingly hot and charming demon, needless to say. He poses as a shop-keeper, sells the heroine a board game in which players have to draw their worst nightmare, and then she, her boyfriend, and all her closest friends get sucked into the game and have to face their nightmares in reality – which in some cases risks being fatal. Julian pursues them around the game, has them pursued by his monster animals and tries to force the heroine to marry him. So proper villain territory. And in any normal book, he really should be despised by the characters and booed by the readers and the plot should focus on bringing him down. But increasingly, the heroine starts to fall in love with him of her own accord, and their scenes together, despite things never going further than kisses, are just some of the sexiest and most romantic things I’ve ever read. And this is not just me being twisted – nominally, the book contains the inevitable love triangle, but the heroine’s actual boyfriend stays firmly in the background for 90% of the series, and every review or fan page I’ve ever come across absolutely adores Julian. Incidentally, one of my very favourite aspects of the Forbidden Game is it’s ending, and without wanting to spoil things too much for anyone who’s read it and hasn’t yet got round to reading Ivory Terrors (or vice versa) let’s just say I was inspired by that too…

This sort of character is basically LJ Smith’s trademark, and it’s one of the things that made her one of my favourite authors – and probably my absolute favourite paranormal author. It’s something that crops up in other books too, most recently, for me, in the Grisha Series, which was pretty much my favourite book of last year (review here) helped in large part by The Darkling, who fits this kind of role perfectly.

It’s a style of character I also love to write.  Prophecy Filler, the first proper novel  I attempted to write, way back when I was about seventeen, had a character who absolutely fit this pattern. He was an ancient force of evil and trying to destroy the world – but was sure to make time for some sexy scenes with the heroine who was prophesied to stop him. (Incidentally, I really, really, want to rewrite Prophecy Filler now I’m hopefully slightly more adept at writing and slightly more resistant to the lure of giving characters stupid names). When I was plotting Oxford Blood, having a character a bit like this was an absolute must for me, and though he’s presented as less of a direct villain than some of these examples (in the sense that the heroine isn’t actively working against him most of the time) in his moments of ruthlessness around both sex and death, and in his intense scenes with Harriet, full of sexual tension and a longing to give in but a determination not to, George really fits this mould. And it’s always made him damn fun to write. 

 

Would you like it if your book was made into a film?

24 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by georgianaderwent in Books

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

cloud atlas, film adaptations, game of thrones, Oxford Blood, the dark is rising, vampire diaries

Authors – would you like it if your book was made into a film?

At first glance, this sounds like a stupid question on two levels. Firstly, because it’s not very likely to happen – only a tiny minority of books ever get made into films and if yours isn’t already  bit of a household name, it’s probably not going to be one of them. And secondly, because isn’t the answer obvious? A film deal gets you cash up-front and probably a huge rush of interest in your original books. I bet there isn’t a single author, literary or populist, who hasn’t at some point idly dreamed about seeing their book on screen and done a bit of fantasy casting in their head.

So yes, let’s be honest. If Hollywood came calling, brandishing an Oxford Blood screenplay, I wouldn’t say no and I doubt anyone else would either. I’d do it for the money and the exposure and the bragging rights, but that still leaves the deeper question – would I actually like that this was happening?

I started thinking about this because I went to see the film of Cloud Atlas last night. As someone who reads vociferously across a wide range of genres, I struggle to pick one book as my all time favourite, but if I was forced to pick, Cloud Atlas would be a pretty strong contender.

Somewhere on here, I describe my taste in books as “I love to read literary novels that don’t forget about plot and fantasy/paranormal novels that don’t forget about prose. My absolute favourite books are generally those that blur the boundaries between the two categories.”

Cloud Atlas is an unashamedly post-modern literary novel. It has a complex structure, cleverly parodies a number of different writing styles, namechecks philosophers and deals with big questions around the point of existence, the inevitability of conflict and evil and ideas of reincarnation and recurrence. And yet it’s formed of six interconnected stories, one of which is the best futuristic dystopia I’ve ever read and another of which is a post-apocalyptic fantasy. How many books can claim to have been nominated for both the Booker Prize and the Nebula Award?

Oh, and if you’ve read my books or this blog, you might have noticed that I rather like aristocratic historical cads. Robert Frobisher – hot bisexual artistocratic old Etonian composer on the run from 1930s Cambridge (Oxford would have been better but you can’t have everything) – is one of my all time favourite characters.

I’m getting slightly off the point here, but this is a book I can’t help rhapsodising about. If you haven’t read it, go and do so. If you have, read it again because you probably missed lots the first time around.

cloud atlas poster

When I heard there was going to be an all-star film of this masterpiece, I felt excited and horrified in roughly equal measure. In theory, what could be better than a film of a book you love? The opportunity to see all the characters and places you’ve imagined in your head up there on the screen in front of you should be an utter treat. But I’d got my hopes up and had them dashed one too many times to be entirely happy about the idea.

Just before Christmas, I wrote about how much I love The Dark is Rising. A few years ago it was turned into a travesty of an abomination called The Seeker. Having read the synopsis of the film, I couldn’t face watching it in the cinema. I finally cracked and watched it through my fingers when it was on tv a few years later. I can safely say that it is both one of the worst films I have ever seen and bears practically no resemblance to the book it’s meant to be based on. Everything’s been modernised and dumbed down. The hero’s suddenly American, despite one of the greatest charms of this book being its absolute sense of place in the Home Counties and then Wales and Cornwall in the sequels. The film was utterly panned by critics, book fans and those poor hapless people who happened to go and see it. I couldn’t help but think that if they’d actually made a faithful adaptation of the brilliant source material it might have done rather better.

This scene is not in the books I have absolutely no idea what it going on here!

This scene is not in the books. I have absolutely no idea what is going on here!

The other adaptation that regularly gets to me is the tv series of the Vampire Diaries. The original books are the ones that originally got me into vampire fiction and though I’ve since read things that are probably technically better, they are still my favourite vampire novels. I was so excited to hear there was going to be a tv series. I watched the first episode in a frenzy of excitement that as the series went on gradually turned into confusion. Where was the plot going? Who were some of these characters? Had the director read the book or just a list of characters names on Wikipedia? About five episodes in I had to stop watching as it was driving me mad. As I tend to visit a lot of paranormal themed websites, I’ve remained vaguely up to date on what’s happening with the plot and most synopsises I read make absolutely no sense to me as a fan of the books.

It’s reasonable light entertainment rather than the jaw-dropping crappiness of the Seeker, but what it’s not is the Vampire Diaries as I know them. If someone wanted to make a high school vampire TV series to capture the Twilight market, I cannot understand for the life of me why they didn’t just write an original story rather than nominally base it on some books and then made an adaptation that has very little to do with them. I’m pretty sure that at the time the books weren’t famous enough to bring a huge fanbase along with them, so that’s not the answer).

Let me pause there and clarify something. When I complain about film adaptations that are nothing like the books, I’m not doing that super- fangirl thing of starting from the point that the text is sacred and nothing can be changed or omitted. I fully appreciate that films are a different media to books. I understand that for reasons of running length and cost, some characters and sub-plots might need to be cut and that for the cinematic experience, action scenes might need to be emphasised and quiet moments of introspection rushed over. I can even accept that parts of the main plot might need to play out subtly differently. The sort of “Nooo, they’ve cut Tom Bombardil from the Lord of the Rings film” thing is not my concern. What I hate is when a book is turned into a film that keeps some character names and a few big events and then spins what basically amounts to a different story around them.

Another of my favourite series is a Song of Ice and Fire, or as everyone now seems to know it, A Game of Thrones. The HBO series gives me faith that good adaptations are possible. That tv series is both a wonderful adapation of the source material and a great piece of entertainment in its own right. Of course, some things had to be changed (and there are one or two changes that I didn’t think were necessary and found a bit irritating) but it’s clear that the screenwriters and directors knew and loved the books and they made something that was recognisably A Song of Ice and Fire. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this has been one of the biggest tv hits in recent years. If you’re starting with good source material, trust it, don’t squander it.

So this brings me back to Cloud Atlas. Two horrific adaptations of my favourite books and one great one – which side was this going to land on? I didn’t think it could possibly be good. Unlike the other books I’ve mentioned, where the main thing I loved was the plot, Cloud Atlas is a book with a capital B. So much of it’s brilliance comes from it’s structure and the way it’s written. It could also fairly be described as basically six short stories. How on earth would it work as a film considering the problems directors seem to have with adapting basic linear narratives?

To my frustration, the film opened in the UK nearly five months after it had opened in the US, which is almost unheard of. Wildly impatient to see what the directors had done to it, I went on opening night, dragging along my reluctant fiancé who has often heard me going on about the book to anyone who’d listen but who wasn’t entirely convinced.

I reassured myself that Ben Whishaw (swoon) was playing Robert Frobisher. Even if everything else was horrible, at least I could enjoy watching one of my favourite actors play one of my favourite characters.

If Ben Whishaw was cased as Tom Flyte, I'd happily let them make the story be about zombies and set in Australia.

If Ben Whishaw was cased as Tom Flyte, I’d happily let them make the story be about zombies and set in Australia.

Somewhat to my amazement, I loved the film. It was brilliant. The individual stories were well told and the overarching themes were brought out and with a few exceptions (only one of which really bothered me – for anyone who has read it, they took away the twist from the end of Somni’s story), it was oddly faithful to the book. My fiancé really enjoyed it. Hurrah.

So to return to my original question. Say there was a film adaptation of Oxford Blood. I’ve gleefully cashed my royalty cheques and seen a boost in book sales – so that’s all good. But now it’s time to actually watch the thing. Am I overjoyed or horrified?

Let’s face it, there’ll be at least a few things that have changed. And if I get this defensive about books I’ve merely read, how would I ever cope with a book I’d written? Not to mention the fact that having been to Oxford, the slightest inaccuracy about what life is like at the university would probably get my hackles up.

And then there are the big issues. Most film productions are American, and they seem to like to have at least some American connection. Surely they couldn’t move the action to Harvard and rename the society the Confederates could they? But I have a horrible suspicion that they would at the very least make Harriet a visiting American student.

I’d also imagine that a director would pick an audience and play with it, so the blood and sex would either be ramped up to ten or completely toned down. I’d prefer the former if it came to it, but either would feel odd. I’m trying to decide what plot changes I could live with and which I couldn’t, but so far I’m drawing a blank on the latter.

The next thing is the characters. Apparently Anne Rice was beyond furious when she heard that Tom Cruise was going to be playing Lestat in the adaptation of Interview with the Vampire. I think if my film was getting such big name stars I’d probably manage to grin and bear it, but seeing a character in a film who doesn’t look like the book character in your head if disorientating – I imagine it’d be a thousand times worse if they look and sound nothing like the characters you’ve spent hours creating, who you sometimes dream about, who are in most part based on an unholy alliance of historical portraits and people I know.

What I really need is an actor who looks like this

What I really need is an actor who looks like this

Does any of this matter? After all, a bad adaptation doesn’t destroy the original book. I think the problem, whether we’re talking hypothetically about Oxford Blood or practically about real adaptations is that more people tend to watch films than read. Even minimally successful films will have a bigger audience than all but the absolute best selling books. Therefore for many people, the film is likely to be their first exposure to the material and they’ll generally believe that that’s broadly what the books are like. Apart from everything else, when watching Cloud Atlas I was worried it would be bad and my fiancé would wonder why I like the book so much. Also, once an adaptation has been made, there probably won’t be another one or at least not for decades. So every bad adaptation of a book means a good, faithful adaptation that is never going to happen. I’ll probably never get my wonderful, life affirming, “the scenes on the screen look just like the pictures in my head” versions of Vampire Diaries or the Dark is Rising, and however much I re-read the books, that’s a sad thought. If it was Oxford Blood, it would be a horrifying one.

So authors, apart from the base emotion of “woo, I’m going to be rich” how would you feel about an adaptation of your novel? Readers, do you tend to like book to film adaptations? Which do you like or hate and why? And what does anyone think of Cloud Atlas, the book or the film?

Ps. Check out this link for a very interesting article on this issue by David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443675404578060870111158076.html

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