Mixing your colours

Often, when writing early drafts of books, you can end up with whole scenes that never make the final cut, or which simply don’t belong in the story. (One thing I’ve found is that the most carefully planned story can shatter into pieces the moment you start trying to write it). But these orphaned scenes are not wasted, far from it. They are part of what I have started to call ‘mixing your colours’.

When talking about writing I tend to use painting metaphors a lot, which is weird as I can’t paint at all. But I tend to think of characters as different colours. Not in a literal way (I’m not synaesthetic) but in the sense of them all being there, lined up on your palette. To write in a particular character’s voice, to write them into a scene, you have to get into their head. But you can’t do this unless you already know them well.

Just as an artist has to mix their colours properly before starting to paint, so it helps if a writer has already written a number of scenes featuring their key characters. Once this has been done, you have a fairly good idea of how each character reacts in certain situations, how they sound, what they say, and what they’d never say. After a while, you don’t have to think about it… you just dip your brush into the appropriate character’s colour and they appear on the page, with even the smallest brushstroke containing something of them.

I tend to ‘mix my colours’ as I go, learning about the characters during the messy first draft. But I’m sure it can be done consciously and deliberately too. It must be a good idea to pick random dramatic scenes from life, and write your character taking part in them. By the end of the process, you ought to have a good quantity of their ‘colour’ on your writer’s palette, there to use freely when you start writing the book for real. Who knows, I may even try that myself.