Over the past few weeks I’ve given a few interviews in relation to The Brotherhood and one of the most prominent questions I receive is ‘which characters and events in the book are real / true?’
Well, at the risk of being sued, here goes. In my first post I told you how the first manuscript I wrote was autobiographical. By the time I got around to The Brotherhood, I’d found that it was actually a lot more fun to fictionalise characters and events. I could make them uglier, more annoying, more sexist and more naïve than in real life.
In truth though, there’s a fair bit of myself sprinkled throughout a number of the characters; Lucy (her youthful naivety), Jo (the relief of leaving it all behind and her dream job in London – which just so happens to be my dream job), Charlotte (how I used to feel about the need to keep up appearances) and Cameron (his ideas on the justice system).
When I think of Sergeant John White himself, the central holographic character in my novel, I think of one of my wonderful sergeants at Devonport from whom I learnt so much in the early days. It’s his idiosyncrasies, his mannerisms, his eye for detail, his nurturing spirit and his fierce loyalty that I’ve injected into John. That said, I’ve let the character of John himself make his own choices and mistakes – fictional mistakes that have nothing to do with my real life sarge.
Others such as Commissioner Ron Chalmers and Darren Rowley are a complex mish-mesh of multiple real life characters I had the occasional displeasure of associating with over my eleven years of policing. Whilst they are fictional creations, like most authors I imagine, I have blended a number of known characteristics, sayings, attitudes and flaws from the various real life people into the fictional constructs.
Some, such as Will and journo Tim are wholly fictional.
In terms of real life events, there’s only a handful scattered throughout the book. Jo and John’s encounter with the bowman, the court case Cam relates in the pub, the subsequent handclapping scene. As per the disclaimer, they’re all fictionalised for the purposes of melding into the story I’ve woven, but they all occurred. The cross bow incident, whilst it didn’t end quite as badly as Jo and John’s, was on of the crucial events in my policing life that made me reassess my career and conclude that I couldn’t keep policing on the frontline. It made me realise that one day, I might not come home. A stark, frightening reality.
Cam’s court case stole a year of peace from my and my husband’s life and also made me re-evaluate my faith in the complaints system. The handclapping debacle was possibly the nail in the coffin that left me fuming, red faced, shaking with anger and on the very precipice of telling a certain senior officer to shove his job fair up his arse.
People ask me for advice in relation to writing, so perhaps one thing I can advise is to dig deep, mine the events that have caused you such high emotion and build on them. You might not have been loving them at the time, but gee they can come in handy when you have a blank page sitting in front of you!
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