Why the
Ripper?
One of
the first questions one might ask me is why I decided to write a Jack
the Ripper novel. It all began as a dream I kept having for weeks.
No! I wasn't dreaming about Jack the Ripper even less a JTR novel. In
this repeating nocturnal fantasy I had, there was a man sitting in a
bar. He was observing women around him, observing each one carefully,
avoiding eye contact and writing down notes. A voice from somewhere
else in the bar, probably coming from another table, was addressing
him with these words: “I know what you're doing: stalking.”
I
couldn't get rid of this dream up until I told myself I should write
down something about it. A novel was the avenue I decided upon. A
story involving stalking? Not that exciting. How about a
stalking-serial killer? Great. Now all I had to do is selecting among
the hundreds of serial killers the one who would carry my nightmare.
You can easily imagine the task of going through the major serial
killer books. I won't even share with you what it could have demanded
of me.
Eventually,
I fell upon Jack the Ripper and was sort of discouraged by the number
of fiction opportunities he had offered writers for decades. I,
nevertheless, decided to work with the Ripper case, mainly because it
happened during the late Victorian era, a period I just can't get
enough of. The British accent, the wit of the Englishmen, the
architecture, the class conflicts, the lifestyles are only a few
elements I enjoy. As for the Ripper, I think the only storyline not
covered has been Jack verus Goldorak or the Terminator, so I had to
come up with something new. That's when Jack London's The People of
the Abyss fell on me like Newton's apple. It influenced me probably
more than any other late-Victorian-early-20th story. I wanted the
reader to live the life of the street people at the time of the
murders. What was going on in the mind of the people living in the
East End back then became the main factor for me to build this story
about an ordinary person, not a copper, trying to find the Ripper.
You went
through three rewrites?
Yes. The
first writing brought me in a long narrow dead-end storyline which I
won't describe just in case I find a way through and write a
different story. It was done with a third-person point of view (POV),
the most common writing technique found. It had a rather small set of
subplots most of them leading me nowhere. So in the second writing, I
dropped the subplots and switched to the first-person point of view.
The same thing happened, a dead-end, even if I honestly felt I had a
well framed storyline. The third writing was a total rewrite, the
only element I kept was the Jack the Ripper background and the
presence of someone observing another person reading in a crowded
pub. My nightmare stalker disappeared and became the main character,
Riley, an initially introverted and reluctant Ripper hunter who
quickly turns it into an obsession. Fearing he might die, he decided
to write down his story on an almost day-by-day basis making it a
diary someone finds decades later. It's the third and last writing.
Why a
first-person POV?
I
believed it offered me an easier way to keep the intrigue within a
limited range of situations, and allowed the main character to
express his true emotions and not those perceived by the other
characters the 'narrator' would introduce. Subplots within a
third-person POV novel probably allow the author a better ground for
that purpose than a first-person POV. I tend to believe that it all
depends on how one wants to handle the conflicts a novel carries
between the antagonist and the protagonist. In 'My Ripper Hunting
Days' it's a more inner conflict than one opposing the main character
and other characters. The combination of a first-person POV, the
story's frame, a diary, and the provenance of the character writing
his diary, Woodrow Riley, created certain constraints in terms of
wording. In the third-person POV, most of the time, the narrator uses
a wording different from the language each and every one of his
character uses. The writer will often describe a setting or a
character in a more flamboyant pure traditional literature style than
simple everyday words. It turned into one of the biggest challenges I
had with this kind of format: using the appropriate wording. Since
it's the 'diary' of a self-made young man, I wrote the narrative
sections in the same kind of language he would have used every day in
his life. It's not necessarily the kind one would find in a
third-person POV.
Did I
have an idea of what I was about to go through?
Not at
all! The challenge was tremendous, historical research being one
major element. Police archives were either lost, destroyed or
inaccessible. I had to rely upon the works of the great
ripperologists who had done a fascinating research job either in
books, archives or on two major forums, Casebook and JTR forums.
Newspaper archives completed the basis of my prime source
documentation. I also bought some documentation sources on the
Internet. For example, in the novel, my main character had to go to
Manchester. From what train station and at what time would he leave?
The answer came from a vintage edition of Bradshaw's Railway Guide I
bought on the net. However, besides the actual facts surrounding Jack
the Ripper I had to learn almost by heart a whole lot of period
elements. Let me give you a funny example of a situation I went
through. My main character is invited for dinner, and I decided to
have his host serve him a Vichyssoise soup which is a cold soup made
of puréed leeks, onions, potatoes, cream, and chicken stock only to
find out its original preparation dated somewhere around 1917! So I
had to serve them something different.
Since the
story happens in the end of the 19th century in UK, I read a lot of
Ripper period novels just to get into writing correct structure and
vocabulary. The structure of the British sentence is a bit different
from the North American one. So is the extended use of adverbs versus
adjectives, allowing the typical British character to keep a certain
distance, adjectives being considered as an emotional response. The
vocabulary and the spelling of many words had to be the kind used
back then.
Is
building a character playing God?
Almost,
although, it took me more than seven days. For me, a good character
is not only someone you set in a scene. He's a virtual human being
with a past, a lifestyle, a way he behaves, talks, dresses. From the
moment you begin to use him, the reader should be able to see him in
his mind like the same way the writer did when he created him. So
creating a character, is something that one has to seriously work on
once a broad storyline is built.
We will
often hear authors talking about invasive characters imposing their
presence within every chapter of a storyline, directly or indirectly.
I must admit I've always been aware of this possibility since I saw
Luigi Pirandello's play 'Six Characters in Search of an Author' some
thirty years ago. It's about a director and actors rehearsing a play
and suddenly who are interrupted by six bizarre persons appearing on
the stage and searching for an author to finish the story they all
have been involved in. As the play develops, these persons explain it
to the director and actors who decide to build something around it.
They actually take control of everything that follows. Well, the same
thing happened to me. As I would sketch out a chapter or a scene
using some of my characters, I would often lose control of what I
wanted to write because each character, given his personality, had
something he could say or do, and surprisingly, I would find myself
working in that direction.
What
about rhythm and pace?
Of
course, maintaining a good pace was also important to me, and I still
consider some paragraphs in my novel could be deleted.
I seem to
have detected a rather recent tendency in fiction book writing. Let's
say, dating no more than 10-15 years ago. It's strongly influenced by
action movies, either plot or character-driven plots. In a movie, a
scene lasts a few minutes where you will find a beginning, a climax
and an end delivered through the setting, the dialog or the action.
The narrative portion is becoming minimal if not totally absent.
Narrative descriptions are integrated through the eyes of the
characters or within the dialog which allows a continuous pace. If
one reads Dan Brown's novels and watches the movies, he sees how
the screenplay preserved this kind of writing.
I could talk about many other aspects of novel writing, but I'll keep for an other article.
