Rosanne Dingli

Rosanne Dingli

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Why I love Interiors Magazines

Courtesy House to Home
Come into my study, my bedroom or my lounge, and you will be astonished at the number of interiors magazines that are stacked, filed or simply lying around, waiting to be read. There are British home decoration magazines, American interiors journals, and of course Australian residential style periodicals.

Is it a covert passion, is it wishful thinking? Have I missed my calling and secretly desire to be an interior stylist, rather than a novelist? Why is this creative writer so taken up with the fine detail that goes into the furnishing and equipping of a home?

The answer is a simple one. Interiors are very good indicators of the character and life-attitude of the occupier of that space. Displayed belongings, kinds of books, colour, design and style are things that tell us a lot about the person who lives there. So I mentally choose the rooms the characters in my books might live in, and think of them in those spaces. Levels of tidiness are not as important as what a particular protagonist chooses to place on a shelf, or what colour to have the walls of a kitchen, or what kind of crockery to place food upon.

A character whose belongings are retro, say... sixties, would dress, think and behave in such a different way from another whose rooms are decked out in carefully chosen Regency antiques, with furniture that looks like it's been dipped in honey, and expensive curtains and carpets that reflect the era. A reader would know exactly how to mentally conjure these two different persons. A reader would imagine them accurately right away: simply from a description of what their houses look like on the inside.

Courtesy Best Home Design
When creating a 'baddie' I could put him in a house that is totally meticulously and scrupulously tidy, decorated in ultra-modern, sparse urban chic, in shades of beige, grey and dull white, with black and white steel-framed pictures on the walls. Here and there are highlighted objects in bright red: a cushion, an ornament, a vase. You can see him already, can't you? His hair is sleeked back, and he carefully adjusts a single tall ornament to precisely the correct position after his housekeeper has left. Then he takes the keys to the safe, which is in plain view in the bare office, where one sheet of paper lies on the desk. It's all sterile, and exact, particular and ... deadly.

All this from seeing a minimilist interior in a magazine! It is a visual metaphor: the steel is a precursor of his gun, the red splashes are of course blood.

Interiors: they can be so important in fiction. And my magazines provide the personality of every single character I create.
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12 comments:

  1. Great article and insight into the creative process Roseanne. I know the objects I have in my apartment speak worlds about me. Yoga figures (a gift from Mom) on the corner shelf; plants mostly watered; area rugs but no carpet; always lots of wood and windows; just a few pieces of arts or crafts that I created; many witches; sarongs in some of the doorways; guitar under the couch. Do you know who I am?

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  2. Indeed I do, Brenda. Careful... you might find a version of yourself in one of my books one day!

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  3. Good post, Rosanne. Interiors are so important.Loved reading your interview too. Had a chuckle about the person you saw becoming your character. That's exactly what happend to me with Abby, my main character in Streets on a Map to be published shortly.

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  4. Some writers have similar inspiration triggers, Dale. A good visual prompt is hard to beat.

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  5. Very well written and interesting observations. I look forward to reading further..

    Have a super day!

    Michael

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  6. You are always welcome Michael. It's amazing how the everyday and the mundane can be raised to figure in fiction.

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  7. It's fascinating to see how much detail goes into the development of a character before pen is even put to paper!

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  8. Yes, Faraz - they develop into quasi-real people, and the author misses them when the book goes off to the publishers.

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  9. Out of interest - and I understand if you don't want to answer this - how often are your characters based on real people you have met, either loosely, largely or entirely?

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  10. Good question, Faraz: most of my characters are amalgamations of real people I know, characters in other books, the appearance of movie stars... and so forth. So I can have a 'baddie', for example, who looks like George Clooney, talks and thinks like my Uncle George, and sings like George Foreman, but dresses like Georgia O'Keefe!!

    That was a strange example, but I think you get the picture: in my book Death in Malta, the parish priest sounded a bit like one of my school teachers, but I pictured him physically like Orson Welles.

    In my forthcoming thriller, the female protagonist looks like an Italian woman I met on my travels, thinks and acts like one of my old schoolfriends, and becomes as determined and single-minded as someone in my family!

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  11. I like the look of your blog. Like you I am also a great fan of interior magazines though I have nothing to do with interior designing. It is good to know how characters are created.

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  12. I'm glad I'm not the only one to like those magazines! Thanks for visiting, Farrukh.

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