By Orson Scott Card

Vivid and noteworthy characters usually are not born: they must be made

This booklet is a suite of instruments: literary crowbars, chisels, mallets, pliers and tongs. Use them to pry, chip, yank and sift strong characters out of where the place they stay on your imagination.

Award-winning writer Orson Scott Card explains intensive the suggestions of inventing, constructing and offering characters, plus dealing with point of view in novels and brief tales. With particular examples, he spells out your narrative options—the offerings you will make in developing fictional humans so "real" that readers will think they comprehend them like contributors in their personal families.

You'll find out how to:

  • Draw characters from various sources
  • Make characters exhibit who they're by means of the issues they do and say, and by way of their person "style"
  • Develop characters readers will love—or like to hate
  • Distinguish between significant characters, minor characters and walk-ons, and strengthen every one appropriately
  • Choose the simplest standpoint to bare the characters and movement the storytelling
  • Decide how deeply you'll want to discover your characters' concepts, feelings, and attitudes

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Extra info for Elements of Fiction Writing - Characters & Viewpoint: Proven advice and timeless techniques for creating compelling characters by an award-winning author

Example text

So I have divided this book into three parts: invention, construction, and performance. Don’t imagine for a moment that the actual process of characterization will ever be as neat and tidy as the chapters and sections of this book. I doubt that you could use the chapters of this book as a checklist, “characterizing” mechanically as you go. Instead you should bring the questions and ideas in each chapter to your own work, the stories you believe in and care about. See which aspects of characterization you already handle well and which you might have overlooked; examine your handling of point of view to see whether you’re helping your readers or confusing them.

Asian Americans are disproportionately successful in mathematics and science. To northerners, southerners seem to drawl; to southerners, northerners jabber. Westerners speak with a twang. Foreigners usually speak English with an accent. All of these stereotypes have a few — or even many — exceptions. The actual stereotypes a community believes in will change over time, as community needs and fears and other attitudes change. What doesn’t change is the fact that humans identify people according to stereotypes, whatever they happen to be, and you will, consciously or not, use stereotypes as part of characterization in every story you write.

Because the minute something worked to stop the crying, the story would be over. If one of them had suggested that the babysitter should examine the baby’s body, then I would have asked what the babysitter found. Maybe a bruise, maybe a horrible bug — who knows what they would have come up with? It might have led to the babysitter finding out the cause of the crying. But since nobody came up with any suggestions except the obvious and uninteresting ones, I made them keep going — I wouldn’t let the baby stop crying.

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