Elements of Fiction Writing, page 1
ELEMENTS of FICTION WRITING
CHARACTERS
& VIEWPOINT
ORSON SCOTT CARD
CHARACTERS & VIEWPOINT. Copyright © 2010 by Orson Scott Card. Manufactured in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No other part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published by Writer’s Digest Books, an imprint of F+W Media, Inc., 4700 East Galbraith Road, Cincinnati, Ohio 45236. (800) 289-0963. Revised edition.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Card, Orson Scott.
Characters and viewpoint / by Orson Scott Card. — Rev. ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-59963-212-4
eISBN 13: 978-1-5996-3269-8
1. Fiction — Technique. 2. Characters and characteristics in literature. 3. Point of view (Literature) 4. Creative writing. I. Title.
PN3383.C4C37 2010
808.3 — dc22
2010040951
Edited by: Nancy Dibble and Scott Francis
Designed by: Claudean Wheeler
Illustrations © Dover Pictura/Art Nouveau
Production coordinated by: Debbie Thomas
DEDICATION
To Gert Fram, alias Nancy Allen Black: You never had any trouble finding an attitude or point of view, and as for inventiveness, you wrote the book.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe thanks to the editors at Writer’s Digest and Writer’s Digest Books, especially:
Thanks to Bill Brohaugh, who accepted my proposal for a brief article on using the “implied past” to help in characterization — and then accepted what I actually turned in, an article on making characters memorable that was so long it had to run in three issues of the magazine.
Thanks to Nancy Dibble, who as my editor on this book was both patient and helpful, far beyond what could fairly have been expected.
Thanks to all those who delayed the launch of a major and important publishing project while waiting for Card to get his act together.
And to those outside Cincinnati who helped, namely:
Thanks to my good friends Clark and Kathy Kidd for putting me up and putting up with me for two weeks as I finished the final draft of this book.
Thanks to the students in my writing class at the Center for Creative Arts in Greensboro, North Carolina, who forgave me — or kindly pretended to forgive me — for canceling two classes so I could finish this book.
Thanks to all the other writing students who have been the victims of my developing understanding of fiction; I learned from their successes and failures as much as I learned from my own.
In particular, I thank my teachers: François Camoin of the english department at the University of Utah; Clinton F. Larson and Richard Cracroft of the english department and Charles W. Whitman of the theatre department at Brigham Young University; Ida Huber at Mesa High School in Mesa, Arizona; and Fran Schroeder at d6e4756-13Millikin Elementary in Santa Clara, California.
Thanks to my sister Janice for her help with art and copying.
And, above all, thanks to my wife, Kristine, for making all my work possible and all my life joyful.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART I: Inventing Characters
CHAPTER 1 WHAT IS A CHARACTER?
A Character Is What He Does
Motive
The Past
Reputation
Stereotypes
Network
Habits and Patterns
Talents and Abilities
Tastes and Preferences
Body
CHAPTER 2 WHAT MAKES A GOOD FICTIONAL CHARACTER?
The Three Questions Readers Ask
You Are the First Audience
Interrogating the Character
From Character to Story, From Story to Character
CHAPTER 3 WHERE DO CHARACTERS COME FROM?
Ideas From Life
Ideas From the Story
Servants of the Idea
Serendipity
CHAPTER 4 MAKING DECISIONS
Names
Keeping a Bible
PART II: Constructing Characters
CHAPTER 5 WHAT KIND OF STORY ARE YOU TELLING?
The “MICE” Quotient
Milieu
Idea
Character
Event
The Contract With the Reader
CHAPTER 6 THE HIERARCHY
Walk-Ons and Placeholders
Minor Characters
Major Characters
CHAPTER 7 HOW TO RAISE THE EMOTIONAL STAKES
Suffering
Sacrifice
Jeopardy
Sexual Tension
Signs and Portents
CHAPTER 8 WHAT SHOULD WE FEEL ABOUT THE CHARACTER?
First Impressions
Characters We Love
Characters We Hate
CHAPTER 9 THE HERO AND THE COMMON MAN
CHAPTER 10 THE COMIC CHARACTER: CONTROLLED DISBELIEF
Doing a “Take”
Exaggeration
Downplaying
Oddness
CHAPTER 11 THE SERIOUS CHARACTER: MAKE US BELIEVE
Elaboration of Motive
Attitude
The Remembered Past
The Implied Past
Justification
CHAPTER 12 TRANSFORMATIONS
Why People Change
Justifying Changes
PART III: Performing Characters
CHAPTER 13 VOICES
Person
Tense
CHAPTER 14 PRESENTATION VS. REPRESENTATION
CHAPTER 15 DRAMATIC VS. NARRATIVE
CHAPTER 16 FIRST-PERSON NARRATIVE
Which Person Is First?
No Fourth Wall
Unreliable Narrators
Distance in Time
Withholding Information
Lapses
CHAPTER 17 THIRD PERSON
Omniscient Vs. Limited Point of View
Making Up Your Mind
Levels of Penetration
CHAPTER 18 A PRIVATE POPULATION EXPLOSION
BONUS ONLINE CONTENT!
To read an exlusive interview with Orson Scott Card visit writersdigest.com/article/card-interview.
INTRODUCTION
Writing fiction is a solitary art.
When an orchestra performs a symphony, it’s a shared effort. Not only are there many musicians playing their instruments, there’s also a conductor helping them sound good together. Yet before any of them plays a note, a composer has to write the musical score.
There’s even more teamwork with a play or movie. Lots of actors, of course; a director to guide, suggest, decide for the group; designers of sets, costumes, lighting, and sound; technicians to carry out those designs. In film, add the vital work of the cinematographer, camera operators, and editors.
But before any of this work can be done, a writer has to put together a script.
Script or score, those group performances existed because somebody had a plan. Somebody composed the music before ever a note was heard; somebody composed the story before ever an actor spoke a word. Composition first, then performance.
We who write fiction have no team of actors or musicians to do our bidding, so it’s easy to forget that our work, too, has a composition stage and a performance stage. We are both composer and performer. Or rather, we are both storyteller and writer.
The actual writing of the story, along with the creation of the text, the choice of words, the dialogue, the style, the tone, the point of view — that is the performance, that is the part of our work that earns us the title “writer.”
The invention of the characters and situations and events, along with the construction of plot and scene, the ordering of events, the complications and twists, the setting and historical background — that is the composition, the part of our work that earns us the title “storyteller.”
There is no clear separation of our two roles. As we invent and construct our fiction, we will often do it with language — we jot down notes, tell scenes to our friends, write detailed outlines or synopses. And as we are performing our stories, writing them out in our most effective prose, we also invent new details or motivations, discover new relationships among characters, and we revise the construction of the story in order to make a scene work better, by adding a new fillip of suspense or horror or sentiment, or present
There is no “right” way to arrange the two roles of storyteller and writer. I often work for years on a story, inventing, outlining, mapping, constructing, before I feel that I’m ready to write it down. Writer Larry Niven tells his stories aloud to his friends, letting each tale grow and take shape with a live audience to help guide him. I know other writers who can compose only while performing, like an actor improvising a monologue — they have to be writing the story in order to bring ideas to mind, discovering and shaping the characters and plot as they go along.
Regardless of how you mingle the roles of storyteller and writer, though, you must do both jobs well. If you don’t invent and construct well, then all your beautiful prose will be no more effective than a singer vocalizing or a clarinetist warming up — very pretty technique, perhaps, but music it ain’t. And if you don’t write well, readers will be hard put to discover the wonderful story you want to tell — just as bad acting can ruin a good script, or out-of-tune, clumsy, underrehearsed musicians can make Mozart sound like a mess.
Effective characterization requires careful attention at every stage in the writing of fiction. You must invent your characters carefully to avoid cliche and to provide your story with rich human possibilities; as you construct the story, you must determine exactly how much and what type of characterization to use for each character. Later, as you set out to write the story, you must make decisions about point of view — which character or characters will be the lens through which the reader sees the story.
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. You don’t improve your storytelling by turning characterization into a mechanical process. You improve your storytelling by discovering and nurturing the characters, by letting them grow.
In other words, this book isn’t a cupboard full of ingredients that you can pull out, measure, mix, and bake into good fictional characters.
This book is a set of tools: literary crowbars, chisels, mallets, pliers, tongs, sieves, and drills. Use them to pry, chip, beat, wrench, yank, sift, or punch good characters out of the place where they already live: your memory, your imagination, your soul.
PART ONE
Inventing Characters
CHAPTER ONE
WHAT IS A CHARACTER?
The characters in your fiction are people. Human beings.
Yes, I know you make them up. But readers want your characters to seem like real people. Whole and alive, believable and worth caring about. Readers want to get to know your characters as well as they know their own friends, their own family. As well as they know themselves.
No — better than they know any living person. By the time they finish your story, readers want to know your characters better than any human being ever knows any other human being. That’s part of what fiction is for — to give a better understanding of human nature and human behavior than anyone can ever get in life.
So let’s go through the ways that people get to know each other in real life, and see how each method shows up in fiction.
A CHARACTER IS WHAT HE DOES
If you’re at a party and you see the same guy spill a drink, talk too loudly, and make inappropriate or rude remarks, those actions will lead you to make a judgment of him.
If you see a man and a woman meet for the first time, and then a few moments later see him stroking her back or see her with her hand resting on his chest as they engage in intense close-up conversation, you reach conclusions about them.
If you tell a painful secret to a friend, and within hours three other people act as if they know that secret, you have discovered something about your friend.
People become, in our minds, what we see them do.
This is the strongest, most irresistible form of characterization. What did we know about Indiana Jones at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark? He was a taciturn guy with a wry smile who took an artifact out of an ancient underground temple. When he was left to die, he figured out a way to escape. When a huge boulder rolled toward him, he didn’t freeze — he ran like a madman to get away. None of this required any explanation. Within ten minutes of the beginning of the movie, we knew that Indiana Jones was resourceful, greedy, clever, brave, intense; that he had a sense of humor and didn’t take himself too seriously; that he was determined to survive against all odds. Nobody had to tell us — we saw it.
This is also the easiest form of characterization. If your character steals something, we’ll know she’s a thief. If he hits his girlfriend when he catches her with another guy, we’ll know he’s violent and jealous. If your character gets a phone call and goes off to teach a third-grade class, we’ll know she’s a substitute teacher. If he tells two people opposite versions of the same story, we’ll know he’s a liar or a hypocrite.
It’s easy — but it’s also shallow. In some stories and with some characters, this will be enough. But in most stories, as in real life, just knowing what someone does while you happen to be watching him or her isn’t enough to let you say you truly know that person.
MOTIVE
When you watch the guy at the party who spills his drink and talks loudly and rudely, would you judge him the same way if you knew that he was deliberately trying to attract attention to himself to keep people from noticing something else that is going on in the room? Or what if you knew that he had been desperately hurt by the hostess only a few minutes before the party, and this was his way of getting even? You still may not approve of what he’s doing, but you won’t necessarily judge him to be an ignorant boor.
What about that friend of yours, the one who told your secret to others? Wouldn’t it make a difference if you found out that she thought you were in serious trouble and told others about it solely in order to try to help you solve the problem? You would judge her very differently, however, if you were a celebrity and you discovered that she sometimes tells your secrets to other people so they’ll think of her as the closest friend of a famous person.
And the man and the woman who met and moments later were stroking and touching each other with obvious sexual intent: You’d judge them one way if you knew that the woman, a government bureaucrat, was lonely and had a terrible self-image, while the man was an attractive flatterer who would do anything to get this woman to award his company a valuable contract. You’d judge them very differently if you knew that his wife had just left him, and the woman was rebounding from a failed affair. The same acts would take on a completely different meaning if you knew that she was passing government secrets to him while they only pretended to be romantically involved.
What about a person who tries to do something and fails? He aims a gun at the governor and pulls the trigger, but the gun doesn’t fire. She dives into a pool to pull out a drowning man, but he’s too heavy for her to lift. Don’t we then think of him as an assassin and her as a hero, even though he didn’t actually kill anyone and she didn’t actually save a life?
Motive is what gives moral value to a character’s acts. What a character does, no matter how awful or how good, is never morally absolute: What seemed to be murder may turn out to have been self-defense, madness, or illusion; what seemed to be a kiss may turn out to have been betrayal, deception, or irony.
We never fully understand other people’s motives in real life. In fiction, however, we can help our readers understand our characters’ motives with clarity, sometimes even certainty. This is one of the reasons why people read fiction — to come to some understanding of why other people act the way they do.
A character is what he does, yes — but even more, a character is what he means to do.
THE PAST
