Elements of Fiction Writing - Characters & Viewpoint
by Orson Scott Card
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Book Summary Information
Author: Orson Scott CardEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-03-15
ISBN: 0898799279
Number of pages: 182
Publisher: Writers Digest Books
Book Reviews of Elements of Fiction Writing - Characters & Viewpoint
Book Review: Damn play on a play in a play....
Summary: 5 Stars
Don't you think you're so clever? Ha ha ha. The book of the book's the thing wherein you'll catch the conscience of the reader who's a writer, right/write? Ha ha ha. Textbook that's a book of texts, eh? Ha ha ha. Viewpoint coming in through the kitchen door while we're all milling around waiting for the formal entrance of our own perspective, hmmm? Ha ha ha. And you won't tell us what happened to Pete and Nora, suddenly two of my most important characters, who repeat the sequences of their lives so I can learn about them? from them? Oh, yeah, the presentation/representation thing..... Got it, I think.
Look, this book is too good: too thoughtful, too practical, too full of a hundred years of literary criticism. I ain't making it up. Read Card's novels, and you see that he writes wonderfully well. But you don't expect him to write wonderfully well about writing wonderfully well: shifting his own viewpoints, creating his own hero with a thousand faces who, quite simply, is an honest, authentic, genuine agent of good in the scary world of writing, of committing yourself to, well, the rest of us.
So, yes, you do indeed learn by following Card as he completes his own exercises in characterization and viewpoint. And then you see how you've engaged the narrator, how maybe it's Card and maybe not, how you're not really sure who came to Elsinore-by-the-Oconee while you read this book: only that you learned more than you bargained for. You wouldn't even feel bad repeating Freshman Comp with the guy.
Here's how he ends it: you've written, you've thought, you've worked, you've written some more. You have enough characters and voices living in your creative unconscious to make you start thinking about maybe just a pinch of Haldol on your own scrambled eggs. (Wait! That's a metaphor! Write that down!) But they are your characters, and you are proud of them. They reveal things to you. They tell you things without interfering with your shopping at WalMart. They have their conflicts, but they find their resolution, and whether you're published or not, your friends... ok, your sweetie... ok, your mother... well, they are all charmed by what you do, and they are appreciative and... well... so are you. Of yourself. That's OK. It is.
Says Card: "You'll realize then what your readers already know: that the people in your fictional world are worth knowing." Page 173. Read it. "Worth knowing." Worth knowing. Did you see it coming? I didn't.
No greater affirmation in a world of finite beings can one give to another. A Speaker for the Living.
That's why you have to read this book. Carefully.
Summary of Elements of Fiction Writing - Characters & Viewpoint
This book is a set of tools: literary crowbars, chisels, mallets, pliers and tongs. Use them to pry, chip, yank and sift good characters out of the place where they live in your memory, your imagination and your soul.
Award-winning author Orson Scott Card explains in depth the techniques of inventing, developing and presenting characters, plus handling viewpoint in novels and short stories. With specific examples, he spells out your narrative options?the choices you'll make in creating fictional people so "real" that readers will feel they know them like members of their own families.
You'll learn how to:
- draw the characters from a variety of sources, including a story's basic idea, real life?even a character's social circumstances
- make characters show who they are by the things they do and say, and by their individual "style"
- develop characters readers will love?or love to hate
- distinguish among major characters, minor characters and walk-ons, and develop each one appropriately
- choose the most effective viewpoint to reveal the characters and move the storytelling
- decide how deeply you should explore your characters' thoughts, emotions and attitudes
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