Outline: "Characters & Viewpoint"

Character & Viewpoint

by Orson Scott Card; outline by Kenny Kemp

Part 1: Inventing Characters

WHAT IS A CHARACTER?
“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.”
A character
• is what he DOES;
• is defined by his MOTIVE;
• has a PAST;
• has a REPUTATION (what others think of him);
• may be a STEREOTYPE (or not);
• is a part of a NETWORK (friends, family);
• has HABITS and PATTERNS;
• has TALENTS and ABILITIES;
• has TASTES and PREFERENCES; and
• has a BODY (description).

“Of all these ways of getting to know people—and therefore getting to know characters—the most powerful of them, the ones that make the strongest impression, are the first three: what the character DOES in the story, what his MOTIVES are, and what he has done in the PAST.”


WHAT MAKES A GOOD FICTIONAL CHARACTER?
“When readers pick up your story or novel, they want it to be good. They want to care about the people in your story. They want to believe. They're on your side. That honeymoon with the readers lasts about three paragraphs with a short story, two pages or so with a novel.”


1. Three Questions Readers Ask:
a. So What? Give the audience a REASON TO CARE (BELIEF).
b. Oh Yeah? Answer the reader's DOUBTS. Be true to the universe you've constructed (EMOTION).
c. Huh? Make sure there's never a moment of confusion or inclarity in the story. Even uncertainties must be clear, so readers will know you meant it to be that way, so they'll continue to trust your competence to deliver the story you promised them (UNDERSTANDABILITY).

2. You Are the First Audience. “If you don't care about a character, you cannot possibly write an interesting story about him.”

3. Interrogating the Character. Ask him questions about causes and results.
a. Why would he do such a thing?
b. What made him do it?
c. If he does it, what will happen then?
d. What can go wrong?

“Inventive story lines emerge only when we demand more from the idea, when we ask more why and what result questions.”

4. Tools for Inventive Story Lines
a. Exaggeration. Move from dull, ordinary people to archetypes (less individualistic), and finally, to caricatures or cartoons.
b. Do the Twist. Take an assumption about the character (the responsible baby sitter) and turn it on its head. What if the baby sitter really is irresponsible? What happens then?
c. The Cliche Shelf. The first answer to the previous questions is probably a cliche. Don't accept the first answer that pops in your head. Go to the next answer, and keep asking: Why? What caused that? For what purpose? What's the result of that? What would happen then?



5. From Character to Story, From Story to Character
Which Comes First? “A simple stereotype isn't much to build a story on. But that question--What could go wrong?—is one of the basic questions you ask to get a story or situation out of an idea for a character.”


WHERE DO CHARACTERS COME FROM?

1. Ideas From Life. Cast your net first in your own life—the people you see, the people you know, the person you are.
a. Observations of Strangers. Carry a note pad or tape recorder to record observations or snatches of dialogue—the added touches that will make a character come alive.
b. People You Know. But two things can go wrong when using real people:
i. It can lead to bad fiction. Believability in fiction doesn't come from the facts—what actually happened. It comes from the readers' sense of what is plausible—what is likely to happen.
ii. It can lead to personal problems. Offending people, for one.
“Modeling characters on life is not a method, it’s a starting point. The characters who come to life on the page or on the stage are the ones that have passed through the storyteller’s imagination. Your readers already “know” people as well as real people ever know each other. They turn to fiction to know people better than they can ever know them in real life. If your story tells them nothing more about people than they already know, you've let your audience down. By sticking to the facts, you cheat them out of the chance to learn the truth.”
c. Yourself. You can interview people who would know what your character would know, but people have an unconscious screen that prohibits them from telling the entire truth. But you will tell yourself all the truth you know. Trust that source of information when determining your characters responses, motives, and emotions.
d. Analogy. If you can't imagine doing what your character must do, then compare that act with something you have done. Is my character going to kill somebody to get her out of the way? Then I might think of a time when I carelessly disregarded someone else’s feelings because I was rushing to get a job done.
e. Memory. Your memory of yourself is the clearest picture you will ever have of what a human being is and why people do what they do. You are the only person you will ever know from the inside, and so, inevitably, when your fiction shows other characters from the inside, you will reveal yourself. Whatever obsessions you have, whatever memories are most important to you, either negatively or positively, they are going to show up in your work no matter what you do.
f. Finding "New" Memories. Search randomly through your memory, just as you move randomly through the world around you, with your idea net extended. Ex: Seventh grade? Memories? You bet!

2. Ideas From the Story. As you work on a story, it will suggest characters to you—as long as you know how to look for them:
a. Who Must Be There? The basic idea of the story requires certain people to be present.
b. Who Might Be There? Take your eyes off the main characters long enough to see who else is nearby. Most of the characters you discover this way will remain minor ones, or even background characters. Still, by using them you’ll enrich the story and make it more real.
c. Who Has Been There? Look into the story’s past to find the characters who are no longer around, but who still helped shape the characters who are present.
“So often we see stories with heroes who seemed to come from nowhere—they never remember anybody who isn't present, never meet anybody they knew from long before, never even refer to parents or old jobs or anyone else. Yet in real life you are constantly remembering people who aren't present, bumping into old acquaintances, and responding to present situations in ways that clearly grow out of old relationships.”

3. Servants of the Idea. Often a story emerges, not from characters or events, but from an idea that you want to put across (or “preach”). Bad idea. roblems arise when you forget you're writing a story, and let the idea take over. Forget about fully inventing characters! I’m going to show how bad pollution is, so I’ll have all the polluters be evil conspirators so eager to make a buck that they don’t care how many people die because of the poisons they put in the ground or in the water. The trouble is that when such a story is finished, who will want to read it? AVOID STEREOTYPES!

4. Serendipity. Just plain luck. When two previously unrelated ideas or characters are put together, they both come to life; it is in the process of connecting the unconnected that stories grow. Also, wondering: ask “What if...?”




MAKING DECISIONS

1. Names
a. What a Name Means to the Character. Think about family ties, ethnicity, pet names, shortened names, named after someone?, etc.
b. You Can't Tell the Players Without a Program. The character name is also a label the reader uses to keep the characters straight. That’s why it’s always useful to give characters memorable—and very different—names. Make sure all major characters’ names start with a different letter. Vary lengths of their names. Avoid symbolic names (“Chastity”). Change accent position of names. Use ethnicity to vary.
c. One Name Per Character. Refer to him the same way every time.

2. Keeping a Bible. Jot down decisions about the character's motives, his past, his family and relationships, his looks and dress, his education. As you jot down these facts, ask yourself why are you deciding it in this way? What does it reveal about the character? About you, the writer? Do the Twist with it.


Part 2: Constructing Characters

WHAT KIND OF STORY ARE YOU TELLING?

1. The "MICE" Quotient. There are four basic factors that are present in every story, with varying degrees of emphasis. It is the balance among these factors that determines what sort of characterization a story must have, should have, or can have:
a. Milieu. The world surrounding the characters--the landscape, the interior spaces, the surrounding cultures the characters emerge from and react to; everything from weather to traffic laws.
b. Idea. The information that the reader is meant to discover or learn during the process of the story.
c. Character. The nature of the people in the story—what they do and why they do it. It usually leads to or arises from a conclusion about human nature in general.
d. Events. Everything that happens and why.

2. Milieu. A milieu story, like Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, is mostly about the world of the story, so the characterization is slight. Only Frodo is well-developed, while there are only one each of all the various life forms represented, mostly stereotypically.

3. Idea. An idea-driven story has a simple structure: a problem or question is posed at the beginning of the story, and at the end of the tale the answer is revealed. Ex: murder mysteries, caper stories, detective novels. Most characters therein undergo little interior changes; the story only reveals who they are. Idea is everything. The author has composed the story according to a plan; the reader’s job is to decode the plan. Characters in allegory are rarely more than figures standing for ideas.

4. Character. The character story is about a person trying to change his role in life. It begins at the point when the main character finds his present situation intolerable and sets out to change; it ends when the character either finds a new role, willingly returns to the old one, or despairs of improving his lot.
“Needless to say, the character story is the one that requires the fullest characterization. No shortcuts are possible. Readers must understand the character in the original, impossible role, so that they comprehend and, usually, sympathize with the decision to change. Then the character’s changes must be justified so that the reader never doubts that the change is possible; you can'’ just have a worn-out hooker suddenly go to college without showing us that the hunger for education and the intellectual ability to pursue it have always been a part of her character.”

5. Event. The structure at the heart of the romantic tradition for more than 2000 years and probably the reason for the existence of the Story itself. From time to time something happens that has causes and results. The world is somehow out of order—call it imbalance, injustice, breakdown, evil, decay, disease—and the story is about the efforts to restore the old order or establish a new one.

6. The Contract With the Reader. Whenever you tell a story, you make an implicit contract with the reader. Within the first few paragraphs or pages, you tell the reader implicitly what kind of story this is going to be; the reader then knows what to expect, and holds the thread of that structure throughout the tale.
“Readers will expect a story to end when the first major source of structural tension is resolved. If the story begins as an idea story, the reader expects it to end when the idea is discovered, the plan unfolded. If the story is a milieu story, readers will gladly follow any number of story lines of every type, letting them be resolved here and there as needed, continuing to read in order to discover more of the milieu. A story that begins with a character in an intolerable situation will not feel finished until the character is fully content or finally resigned. A story that begins with an unbalanced world will not end until the world is balanced, justified, reordered, healed—or utterly destroyed beyond hope of restoration.”


THE HIERARCHY
Not all characters are created equal. They are, in ascending order:

1. Walk-Ons and Placeholders. Main characters are surrounded by people who are utterly important in the story; they are background. They fulfill a brief role in the story and then vanish completely.
a. Part of the Scenery. How do you make people vanish? Don't let them do anything to interrupt the flow of the story. If they do, then they are trying to be minor characters. Decide if you want them to do this. Ask, “Why?”
b. Stereotypes. Sometimes stereotyping is exactly the tool of characterization you need, especially if you wish the character to perform some needed action and then to disappear.

2. Minor Characters. If a walk-on attracts attention the audience will notice him and will expect his strangeness to amount to something. There are three ways to make such a character instantly memorable without leading the audience to expect them to do more: make them eccentric, exaggerated, or obsessive.
a. Eccentricity. Ex: Bronson Pinchot as the attendant in the art gallery with the weird mannerisms and unplaceable accent in Beverly Hills Cop.
b. Obsessiveness. Ex: the cabby who demands the tip, beyond all reasonableness.
c. Exaggeration. Take a normal human trait and make it just a little more extreme, like Sweet Face in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

3. Major Characters. Their choices turn the story and their needs drive the story forward. Cues which let the audience know which characters are major:
a. Choices. If a character has the power to make choices that change other characters’ lives, they are a major character. If the other characters regard a character as dangerous or powerful, the readers will, too.
b. Focus. Other characters think about, listen to, respond to, or otherwise are concerned with, the major character, even if he is absent from most scenes (Sauron in Lord of the Rings—he appears only once in the entire story!).
c. Action. A character doesn't have to appear all that often, as long as every time he does appear, what he says and does has an important effect on the plot. Remember: passive characters will not seem as important as active characters.
d. Sympathy. The more endearing or charming a character is, the more the audience comes to like her as a human being.
e. Point of View. One of the most potent devices for making a character important to your readers is to use the character’s point of view.


HOW TO RAISE THE EMOTIONAL STAKES
Several things you can do with characters to raise the reader's emotional stake in the story, make them more emotionally involved in what’s happening, and make them care more about the outcome:

1. Suffering. Pain is a two-edged sword: the character who suffers pain and the character who inflicts it are both made more memorable and more important.
a. Physical or Emotional? Emotional pain is more dynamic; the audience can relate to the character's emotional loss and feel it deeply. We lack the ability to remember physical pain (thank goodness).
“In The Dead Zone, Stephen King devoted several pages to creating a warm, valuable love relationship between the main character and the woman he loves. It is at a vital moment in their relationship that he has his terrible accident. Now when he discovers that she married someone else during his coma, the readers know how much he loved her, and so the pain of losing her actually outweighs the physical pain he suffered.”
b. Don't Go Too Far. When pain or grief become unbearable in real life, humans develop fictions to cope with it—we call it insanity. When pain or grief become unbearable in fiction, readers simply disengage from the story, and either abandon the tale or laugh at it.
c. Solving the Riddle. You increase the power of suffering, not by describing the injury or loss in greater detail, but rather by showing more of its causes and effect. Blood and gore eventually make the audience gag; sobbing and moaning eventually earn the audience’s laughter or contempt. On the other hand, if you make us understand how intensely the character loved before losing the loved one or trusted before being betrayed, then his grief will have far greater power, even if you show it with great economy. If you show a character coping with her pain or grief, refusing to succumb to it, then readers will wince or weep for her.
“If your characters cry, your readers won't have to; if your characters have good reason to cry, and don't, your readers will do the weeping."

2. Sacrifice. Self-chosen suffering for the sake of a greater good—sacrifice, in other words—is far more intense than pain alone. The Sufferer and the Pain Inflictor are two sides of the same coin—both will be rewarded with the appropriate audience reaction.

3. Jeopardy. Definition: anticipated pain or loss.
a. Children in Danger. These are powerful characters, such as Carol Ann in Poltergeist.
b. Upping the Ante. The greater the jeopardy, the stronger the pain when the dreaded event actually occurs.

4. Sexual Tension. Related to jeopardy. When a man and a woman meet, we assume at least some degree of sexual possibility.
a. Exterior vs. Interior Attractiveness. The easiest way is to create physically attractive characters, although the same effect can be reached if we endow a character with subtle but valuable traits, and then watch as the other character(s) come to recognize these traits.
b. Blowing It. When Sam and Diane got together on Cheers, sexual tension dissipated. To restore it, the writers pulled them apart.

5. Signs and Portents
a. Connecting With the World. Connect a character with the world around her, so that her fate is seen to have wider consequences than her private loss or gain. Ex: the storm in King Lear symbolizes his madness; the ark in Raiders is more than a secret weapon—its opening represents the unleashing of the power of God.
b. Subtlety. Instead of a raging storm to heighten the character's turbulent emotions, let the rain simply drizzle around him. The roll of thunder becomes a distant siren in the city; the famine becomes the wilting of a flower in the window. The connection between character and cosmos will still be there, and, often without consciously noticing the portents, the audience will become more intensely involved with what the character does.


WHAT SHOULD WE FEEL ABOUT THE CHARACTER?
Even though it’s possible for a good author to make us care about an unsympathetic character, it’s difficult, and most readers want to read about characters they like and hope will obtain their goals safely. The anti-hero is rare in fiction and rarely successful, and only when they have many redeeming qualities—they merely need, metaphorically speaking, a bath, to be a true hero.

1. First Impressions. Characters, like people, make good or bad first impressions. We decide right away, based on what they do, whether we will like them.
a. We Like What's Like Us. The word like has a lovely double meaning: The most important ingredient in how much we like a stranger when we first encounter him is how much he seems to be like us.
b. Opposites Attract. But don't neglect the story possibilities of a character that outwardly appears completely different from either the reader or another main character, who then is revealed in the course of the story to be more like us than we thought.
c. Editorial Resistance. General Rule: Making a weird or unpleasant character likeable is very hard. It's easier to use characters to will appeal to your main audience.
d. Sympathy vs. Curiosity. While we tend to like characters that are like us, we also tend to be a little bored with them. It’s strangeness, not familiarity, that excites our curiosity. It’s hard to imagine a blander character than one who is exactly typical of a certain group. So even if you decide, for simplicity’s sake, to use a main character who is a member of the same community as your intended audience, you must find ways to make him different and intriguing. Giving him a few attributes in common with the target audience starts you on the road to sympathy—but doesn't get you very far along that road.

2. Characters We Love. Here are the devices that will make an audience tend toward lasting sympathy with a character:
a. Altruism: Victim, Savior Sacrifice. Some of the devices we use to raise emotional stakes—suffering, sacrifice, and jeopardy—also have a rather complicated role in creating sympathy.
b. Victim. When Nora is a victim of suffering and jeopardy, the audience will pity her; they'll hope for her deliverance, but she will also seem weak, and along with pity there'll be at least a trace of contempt. Compensate for this by showing that she had not choice but to put herself in the power of her tormentor.
c. Savior. Audiences like rescuers, even those who may fail.
d. Sacrifice. Before the audience will admire Nora for her sacrifice, they must feel that the cause she is willing to suffer or die for is important and right. They must feel that Nora has no other decent choice or that her sacrifice will make a difference in helping other people. She must not have a decent alternative to being sacrificed.
e. Physical Attractiveness
f. Plan and Purpose, Hunger and Dreams. When the story is about the character's plan —a quest or caper story—or when the story is about the character's need—as all character stories are—this tool makes him almost irresistibly sympathetic.
g. Common Mistakes. Beginning writers often make the mistake of having their hero always react to the events of the story. His reactions may all be perfectly reasonable, but the result is a character who seems to have no initiative—a puppet.
h. The Valid Dream. Audience sympathy increases with the importance of the character’s dream and the amount of effort the character has already expended to try to fulfill it.
i. Courage and Fair Play. Readers will respond warmly to a character who is brave and plays fair, and they lose sympathy for one who is cowardly and cheats.
j. Attitude. The sympathetic character:
i. doesn't whine or complain;
ii. doesn't blame others for his problems;
iii. takes responsibility for his own mistakes;
iv. refers to his problems with wry humor;
v. tries to solve his problems;
vi. has sympathy for other's suffering;
vii. tries to see other's point of view;
viii. listens to other's explanations;
ix. is willing to trust people--even if they proved before that they really aren't very trustworthy;
x. is modest;
xi. engages in self-deprecating humor; and
xii. refuses to defend himself.

k. Draftee v. Volunteer. If the task requires courage with little glory, the audience will sympathize most if he volunteers, but if the task will bring fame and fortune, then the audience will have more sympathy if he is drafted. Ex: Frodo was drafted.
l. Dependability. Don't underestimate the importance of a promise. The pledge, kept or broken, is one of the strongest motifs running through all storytelling. It’s one of the deadliest accusations you can level against an enemy: He doesn't keep his word. And if your main character casually breaks a promise, it will leave such a sour taste in your reader's mouth that you'll never fully win back the reader’s sympathy.
m. Cleverness v. Intelligence. Our egalitarian society dislikes obvious displays of intelligence or erudition which suggest elitism, snobbery, and arrogance. Instead, we value a character that is clever, but doesn’t know how clever he is. Only the audience and other characters are aware of his marvelous intelligence, but he isn’t. He must never think of himself as smarter than another. Ex: Indiana Jones, who is clever enough to obtain artifacts at great risk, but bumbles around in the classroom.
“The audience loves a character who solves problems and knows exactly the right facts when he needs them—but they don't like a character who flaunts his superior knowledge or acts as if he knows how clever he is.”
n. Endearing Imperfections: The Lovable Rogue. With all these marvelous characteristics, our main character is beginning to look like a Boy Scout. If he is too perfect, the audience will stop believing in him. We're back to that balancing act of caring and belief.
i. The Endearing Imperfection. We use most of the sympathy tool kit to make the audience like him, but then deliberately give him some small, understandable foibles to make us believe in him. Ex: Han Solo in Star Wars. He keeps his word, comes to the rescue, is physically attractive, brave, clever, and has a great sense of humor—but he is also boastful and all his plans seem to be motivated by greed and self-interest. He also doesn’t pay his bills—all relatively small things.

3. Characters We Hate. Getting an audience to hate a character is much easier than trying to win their sympathy. How to do it:
a. Sadist or Bully. He deliberately causes others to suffer. Caveat: don’t go overboard; he has to be believable. Remember that sadism is not the love of pain—it is the love of power, the sense of control over someone else’s body, mind, or life. Murder is nowhere near as powerful as bullying or sadism is.
b. Assassin or Avenger? Murder and other crimes will only make a character into a villain if he commits the crime for selfish reasons, and if the crime harms people who don’t deserve to be hurt. See The Sting.
c. Self-Serving and Self-Appointed. We simultaneously disdain people who are dull and unambitious—and resent people who try to push their way up to a higher level. There is a balancing act here.
d. Oathbreaker. When a character breaks a promise or betrays a trust, the audience takes that betrayal personally.
e. Intellect. Villains are almost always intelligent and erudite—which makes us dislike them even more. The American audience resents any character who is smarter or better educated than other people.
f. Insanity. We are terrified of people who don’t live in the same reality we do, who don’t have the same definition of rational behavior. You can’t talk to them, you can't reason with them; there is no common ground. The only way to surmount this is to show the valid reason for their insanity, or that they are not really insane at all.
g. Attitude. The villain’s attitude about himself is the mirror image of the hero's: he is:
i. humorless;
ii. completely unable to laugh at himself;
iii. takes all the credit when things go right;
iv. takes no blame when things go wrong;
v. is prone to boast;
vi. never shows regard for other's feelings;
vii. judges people without listening to their explanations;
viii. is a hypocrite;
ix. is a respecter of persons; and
x. never trusts or believes anybody.

h. Redeeming Virtues: The Understandable Villain. While readers eventually get sick of a hero who’s too good to be true, they almost never refuse to believe a villain. That doesn’t mean you should create completely evil villains. Try giving him some socially redeeming qualities. Remember: Everybody is the hero of his own story—even a villain. He has good reasons for what he does.
i. Justification. Just as you can make a hero more believable by giving him endearing imperfections, you can make a villain more believable by giving him compensating virtues: he may love someone, keep some promises, or show that his hate is partially justified. Result: While you may not persuade the audience to like him, they will give him their respect.


THE HERO AND THE COMMON MAN
On the Hero Continuum, Realistic and Romantic form opposite ends. In this context, Romantic heroes are idealized, extraordinary, exotic, and magnificent. Realistic heroes are common, plain people, living lives that are well within the experience of the readers. What we want to do is to strike a balance; to create a main character who is at once believable and romantic.
“The hero may wear the mask of the common man, but underneath his true face must always be the face of the hero.”
“A large part of Stephen King’s appeal as a writer of horror, fantasy, and science fiction has been his insistence on using heroes from the American middle class, living in the familiar world of fast food, shopping malls, and television. Yet even as we recognize people and details from the real life around us, all these stories would have been pointless had their heroes not been extraordinary in one way or another, though their uniqueness was hidden even from themselves.”
“If there is no awe, there is no audience. In every successful story the author has created characters who somehow inspire enough admiration, respect, or awe that readers are willing to identify with them, to become their disciples for the duration of the tale.”
“When you find yourself blocked—when you can't bring yourself to start or continue a story—the reason is that you have forgotten or have not yet discovered what is extraordinary about your main character.”


THE COMIC CHARACTER: CONTROLLED DISBELIEF

1. "Dying is Easy, Comedy is Hard." Comedy almost always deals with pain, and comic characters almost always suffer. Something is made deliberately “wrong” with the character, so that we know we aren't supposed to react with sympathy. Instead we’re supposed to laugh.

2. Doing a "Take." When the character speaks directly to the audience, a la Woody Allen in Annie Hall.

3. Exaggeration. “My hand swelled up like a boxing glove.” Of course, it didn’t, but it’s the exaggeration that makes this comment funny. Never laugh at your own humor—or let your characters laugh at it. Give no sign that either the author or the character’s are amused at their own clever wit. Deadpan delivery, no response frees up the audience to “discover” the humor and enjoy it.

4. Downplaying. The character downplays the importance of his problems. Ex: Luke, Han and Leia trapped in the compactor in Star Wars. Han says, “I've got a bad feeling about this.”

5. Oddness. Eccentricity, like Miracle Max’s out-of-context Jewish accent in The Princess Bride, works well if not overplayed to farce or melodrama. The “comedy of humors” is comedy which arises from a character being completely dominated by only one desire or temperament. Misers, hypochondriacs, hypocrites, and cowards all have traits that all humans share to some degree. Exaggerate the trait enough, and the characters become unbelievable enough to be funny. Exaggerate the trait out of all proportion, and they become either monstrous or utterly unbelievable.


THE SERIOUS CHARACTER: MAKE US BELIEVE
Never appeal to the facts. Fiction doesn’t deal with what happened once. Fiction deals with what happens. Your job is not to create characters who exactly match reality, but to create characters who seem real, who are plausible. The key is DETAILS. The more information you give about a character, the more the audience will believe in him. Tools of reality:

1. Motive. To make characters more believable—more real—give them complex, even contradictory motives, and we justify them better.

2. Attitude. The character must have an attitude toward important events that happen to him, be it cynical, believing, outraged, fearful, etcetera. Motive tells us why the character acts as he does; attitude is the way he reacts to outside events. Attitude also tells us what people notice about each other, and what value they assign to what they see.

3. The Remembered Past. Give the character a past, which will explain his reactions to the present. How to do it:
a. Flashback. The present action stops for a while as the character remembers some key event from the days of yore. The key: don't go to flashbacks before you establish the present of the character. Once you have done that, the flashback will illuminate the character more.
b. Memory as a Present Event. Slightly more effective than a flashback, memory can interrupt the present just long enough to reveal something important about the character’s attitudes or background. Indeed, if a character’s memory of a past event causes him to make a key decision, or take an action he would otherwise not have taken, then the memory is part of the present action, and not really an interruption after all.
i. "Active" memory: The memory should be of something the character never really understood; new information or a new experience has changed the meaning of that event in his mind, so he isn’t just remembering, he’s also revising. Then the memory isn’t passive, it’s an active part of the story.
ii. Quick References. Drop in memories with only a slight pause in the forward movement of the story, like the short memory about the falling cat as the character looks out over the long drop from the bridge. Rule of thumb: the shorter the memory, the less important it needs to be in order to justify stopping the story for it.

4. The Implied Past. You give the reader a sense that the character has already lived a full life without telling him exactly what that past was.
a. Expectation. What a character expects will happen in the present tells us what has happened before in his past, like the child who flinches when an adult reaches out suddenly toward her—was she abused?
b. Habits. Everyone has habits, some of the meaningless, but many of them the result of patterns in our lives. Ex: drumming fingers is an easier way to establish an impatient character than telling us he’s impatient.
c. Networks. Believable characters don’t come out of nowhere, they have connections with others. Remembering them will further flesh out a character.

5. Justification. If Nora must toss Pete off the roof, establish that she is able to do so. Rule: the more bizarre and unbelievable the character’s behavior and the more important it is to the story, the earlier in the story you have to begin justifying it and the more time you'll need to spend to make it believable.


TRANSFORMATIONS
Real people seem to change: physically, age-wise, roles, etc., but rarely do people’s basic nature change. Your reader will be upset if you establish Nora as honest, then make her a liar in a crucial moment—unless you rehabilitate her later.

1. Why People Change. Fiction deals with change by revealing (eventually) character’s motives, which helps us explain changes we face in real life. There are three ways of dealing with change in fiction:
a. You Can't Change. The character is not transformed, but rather unmasked. Develop this theme in three ways:
i. Characters are who they are from beginning to end: Nobody's Fool. It is the people around them that change. The audience is grateful for the main character's lack of change, because it is often revealed that they had no business changing anyway.
ii. Stories of people who seem to change, but it is revealed that the changed character was who they were all along, they were just pretending to be what you thought they were, or lacked the power or opportunity to reveal themselves.
iii. People who want to change, but can’t until they discover their true nature; then, when they change the outward pattern of their lives, they are only becoming true to their newfound self.
b. Other Things Change You. Another great theme in fiction is that people do change, but for causes beyond their control:
i. Causes of change might be the drives and hungers born in their genes. The character shows a kind of nobility in trying to transcend their nature.
ii. People change when they are treated a certain way by others: Pygmalian.
c. You Change Yourself. We can change our nature by an act of will. The character becomes what he wants rather than who he was born to be or what others force him to become.

2. Justifying Changes. A change of social role requires an explanation of the change and the ramifications thereof. A shy person doesn't just suddenly walk up to the pretty girl and ask her out. There must be a reason why now, as opposed to every other time in his life, he musters the courage to speak to her.


Part 3: Performing Characters

VOICES
Whose voice will the reader hear? Each voice has its own vocabulary, syntax, dialects, etc. Attitude (cynical, flippant, wondering, cold, nostalgic) determines how that voice sounds as well as level (crude, slangy, informal, formal, elevated, magisterial).

1. Person. First Person (“I go”), Second Person (“Thou goest”), or Third Person ("He goes"). Most stories are in the first or third person.
a. First Person Singular. The eyewitness. Drawback: they can only talk about what they witnessed or heard about. If they weren't there or are not told about what happened, they will not know about an event. This is a limiting factor in writing fiction.
b. Second Person Singular. Rarely used in fiction. Often, it is implied: “(You) fold in two eggs, then stir...”

2. Tense. Almost every story is written in the past tense, while the present tense is reserved for how-to books, philosophy, scientific theories, and screenplays.


PRESENTATION VS. REPRESENTATION
The storyteller has a relationship with the audience. In the theater, a representational play requires the “fourth” wall between the actors and audience—the actors give no notice to the audience. Presentational theater, on the other hand, tears down the imaginary fourth wall—destroys the perscenium—and the actors engage in direct contact with the audience (stand-up comedy). In fiction, the representational writer never addresses his audience. The narrator never expresses a personal opinion. All the focus is on the events and everything is focused through the point of view of a character in the story.
Whichever method you choose, let the audience know immediately what to expect and don't change horses in the middle of the stream. They just might walk out on you.
“The more you rely on the narrator’s voice to carry the story instead of the events themselves, the better your writing has to be. Because when the audience’s attention is drawn away from the story, it goes somewhere. They’re staring at your style close up, and if your voice happens to not be very interesting, you’ve lost them.”



DRAMATIC VS. NARRATIVE
The author must constantly choose between showing, telling, and ignoring. Plays and films are dramatic in form—they contain “scenes” where things get interesting; things happen. The action unfolds in “real time” while the audience watches.
On the other hand, fiction has a narrator, a storyteller. Instead of the audience seeing events directly, they are unavoidably filtered through the perceptions of the narrator. The writer decides what to include and to what depth. Bottom line: characters are made more real through scenes than through narrative.


FIRST-PERSON NARRATIVE
The temptation is to get wild with dialects, spellings, etc. Resist this urge. By and large you should attempt to create the narrator’s voice through his attitude and implied past, letting the speech reflect his educational level and regional accent only in syntax and word choice, not in odd spellings or endless pronunciation guides. Avoid the gerund apostrophe: “readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic”!

1. Which Person Is First? The main limitation of the first-person narrative is that your narrator has to be present in key scenes. A first-person narrator who merely hears about major events is no good to you at all. You have to make him present whenever you need him to observe something.

2. Best Use of the First-Person Narrator. It lets us live for a while in a strange or twisted world, to see the world as someone else sees it. Yet because the narrator is not the author, but rather a character, readers know that the author doesn't necessarily agree with the narrator.

3. No Fourth Wall. Since the first-person narrator is physically taking part in the story, he must have some reason for telling it, and his audience asides are an expected part of his recounting of events.

4. Unreliable Narrators. What if he lies? If he does, the audience must catch him at it. This then opens up rich possibilities for the future, as the audience will now be on the lookout for another lie.

5. Distance in Time. Since the first-person narrator is telling a story, it is clear that whatever happened, he survived the events therein. Some level of drama is gone. In contrast, even though most third-person accounts are told in past tense, they feel quite immediate. There is no sense of the narrator remembering the events—they are recounted as they are experienced. There is no distance in time, but there is distance in space. The narrator, though he can dip into one or more minds, is never a person who is actually there. He is always an invisible observer, always at some distance.

6. Withholding Information. Another technical problem with the first-person narrator, arising out of distance in time, is that the narrator knows how the story ends. He can, therefore, reveal it on page one, but the audience will not begrudge him withholding the information if he tells the story honestly and well, revealing the ending at the end.

7. Lapses. Sometimes beginning writers reveal that the first-person narrator is a fraud, by noting something the actual first-person participant in the scene would never know, like another character’s thoughts.

8. What Is Valid about First-Person. We are allowed to experience the world through that person's eyes, his perceptions, his attitudes, driven by his motives. First-person must reveal the narrator's character or it isn't worth doing.


THIRD-PERSON NARRATIVE
Two ways of using third-person:

1. Omniscient Point-of-View. The omniscient narrator can see into all character's minds, switching back and forth a will.
a. Advantages. We know things that neither character knows; the pleasure of a scene is that often neither character's point of view is accurate, but ours is—we have the pleasure or tension of knowing the mistakes as they happen and anticipating the outcome, well ahead of the characters. In short, we are superior to them, and this makes for pleasant reading—feeling superior. Another advantage is brevity.
b. Disadvantages. The omniscient narrator shows us everything and everybody as the narrator sees them, not as the characters see them. We are on the outside looking in. And because the omniscient narrator slips in and out of different character’s minds, he keeps the reader from fully engaging with any of the characters. The storytelling is far more presentational than representational—we're constantly being reminded that the narrator is telling us a story about the characters. And because we are told everything about them, we don’t share their frustration or bafflement, instead we are forced to take a distant, ironic, amused stance, watching what they do but not experiencing it.

2. Limited Point of View. The dominant narrative voice in American fiction because it aids the reader immerse himself in the life of the characters—you follow just one character at a time, seeing only what that character sees; aware of what that character thinks and wants and remembers.
a. Advantages. It takes longer to get through the story, but in return we get a much deeper, more intense involvement with the lives of the viewpoint characters. In other words, limited third-person trades time for distance. And although it might appear that the limited third-person is strikingly similar to the first person, there is one big difference: the third-person account tells of the events in a straight-forward manner, without self-conscious asides that permeate first-person accounts, mostly because the limited third-person account is more immediate—we are there with them as the story moves forward—and not listening to the first-person recount their experience later.
b. Disadvantages. Since we follow only the viewpoint character, we are unable to do more than guess at any other character's inner life. Also, with the changes of viewpoint back and forth, the storytelling takes longer.
c. Changing Characters. Do it with well-defined breaks:
i. The Chapter Break: Kind of a He Said, She Said structure.
ii. The Line Space Break: Two carriage returns on a word processor, three asterisks on the manuscript (which will be removed in typesetting, unless the line space break falls at the end of a page, in which case they will remain.

3. Choosing the Viewpoint that Works Best
a. Emotional Involvement. When you want readers to get emotionally involved with your main characters, with minimal distraction from their belief in the story, use the limited third-person narrator.
b. Humor. First-person or Omniscient narrators aid in creating comic distance. These intrusive narrators can make wry comments or write with the kind of wit that calls attention to itself, without jarring or surprising a reader who is deeply involved with the characters.
c. Brevity; Spans of Time and Distance; Many Characters. The Omniscient narrator is the best choice for brevity's sake.
d. Eyewitness Account. Use the first-person because it feels less fictional, more factual.
e. Weak Writer, Strong Story. Limited third-person narration invites a clean, unobtrusive writing style—a plain tale plainly told.

4. How Deeply Should We Penetrate the Viewpoint Character's Mind? Levels of penetration:
a. Omniscient Narrator. We see everything, including what's going on in every character's mind, but we are always at a distance.
b. First-Person Narrator. We see inside only one character's head, the narrator-in-the-story, and we see only what the narrator saw, experiencing the world as he experienced it—but we still watch from a distance, because it is all told from the perspective of the present narrator recounting events in his past.
c. Limited Third-Person Narrator (Light Penetration). We can see inside the viewpoint character’s mind, we observe only scenes where he is present, but we don’t actually experience the scenes as if we were seeing them through the viewpoint character’s eyes. The narrator tells what happens in the scene in a neutral voice, only giving us the viewpoint character’s attitudes when the narrator turns away from the scene and dips into the viewpoint character's mind.
d. Limited Third-Person Narrator (Deep Penetration). Intense, hot narration; no other narrative strategy keeps the reader so closely involved with the character and the story, but this viewpoint can become annoying or exhausting if carried too far, or of the narrator isn’t reliable. We do experience the scenes as if we were seeing them through the viewpoint character’s eyes. We don’t see things as they really happen, we see them only as he thinks they happen. We are so closely involved with the viewpoint character’s thoughts that we don't have to dip into his mind; we never really leave.
e. Limited Third-Person Narrator (Cinematic Point of View). Cool and distant, but it shares the virtues of the camera: you can believe what you see and if mistakes are made, they are yours. We only see what the viewpoint character is present to see—but we never see inside his or anyone else’s head. It is as if the narrator were a movie camera looking over the viewpoint character’s shoulder. This narrator gives no attitude, except as it is revealed by facial expressions, gestures, pauses, and words. It is ironic that fiction writers have been trying to do for years what the camera does well: tell us what’s going on in a character’s mind. But the three paragraphs it takes you to describe a moment means it’s no longer a moment—it’s become twenty minutes.