Elements of Fiction Writing - Characters & Viewpoint

by Orson Scott Card

If you stop with the first acceptable answer, the first “good enough” version of the story, you lose the chance to move from shallowness to depth, from simplicity to complexity, from a merely fun story to a fun but powerful one.

A little exaggeration helps turn an ordinary, believable, dull person into an interesting one.

Who suffers most in this situation without dying or being incapacitated?

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.

In a pure milieu story, the less you characterize the main character, the better.

much of what makes the difference between major and minor characters is the amount of time you spend on them. And the amount of time is not absolute — it is relative to the total length of the story.

Passive characters will never seem as important as active characters.

When a character in the story is used as the narrator or viewpoint character, his importance is greatly increased.

Suffering loses effectiveness with repetition.

you must remember that 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.

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.

Pain or grief also increase a reader’s intensity in proportion to the character’s degree of choice.

Jeopardy is anticipated pain or loss.

The greater the jeopardy, the stronger the pain when the dreaded event actually occurs.

As a general rule, 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.

If somebody says, “I’ve got a miserable, nasty job here that has to be done,” then a character gains sympathy by volunteering. If somebody says, “If you succeed in this task, your name will be remembered for ten thousand years,” then a character gains sympathy by modestly waiting to be drafted.

The pledge, kept or broken, is one of the strongest motifs running through all of the world’s storytelling.

To make us dislike somebody, simply show her deliberately causing someone else to suffer in body or mind.

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.

Comic characters cannot be believable in the same way that other characters are.

Something is made deliberately “wrong” about the character, so that we know we aren’t supposed to react with sympathy.

The simplest way of signaling comic unbelievability is to talk directly to the audience.

Your job is not to create characters who exactly match reality. Your job is to create characters who seem real, who are plausible to the audience.

how to make your characters more believable: details.

in your characters is elaboration of motive. If you don’t tell your audience what a character’s motives are, the audience will assume the obvious motive: a simple, single motive, a naked archetype or a cliche.

Motive is at the story’s heart. It is the most potent form of causal connection. So every revision of motive is a revision of the story.

One of the surest signs of an amateur story is when strange or important events happen around the narrator or point-of-view character, and he doesn’t have an attitude toward them.

Motive tells why he acts as he does; attitude is the way he reacts to outside events.

Notice that it is primarily through attitudes that we establish the meaning of relationships between people.

If you feel a need to have a flashback on the first or second page of your story, either your story should begin with the events of the flashback or you should get us involved with some compelling present characters and events before flashing back.

The shorter the memory, the less important it needs to be in order to justify stopping the story for it.

The underlying voice that repeats from one story to the next is your natural style.

Choose the simplest, clearest, least noticeable technique that will still accomplish what the story requires.

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.

In a good represensational story, the audience will forgive a certain clumsiness of writing because they care so much about the characters and events. In a good presensational story, the audience will forgive a certain shallowness of story because they so enjoy the writer’s style and attitude. So you not only have to know what’s good for your story, you also have to know what type of story your particular talents are best suited for.

First-person narration must reveal the narrator’s character or it isn’t worth doing.

It’s a lot easier for readers to adapt to the viewpoint change if they have already met the new viewpoint character, and it’s even easier if the new viewpoint character is already very important in the story.

The omniscient narrator can tell more story and reveal more character in less time than it takes the limited third-person narrator. That’s the greatest advantage of the omniscient narrator.

First-person and omniscient narrations are by nature more presentational than limited third-person — readers will notice the narrator more.

If you want brevity, covering great spans of time and space or many characters without writing hundreds or thousands of pages to do it, the omniscient narrator may be your best choice.

tribal unity that comes at the end of Unicorn Mountain would be impossible if we had not seen almost every moment of the story from the viewpoint of practically every major character who was present.

With deep penetration, the viewpoint character’s attitude colors everything that happens.

The dividing lines between cinematic, light-penetration, and deep penetration narratives are not firm. You can drift along with light penetration, then slip into deep penetration or a cinematic view without any kind of transition, and readers usually won’t notice the process. They’ll notice the result, however.

Cinematic narration is cool and distant, but it shares some of the virtues of the camera — you can believe what you see, and if you misinterpret the gestures and expressions and words of the characters, that’s your problem — the narrator never lies.