Elements of Fiction Writing - Characters & Viewpoint

by Orson Scott Card

The more like us a stranger is, the safer we feel, but also the less interested; the more unlike, the more we feel threatened or intrigued.

Somebody could like all the same things as you and still not be the kind of person you would allow to babysit your children.

Real people are who they are — you love ’em or leave ’em. But fictional characters have a job to do. And if they aren’t fulfilling their purpose, they’ve got to change until they do — or another character has to be found to do the job.

it isn’t the money that makes the work worth doing; too many of us make too little for that to be the motive that pulls us along.

The result is that at exactly the points where your story is most factual, it will be least believable.

“But it really happened like that” is no defense in fiction.

Very few friendships can stand the strain of an author-character relationship.

Your readers already “know” people as well as real people ever know each other. They turn to fiction in order to know people better than they can ever know them in real life.

Those guys from back home are never “present” in the story, and yet her relationship with them is very important.

You don’t “flesh out” a character whose role is to put across an idea or point of view by having the character do a lot of things that have nothing to do with the story.

My experience is that I have never done well writing a story from one idea or developing a character from one source. Only when I put together two previously unrelated ideas or characters do they come to life; it is in the process of connecting the unconnected that my stories grow. This may be true for some of you, also.

it would be difficult to write a character story about me, because stories about happy people are boring.

Jeopardy magnifies the stalker, the savior, and the prey, just as pain and sacrifice magnify sufferer and tormentor alike.

your audience will consist of readers who agree with your answer.

The character may wear the mask of the common man, but underneath his true face must always be the face of the hero. Why? Because we don’t read stories to duplicate real life.

In all stories, the hero is our teacher-by-example, and if we are to be that hero’s disciple for the duration of the tale, we must have awe: We must know that the hero has some insight, some knowledge that we ourselves do not understand, some value or power that we do not yet have.

Often 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.

These methods won’t make your story “truthful” — the truth of your tale arises from your unconscious choices, from your beliefs that are so ingrained that you may not even know you believe them, because it doesn’t occur to you that they might not be true. What these tools provide is the illusion of truth.

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.

The most obvious technique — and the least effective and most overused — is the flashback.

what really disturbs us is when people’s basic nature seems to change.

After reading the narrative paragraph, we still feel that nothing has yet happened. But at the end of the scene, we feel that something has happened.

If the first-person narrator doesn’t want to confess anything personal, that is also an attitude and will show up in his writing: