Elements of Fiction Writing - Characters & Viewpoint

by Orson Scott Card

A character is what he does, yes — but even more, a character is what he means to do.

Remember that of all these different 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.

the starting point, the most important factor of all, is whether they’re interesting and believable to you.

Never let an idea pass through your mind without giving it the third degree. Shine a bright light on it. Demand that it answer your questions. And let your questions, again and again, be Why? What caused that? For what purpose? What’s the result of that? What would happen then?

And then, when you think the idea is just right, when the character is exactly what you want her to be, exaggerate an aspect of her that nobody else has ever thought of exaggerating. Or give the character a little twist. Or both.

Often you’ll find yourself in the opposite position. You’ll have an idea for a setting or situation for a story, and you won’t have any idea about who the characters ought to be. Then the question you ask is: Who suffers most in this situation? Your interrogation of the idea will then focus on the person who has the most need to change things — that will almost always lead you to the most possibilities, and it usually happens that the character you find this way will end up as the main character of the tale.

When you have a point to make, an idea to put across, it is all the more important to be a good storyteller, to examine every character and wring from him all possible truth. If you want to write a story that makes the dangers of industrial pollution really come home to people, you don’t make the “bad guys” into villainous conspirators. Instead, you focus on a “bad guy” who thinks of himself as a good guy. His factory makes a product that people need, and he’s following all the regulations. He’s also trying to keep costs down so the product will be affordable and competitive. When people start complaining that the company is polluting the community’s water, he doesn’t oppose these people because he’s evil, he opposes them because he thinks they’re wrong. To him, they’re just extremists who think that nothing but distilled water should ever be emitted by any factory; to him, these people would rather see everybody live in caves than allow any modern progress.

When it comes to storytelling, invention is the mother of astonishment, delight, and truth.

Self-chosen suffering for the sake of a greater good — sacrifice, in other words — is far more intense than pain alone.

The true “antihero” is rare in fiction. Most seeming anti-heroes are really heroes who need, metaphorically speaking, a bath.

A character who endlessly tries to understand her own motives eventually becomes a bore.

Suppose Pete steps toward a young girl, smiling, and extends his hand to give her a doughnut. To his surprise, she cringes away as if afraid she’ll be struck. The audience knows at once — without the narrator having to say it — that the child has been beaten often enough that she expects a beating. Without slowing down the action at all, you have given a sense of the character’s past and told us something of her pain.