Tag Archive for ‘character’
How Do You Become Someone Else?
The writer Elizabeth Strout, explaining what it’s like to write from the point of view of an irascible retired schoolteacher in her 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Olive Kitteridge: “I actually see myself in all my characters. In order to imagine what it feels like to be another person I have to use my own experiences and responses to the world. I have to play attention to what I have felt and observed, then push those responses to an extreme while [...]
What We Don’t Know We Know
The novelist Gayle Brandeis wrote about a traumatic and terrible event. And then it happened to her in real life. Several months ago, as I was proofreading my new novel, Delta Girls, a sentence I wrote last year kicked me in the gut: “My mother killed herself, you know.” It took me a moment to remember how to breathe again. I had not recalled writing that sentence, had not recalled that this was part of a character’s history, part of [...]
Writing Past the Blind Spot
Last week Bonnie Friedman found out something big … As soon as I finished writing my guest post for this blog last week about how “people don’t do such things,” I put the computer in “sleep” mode, stood up, and the answer to the question I was secretly asking washed through me. Why couldn’t I really believe that people in the world do mean and otherwise outrageous things (things that, if I could believe in them, I could let my characters [...]
"People Don't Do Such Things!"
The writer Bonnie Friedman considers what it means to create ‘realistic’ fictional characters: “People don’t do such things!” is the last line of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler — words cried out by the scandalized judge after Hedda has shot herself off-stage. His words echo in our ears as the curtain rings down and as the actors gradually emerge to take their bows, and as we shuffle out onto the street and back into our lives. People don’t do such things! Well, [...]
"The Vertical Motion of Consciousness"
In which Annie Dillard articulates the seemingly inexpressible, discussing what she likes about writing fiction: “The interior life is in constant vertical motion; consciousness runs up and down the scales every hour like a slide trombone. It dreams down below; it notices up above; and it notices itself, too, and its own alertness. The vertical motion of consciousness, from inside to outside to back, interests me.” (from To Fashion a Text)
Quick Link: The Picture that Inspired 80,000 Words
“The newspaper clipping is in tatters. Folded, yellowed, curling at the edges and mended in places with clear tape, it was tacked to the bulletin board in my office for eight years….” So begins a guest post I wrote this week for In This Light, a blog about the influence of images on writers and writing. Instinctively I knew that this image would help me access the core motivations of my characters in Bird in Hand, who act in comparably [...]
Language Geek, #3: Semiotics
Semiotics is the study of signs, and a sign is anything that stands for something else. It took me a long time to understand this seemingly simple idea. The argument goes like this: it is a myth to believe there is any such thing as an objective reality; ‘reality,’ in fact, is a system of signs. As Proust has said, “Everything can be several things at the same time.” Or, to put a finer point on it: the art historian [...]
Language Geek, #2: Bildungsroman
“No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars – bills you’ve scrounged and saved for … ” begins Mary Karr’s memoir Cherry. It’s been said that there are only two stories in the world: a stranger comes to town and a man sets off on a journey. [...]
Guest Blog: Pamela Redmond Satran on Naming Characters
Novelist and naming expert Pam Satran writes: There’s a character named Billie in the novel I’ve been working on since the invasion of Iraq. But Billie wasn’t always in the book: Until this spring, she was Lily. Well, she wasn’t really Lily, but the character who played her role in the plot was named Lily until the most recent draft. Lily was older – 23 to Billie’s 19 – a college graduate already living on her own in New York. [...]
More Monkey Business
A writer friend, Cindy Handler, asks: “A few posts back [Writing Tip #3: Use a Monkeywrench] you mentioned that you like to give your characters a trait that goes counter to their basic nature and makes it harder for them to get what they want (if I understand correctly). Could you give an example? The main character in my novel is so controlling that it works both for and against her, but I don’t think that’s the same thing.” So [...]
