Posts Tagged ‘characters’
In a lecture he delivered at Cornell University, Vladimir Nabokov said this: “A work of art shouldn’t make you think, it should make you shiver.” And yet in reply to that one must ask: what about those of us who actually like for a book to make us think? What about those of us who […]
Read More
Establish your setting early on. Give us The When, The Where, The Weather — the overall tone. Is your story happy, soft, somber? John Steinbeck does this so well in the beautiful opening of Of Mice and Men: A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and […]
Read More
If plot is the skeleton — that vital framework upon which the rest of the body is built — then characters are the soul. Characters are the reason we ultimately love or hate a story. “I’m sick to death of the inarticulate hero,” said John Fowles. “To hell with the inarticulate.” Characterization is in essence […]
Read More
(c)Ray Harvey 2011