How to Write Characters Readers CAN’T Ignore- Elements of Fiction Writing: Characters & Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card

Detailed Book Notes

How to Write Characters Readers CAN’T Ignore— Elements of Fiction Writing: Characters & Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card

Love them or hate them, your audience can’t ignore them

Published in 1988, this is one of the books in the Ender’s Game author’s three-part series “On Writing.”

But just because certain writers know how to write doesn’t necessarily mean that they know how to teach it, especially through the more impersonal-distant means of writing a book about it.

(Much easier when you are a teacher, coaching writers in real time, and able to give feedback).

But does Orson Scott Card actually have something valuable to teach aspiring and practicing writers about creating characters that really “work”?

Check it out yourself!

Who this book is for: Aspiring writers, fans of Card, storytellers who want to learn more about the mechanisms behind characters that readers love to love and hate.

Scylighter rating: 4.3/6 ⭐s (explanation of ratings at the end)

TL;DR — Best Ideas From This Book

• Three questions you never want your readers to ask: 1) So what? 2) Oh yeah? 3) Huh?
• The 3 most powerful elements that make a character “who he is”: A character is what he does, what motivates him, and his past.
• The MICE Quotient — you’re either telling a Milieu, Idea, Character, or Event story.

Detailed Book Notes

Now, let’s break it down!

Introduction

In This Section

• The difference between a writer and storyteller.
• The 3 parts of this book on characterization.

To begin with, Card distinguishes the role of the writer vs the role of the storyteller:

1. The writer does the actual writing of the story, word choice, craft, etc.
2. The storyteller does the composition, plot construction, ordering events, setting up twists, etc.

“There is no ‘right’ way to arrange the two roles of storyteller and writer…I know [writers] who can compose only while performing, like an actor improvising a monologue — they have to be writing the story in order to bring ideas to mind, discovering and shaping the characters and plot as they go along.”

(This note about writing the story in order to inspire ideas is what I do a lot, something I’ve realized only in the last few years. Being part of a writing group has been an important part of that process too — accountability and feedback from actual readers also helps to drum up interesting ideas)

Card says he often works for years plotting and planning before writing, while other writers tell stories aloud to a live audience, composing only while performing.

But you need to do both well.

“Effective characterization requires careful attention at every stage in the writing of fiction.”

So for this book about characterization, Card has split the book into three parts:

1. Invention
2. Construction
3. Performance

But Card warns — this book is not a checklist that you can use mechanically. Instead, mull over the ideas and apply them to your own stories. See what you’re good at and what needs work.

The point of the book is to give readers tools to “punch good characters out of the place where they already live: your memory, your imagination, your soul.”

Comments & Analysis

Opening: Writing fiction is a solitary art.

Closing: This book is a set of tools: literary crowbars, chisels, mallets, pliers, tongs, sieves, and drills. Use them to pry, chip, beat, wrench, yank, sift, or punch good characters out of the place where they already live: your memory, your imagination, your soul.

OTHER COMMENTS

• “We who write fiction have no team of actors or musicians to do our bidding, so it’s easy to forget that our work, too, has a composition stage and a performance stage. We are both composer and performer. Or rather, we are both storyteller and writer.”
• (This is a really interesting perspective. Writing is probably a great practice for people who like to have control. But it also means that everything is on your shoulders.)
• “There is no clear separation of our two roles…as we are performing our stories, writing them out in our most effective prose, we also invent new details or motivations, discover new relationships…”
• (This line stuck out to me because it’s very true that the writing itself begets more ideas, both in nonfiction and in fiction.)
• “If you don’t invent and construct well, then all your beautiful prose will be no more effective than a…clarinetist warming up — very pretty technique, perhaps, but music it ain’t. And if you don’t write well, readers will be hard put to discover the wonderful story you want to tell — just as bad acting can ruin a good script.”
• Card’s concept here is a lot like the top two layers of the Scylighter Schema ~

PART I: INVENTING CHARACTERS

Chapter 1. What is a Character?

In This Chapter

• The real reason why readers want to care about your characters
• How to translate into fiction the way people get to know each other in real life
• The 3 most powerful elements of characterization

Readers want to know your characters “better than they know any living person…better than any human being ever knows any other human being.”

Because “that’s part of what fiction is for — to give a better understanding of human nature and human behavior than anyone can ever get in life.”

So the point is to see how people get to know each other in real life, and how that applies to fiction.

Here are several points Card mentions:

1. A character is what he does: “This is the strongest, most irresistible form of characterization.” No one tells you what kind of person they are, they SHOW you. You SEE it. Someone who lies is a liar. Someone who keeps his temper is self-controlled, etc.
2. Motive: A layer beyond visible actions is the WHY behind the act. If someone steals, he’s a thief…but what if he’s doing it to feed orphaned children? Or he’s reclaiming property that was first stolen from him? Then we don’t judge him the same way. In other words, “motive is what gives moral value to a character’s acts.
3. The past: Similar to motive, knowing someone’s past affects how we perceive him today. “People are what they have done, and what has been done to them. That’s how we construct our image of ourselves. We all carry around in our memory our own story of what has happened in our past.” So when you are writing a character, let your readers know something of her past.
4. Reputation: Everyone has a reputation, and we all take part in building each other’s reputations. You know a lot about people based on what you’ve heard others say about them. So when you’re writing stories, consider what reputation your character has and whether you will fulfill or violate those expectations.
5. Stereotypes: We also judge people by what groups they seem to belong to. But in our society, we try NOT to treat people by knee-jerk stereotypes. You can’t stop readers from having stereotypes, but you can use this concept by breaking stereotypes and piquing reader interest. Some things people might be stereotyped by: jobs, sex, age, family role, race or physical type, ethnic/regional traits.
6. Network: How a character interacts with others shows you more about who he is, and “the deeper truth is that we are different people in different relationships.”
7. Habits/patterns: Habits make characters seem more realistic. Do your characters have any annoying habits or patterns?
8. Talents/abilities: “A large part of who you are is what you can do.” Readers are interested if a character is unusually good at something.
   (This is so true. Refer to Brandon Sanderson’s training on the three levers of characterization. Competence is one of them. Also consider characters like Sherlock Holmes, Artemis Fowl, etc.)
9. Tastes/preferences: Does your character enjoy certain kinds of cuisine or literature? Since real people have likes and dislikes, so should fictional characters. These preferences can make them interesting, endearing, etc.
10. Body: Card lists this one last because although it’s important, too many beginning writers think this is the end-all and be-all of characterization. Hair and eye color and complexion are often the most trivial aspects of a person, unless they have a significant handicap or something exceptional that affects the story.

And in summary, Card reminds readers that the first 3 elements on this list are most powerful:

What the character does, why (motive), and about the character’s past.

Comments & Analysis

Opening: The characters in your fiction are people. Human beings. // Yes, I know you make them up. But readers want your characters to seem like real people. Whole and alive, believable and worth caring about.

Closing: Remember that of all these different ways of gettingt o 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.

OTHER COMMENTS

• “We never fully understand other people’s motives in real life. In fiction, however, we can help our readers understand our characters’ motives with clarity, sometimes even certainty.”
• Why do we care about motives? In the same way we care about all kinds of knowledge — it makes the world a little less chaotic and scary. If we understand what motivates a person, we can learn how to interact with the person better. And that even applies to ourselves. Which is why psychology is so fascinating, and fiction too, to some people
• “A character is what he does, yes — but even more, a character is what he means to do.”
• This reminds me of the Bible verse in Matthew 5:21–22: “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder,’ and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother…will be subject to judgment.”
• Because people are not just what we do, but why we do it. Which is why in a murder, the one who plans the murder is guilty even if they don’t do the actual killing.
• “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. Strangeness is always both attractive and repellent.”
• Overall, this chapter was fairly predictable and straightforward. The most important piece of information in here was one I already knew — physical looks do not make the character, and that’s a trap many beginning writers fall for.
• The “semi-new” piece of information that I found valuable was that the top three things that make a character who he is are “what he does, his motive, and the past,” according to Card. It does sound rather intuitive, but sometimes we know thing intuitively that we don’t consciously use in our writing, so it’s worth a reminder.

Chapter 2. What Makes a Good Fictional Character?

In This Chapter

• 3 questions all readers ask when they pick up your story.
• How to “interrogate” your characters.

Card begins by saying that fictional characters “have a job to do,” a purpose to fulfill and you have to make them fulfill it, or replace them with a better character.

Even minor characters have to contribute to the story somehow, twist it or relieve tension or provide information.

Next, Card says that on the one hand, readers who give your story a try WANT it to be good. But in order to do that, authors must answer 3 question:

1. They ask: So what? (aka, why should I care what’s going on?)
   Your job: Give them a reason to care.
2. They ask: Oh yeah? (aka, I don’t believe you, how dumb do you think I am?)
   Your job: Provide a clue or explanation that persuades readers to keep trusting you.
3. They ask: Huh? (aka, I have no idea what’s going on)
   Your job: Make sure there is never a moment of confusion or inclarity in your story.

“On those rare but vital occasions when suspense requires you to withhold a bit of information, you’ll make sure your readers know exactly what the question is, even if they don’t know the answer.”

The above three questions may sound hostile, but they’re critical. You must anticipate where in the story people will ask each of these questions and answer them before they give up and leave.

(The first time I consciously noticed an author doing this was when I was reading Brandon Mull’s middle grade fiction, specifically his Five Kingdoms and Beyonders series — and also Fablehaven and Candy Shop Wars.

(Basically: Whenever I had a question about how or why his fantasy world worked a certain way, he answered it, as if reading my mind. I wonder if he workshopped the stories with several gifted beta readers/critique partners, or if he just naturally has a knack for anticipating and answering reader questions…

(It was a really interesting thing to notice, and makes me more conscious of this when I read other fiction.)

In other words, you must give readers reasons to care, to go on trusting you, and to keep reading.

“With rare exceptions, stories are about people and what they do, and…a story should focus on only a few characters [who] satisfy those three questions the audience is constantly, unconsciously, asking.”

Remember, you are your first audience. Your characters must be interesting to yourself. You have to believe in your characters on a gut level, not intellectually. You’re either intrinsically interested and want to write about a character, or you’re not.

But once you have a story and characters you care about, it’s time to use all the storytelling tools you have to make a story worth others reading.

Card quotes St. Paul’s “faith, hope, and charity.”

(…although he or someone at the publishing company briefly misquoted it as “clarity.” Also, for modern readers — charity here is referring to selfless, generous love. Not giving alms):

“If your story really does matter, if your made-up tales have any real value at all, then it truly is an act of charity, of brotherly love, to open up that story to as many people as can possibly receive it.

Then Card reminds readers that writing is about telling the truth and changing lives with stories.

If you do this well, with a lot of people, the money will follow. But money doesn’t make the work worth doing. It can’t be your motivation.

Now, Card gives some question types to “interrogate” your character:

First, Card begins with Casual Questions — questions about causes and results. He demonstrates by showing a workshop he does with students called “A Thousand Ideas in an Hour,” where he starts by asking a question like, “Do you want a story about a boy or a girl?” and then based on that question, he’ll keep asking questions, like:

• How old is this person? (Twelve!)
• What happens when you’re twelve? (Go places by yourself!)
• Such as where? (and so on and so forth)

The point is to ask “Why” and “What result” questions and see how the story grows.

Other causal questions you want to consider are:

• Why would he do X? What made him do it? If he does it, what are the consequences?
• What happens when X is true? (Ie: What happens because you’re twelve?)
• What can go wrong? What’s the result?

You can also exaggerate elements of the story beyond the ordinary, or twist an expected assumption.

Like if the assumption is that your babysitter character is a responsible person trying to do a good job, try twisting it so that your babysitter is manipulative?

Basically, think the opposite of the most obvious assumption, and see where that takes you.

And avoid cliches. Because everyone has a “library of cliches, stock story elements” which we pick up from our reading and conversations. So don’t settle for them!

“Never let an idea pass through your mind without giving it the third degree…Be brutal…Don’t believe the first answer that comes to mind, either. Chances are very good that the first answer you come up with will be a cliche. The second one too. Keep asking the questions, trying for more answers — eventually one will come along that really comes alive for you.”

Some more questions to ask in order to open up character and story possibilities:

1. What could go wrong?
2. Who suffers the most in this situation?
3. What made this happen?
4. What is the purpose?
5. What is the result?

So to sum up, the process is:

1. A) Ask questions
2. B) eliminate cliches
3. C) Choose your answer and then
4. D) Twist/exaggerate the answer

Comments & Analysis

Opening: 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.

Closing: There. Now that we’ve got a plan for what to do when we find an idea, let’s go get some.

OTHER COMMENTS

• “When readers pick up your story or novel, they want it to be good…They’re on your side. That honeymoon with the readers lasts about three paragraphs with a short story, two pages or so with a novel. Within that time you need to give the reader some reason to read on.”
• I like how he gives concrete numbers here. The “three paragraphs or two pages” is a nice rule of thumb, much better than the vague “The start of your story.” It could even be a made-up number, or something that most likely he learned from experience, but just having a number is better than not in nonfiction books.
• “Every story choice you make arises out of who you are, at the deepest levels of your soul; every story you tell reveals who you are and the way you conceive the world around you — reveals more about you, in fact, than you know about yourself.”
• EXACTLY! And THIS is why writing as a practice is so fascinating
• “Some readers will be so in harmony with you that they’ll receive your story no matter how clumsy your efforts; for other readers you’ll never succeed no matter how good a writer you are. But that doesn’t mean you should shrug and write however you like. You owe it to other people to give them the best possible chance to receive this important, truthful story…give them every possible reason to care, every possible justification for belief.”
• “Some techniques I’ll tell you in this book can be used mindlessly and mechanically, and they’ll still work, to a degree.”
• “Our objective as storytellers isn’t to make money — there are faster and easier ways of doing that. Our objective is to change people by putting our stories in their memory; to make the world better by bringing other people face-to-face with reality, or giving them a vision of hope, or whatever other form our truth telling might take.”
• This “truth telling” here is intriguing.
• “You want the widest possible audience to receive this message; when you use your best skills to open up your story to other readers…you’re freely giving your best gifts.”
• “The moment you use a technique that doesn’t belong in your story, solely for the sake of appealing to some imagined reader who wants a bit more…[random examples here]…at that moment your story dies a little, becomes a little more lie and a little less truth. For every reader you might gain that way, you’ll lose the power to influence a dozen others who will recognize the falseness in your story and reject it.”
  (THIS is why artists must be genuine, authentic)

Chapter 3. Where do Characters Come From?

In This Chapter

• 5 idea sources for creating interesting characters.
• How stories ALWAYS reveal more about you than you want them to, because…
• How to be persuasive without being preachy.

Ideas are ubiquitous. If you don’t see them, you’re not paying attention. So where are some places to get ideas?

1. From life: What’s ordinary to you is strange to someone else (Card gives an example of a fairy tale world set in Georgia and he found everyday life in Georgia more interesting than the fantasy elements)
2. From strangers: Keep your eyes peeled for interesting happenings in real life. (Card’s example is of a family that divided and conquered a grocery store: Mom went to stand in line with empty cart, dad and kids ran to get what they wanted to buy)
3. From people you know: Obvious. But be careful because you may not know people as well as you think you do, or you might know too much and forget to tell the readers (remember truth is stranger than fiction, sometimes), or you might hurt your relationships with people (even asking for permission can backfire because they might be offended no matter what).
4. Yourself/Analogy: You can always interview yourself, try to think what might get you to act the way your character does. You may have never murdered someone, but you know what anger feels like.
5. Memory: “This is a deep well, but one that can quickly become exhausted.” Memory can also be distorted by your own perceptions, and yet you know yourself best, so your own experience is the truest well from which you can draw ideas.

Using your memory as an idea cache does have the danger of repeating “incidents and attitudes” and creating “personal cliches,” so you have to consciously exaggerate and twist what you come up with to make things different.

(I definitely find this to be true. I tend to use similar concepts and themes over and over in stories.

(Another suggestion is to write down the ideas and loosely organize them so that you don’t overuse the same ideas)

Another thing to do is to do random searches through your memory, for example, by picking an arbitrary starting point in time and seeing what happens.

Also consider what other characters must be in the story because of the plot or setting:

If a girl is living with her aunt and uncle for the summer, Card suggests, it might make sense that she has cousins. Will they be older or younger or the same age? And where do they live, what is the place like, etc.

At this point, it’s also to consider who is in the story’s past — what characters are no longer around?

In real life, you are always remembering people from the past. So your main character should have such people in his/her life too.

Now, if you have a message you want to share in your story, some moral lesson or the like, don’t forget you’re writing a story. No one wants to read a preachy essay in the guise of a story.

(Card mentions the movie The China Syndrome as an example of a message wrapped in a story that was well done).

Just be careful not to create propagandistic one-dimensional characters who are just there to be a mouthpiece for some ideology. Dig deeper and ask why the character cares about X idea, and “don’t settle for the first answer, either.”

(Before you dive deeper, you have to have somewhere to dig, though, I think. That means experiencing lots of other people through reading — not just fiction, but history as well, and also interacting with real life people, having relationships with many different people, and hearing their own stories)

To develop a truly well-rounded character, Card suggests using the categories in Chapter 1 of this book to assess how much you know about your character, and ask the questions in Chapter 2 of your character.

Now, to increase your chances of coming up with good ideas for your story, keep your mind working on “what if” questions. And ask those questions about places you travel through. Let it trigger your imagination.

“The stories that fill a reader with wonder are the stories that came from a wondering mind, your mind, constantly speculating, exaggerating, questioning, challenging, twisting, searching.”

Comments & Analysis

Opening: To get ideas for characters, you don’t have to go searching until you find the Holy Grail. There’s no mystical process involved.

Closing: Good stories and characters will wander through, by and by. You’ll find them in your idea net, and you’ll breathe on them and bring them all to life.

OTHER COMMENTS

• “Believability in fiction doesn’t come from facts — what actually happened. It comes from the readers’ sense of what is plausible — what is likely to happen.”
  (This is where the “truth is stranger than fiction” line comes from)
• “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. If your story tells them nothing more about people than they already know, you’ve let your audience down. By sticking to the facts, you cheat them out of the chance to learn the truth.”
• “You are the only person you will ever know from the inside, and so, inevitable, when your fiction shows other characters from the inside, you will reveal yourself.”
• “Sometimes it will startle, even embarrass you, when you look back on a story you’ve written and suddenly realize how much you have confessed without even meaning to.”
• “Whatever obsessions you have, whatever memories are most important to you, either negatively or positively, they are going to show up in your work no matter what you do.”
• “The danger of delving into your own memory is that you’ve only lived one life. You’re going to keep coming up with the same incidents and attitudes over and over again, without even realizing it.”
• “Polemic — persuasive writing — only works when it doesn’t feel like propaganda. The audience must feel that you’re being absolutely fair to people on the other side. If you depict them as devils, the uncommitted members of the audience will be disgusted, and you’ll convince none of them.”
• “To create effective persuasive or educational fiction, you must have believable, interesting characters…make your characters balanced and well-rounded.”
• “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 quote reminds me of the concept of the zettelkasten (see Sonke Ahren’s book) as well as Brandon Sanderson’s second lecture in his 2012 course on writing, where he talks about how he outlines by keeping a “Cool Stuff” file and then putting multiple ideas together. 7 out of 10 writers, Sanderson says, don’t put enough ideas into their novels.

Chapter 4. Making Decisions

In This Chapter

• How to nail down ideas and transition from brainstorming to actual writing.
• How to keep a “Character Bible” and why.

When you’re brainstorming, everything’s negotiable. But at some point, you need to start nailing down the details. For example…

NAMES

Card has a friend who uses placeholders like XXX for all his characters until he decides on what kind of person they are, and then he names them. But for Card, names are part of a person’s identity and he can’t use that method.

Names suggest family relationships, ethnicity, history and time period.

And consider that a name is what readers use to keep characters straight in their heads, so Card suggests giving characters very different and memorable names.

For example, he makes sure all his major characters have names that start with a different letter, unless there’s some compelling reason not to.

Consider also varying the length and sound of the names (where the accent/emphasis is, for example).

Don’t overdo monosyllabic names, for example. And don’t distract readers with too many overly bizarre names unless that’s part of the plot.

Another rule of thumb is to have one name per character.

Russian novels infamously give characters multiple names and nicknames because that’s the Russian way, but it’s confusing in stories.

KEEPING A BIBLE

Next, Card suggests keeping a “Character Bible” to keep track of the many details about each character, because it’s easy to forget little things about the character’s past and so on.

In a movie, there’s literally a person whose job it is to keep track of continuity. You’re going to have to be that person for yourself.

(This reminds me of Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere wiki and how he has trusted beta readers to help him keep his own canon straight in his mind).

Jot down every decision you make about every character either as you write it, or at the start of your writing session the next day (just skim through the last day’s work and add relevant details to your character bible).

The character bible not only helps you keep track of details, it also makes you more aware of the decisions you make as you write, and maybe come up with better answers.

Comments & Analysis

Opening: So far, I’ve been treating characters as if everything about them were negotiable. This is true, as long as the story still exists only in your head or in outline form. But at some point you’re going to start writing the story down, and then you’ve got to make some decisions and stick to them.

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

OTHER COMMENTS

• “When I wasn’t creating a bible as I went along, I once changed a character’s name between chapter 5 and chapter 15…I’ve changed a minor character’s race…hair color, age, height, birthday — it’s easy to do when a character isn’t the focus of the action.”
• I think this concept might be much more necessary for people writing historical fiction and epic fantasy, but sounds like not a bad idea for people working on shorter projects as well.
• “[When editors catch continuity errors] I’ve had to choose which version is correct. This has forced me to rethink many decisions that I had made arbitrarily…and I’ve realized that many of these decisions were careless, that with a bit more thought I could come up with something much better.”
• This is the reason why developmental editing is necessary. The first pass through your story (unless you’re a literary Mozart or Solzhenitsyn), you often choose what’s easy, aka cliches. On a second or third pass you can reconsider and make more interesting decisions.
• “The stories that astonish us, the characters that live forever in our memories — those are the result of rich imagination, perceptive observation, rigorous interrogation, and careful decision making.”
• Imagination, observation, interrogation, and decision-making, in other words. I think observation is the key here. Creativity comes from borrowing from the real world. And there would be nothing to interrogate or make decisions about without observing things.

PART II: CONSTRUCTING CHARACTERS

Chapter 5. What Kind of Story Are You Telling?

In This Chapter

• Card introduces the MICE Quotient: What it is, why it matters, and how to use it.
• The four factors that exist in every story and how they determine the kind of story you write.

Card begins the chapter with a section on the MICE quotient, a concept he created that focuses on four factors that are in every story, to varying degrees:

1. Milieu: the world surrounding the characters
2. Idea: the info that the reader will learn during the process of the estory
3. Character: the nature of one or more people in the story — what they do and why, and is associated with some “conclusion about human nature in general”
4. Event: Everything that happens and why.

These four factors usually overlap.

MILIEU

When it comes to MILIEU, the goal is to get a character into the story’s setting and have him move around in that world to show the reader all the interesting physical/social aspects.

In “pure milieu” stories, “the less you characterize the main character, the better.” The character is often a stereotype, an everyman, an avatar for the reader, who is living vicariously through the character.

The point of a milieu story is to focus on the setting, the world.

What are pure milieu stories?

Some examples are travelogues, utopian fiction, satire, and natural science, Card says. Not to mention sci-fi/fantasy, where “the world of the story is often the main attraction” (Think Dune and Lord of the Rings).

Oh, and “Milieu is the entire definition of the western.”

IDEA

With an IDEA story, the author poses a question or problem at the beginning, and that problem is answered at the end.

Murder mysteries are strongly “idea stories” as are caper stories. Sometimes sci-fi as well. Allegories, particularly, are the quintessential “idea story.”

Again, characterization isn’t important here, even when you have an interesting detective character, that character doesn’t change.

CHARACTER

Then we have CHARACTER stories, which are focused on a person trying to “change his role in life.”

How does Card define a “role”? It’s “his network of relationships with other people and with society at large.”

And the character story “emerges when some part of a character’s role in life becomes unbearable.”

Then the rest of the story is about the character breaking free from the old role and looking for a new one. Or struggling to cut free from the old one. And so on.

This story requires the most characterization at least for the main character.

EVENT

And finally, an EVENT story is kind of what every story is, but an event-focused story follows the pattern:

The world is somehow out of order and either must be restored or a new order must be established.

This type has been “the structure at the heart of the romantic tradition for more than two thousand years.”

As examples, Card cites: The Count of Monte Cristo, Macbeth, Lord of the Rings, Wuthering Heights.

THE CONTRACT WITH THE READER

Next, Card says, when you tell a story, you promise the reader within the first few pages what kind of story he can expect. Will it be more of a milieu, idea, character, or environment story?

For example, a story might start with a murder, and be more of an “idea” story.

Or if the same plot is told from the POV of the widow of the murder victim and how her life has been disrupted, it is more of a “character” story.

The key is that the story should end “when the first major source of structural tension is resolved.”

So if the story starts as an idea story, the story should end when the idea (answer to the problem) is discovered.

The second contract you make with the reader is:

“Anything you spend much time on will amount to something in the story.”

(This is just like Chekhov’s gun)

So based on which of the four letters in the MICE quotient you are most intrigued by, or which your story most leans on, brainstorm ideas and devote the bulk of your story, consciously, to answering the questions pertaining to that part of the quotient.

You can use the “techniques and structures” of the other story factors for “subplots or complications,” but they must be subordinate to your main idea.

For example, in the Lord of the Rings, the story goes on and on after Frodo destroys the ring, with the Scouring of the Shire, and then Frodo sailing off to the west and it seems like it almost never stops.

But readers don’t get bored. They keep reading because this is a milieu story, and they’re not here to solve a problem, but to enjoy and explore the world.

In other words: LoTR has all of the MICE elements, but milieu is its predominant focus.

The point is that if you want to characterize well, you have to characterize appropriately, which means you need to know what type of story — M, I, C, or E — are you really telling?

Now, a word about character stories, which grew popular in the beginning of the 20th century:

Character stories now dominate storytelling so much that writers of other-focus stories are forced to pay more attention to their characterizations now, because readers expect it.

But, Card says, “detailed characterization [is not] an absolute virtue in storytelling.” If you don’t feel like you HAVE TO DO IT, if you aren’t writing a Character story, then don’t worry about this too much.

Comments & Analysis

Opening: When you invent a character, you depend on your sense of what is important and true to make your decisions. This will continue throughout your telling of the tale — but once you start setting down words, you also have to make many decisions based on what is right for the whole story.

Closing: A good understanding of characterization includes knowing when it’s appropriate to concentrate on character — and when it isn’t.

OTHER COMMENTS

• “[This] is your first contract with the reader — you will end what you began. Digressions will be tolerated, to a point; but digressions will almost never be accepted as a substitute for fulfilling the original contract.”
• This is the reason why I have been experimenting with putting a “promises & payoffs” section in the article when I analyze novels. Maybe not in the initial drafting stage, but definitely when you’re developmental-editing the story, you need to know what promises you’re making to the reader, what promises you should be making, and whether you’re paying it off properly.
• I first heard of the MICE quotient on the Writing Excuses podcast, and it was interesting to revisit it here in Card’s own words, since I believe he was the one to come up with the concept.
• I haven’t enough experience to evaluate if I agree with this way of framing stories, but it sounds reasonable so far, and what he says about ending the story when the relevant conflict (related to M, I, C, or E)

Chapter 6. The Hierarchy

In This Chapter

• The difference between three levels of characterization.
• How to make a main character a MAIN character.

Now, it’s time to talk about the hierarchy of characters, beginning with…

1. Walk-ons and placeholders: These are basically background NPCs.
2. Minor characters: They may make a difference in the plot, but readers shouldn’t get emotionally attached to them for good or ill. “A rule of thumb is that a minor character does one or two things in the story and then disappears.”
3. Major characters: The people readers care about and love or hate.

WALK-ONS

In acting, walk-ons aren’t supposed to draw attention to themselves. If they do, they’re either fired, or else their actions are so interesting the directors decide to elevate them to a more important part.

Same with your walk-ons in fiction. If someone’s getting distracting, cut him out of the story, or figure out why you are so interested in this character.

You can make your walk-ons stereotypes. But note that if you violate the stereotype, you will make the character interesting, and that makes him NOT a walk-on anymore.

MINOR CHARACTERS

Now what can you do with minor characters to make them interesting? (But not TOO interesting)

1. Make them eccentric. Here, Card sites the character played by Bronson Pinchot in Beverly Hills Cop. He stood out as a character, even though he was a very minor one.
2. Exaggerate one of their traits.
3. Make them obsessed with something.

Just be careful not to make a minor character stick out too much in the beginning of a story because then he might be mistaken as important.

MAJOR CHARACTERS

Now, moving on to major characters. How do you characterize them?

1. Their choices: Are they powerful enough to make choices that affect others?
2. Who’s focused on them: If the other characters look at, listen to, pay attention to him, he’s important.
3. How often they appear: If they keep showing up, the writer probably wants to do something with them.
4. Action: What they do matters to the plot. Make them active rather than passive.
5. Sympathetic: Are they endearing? Charming?
6. POV: You write from their POV.

But remember that there are still some issues out of your control. For example, “a character might be extremely important to some readers because they think they resemble him…or someone they love or hate.”

You can’t control those things, but you can use the 6 factors listed above to make your character more or less prominent, as needed.

Comments & Analysis

Opening: Not all characters are created equal.

Closing: And when these techniques are under your control, you can play your characters the way a harpist plays each string on the harp, a few at a time, for exactly the right balance and harmony.

OTHER COMMENTS

• “Much of what makes the difference between major and minor characters is the amount of time you spend on them.”
• Random note: This reminds me of the way the minor prophets are nicknamed in the Bible — it’s not that they’re “lesser people,” but that the lengths of their books are shorter, and they don’t play as big a role in the whole story as, say, a character like a Moses or a David.

Chapter 7. How to Raise the Emotional Stakes

In This Chapter

• How to make your readers cry.
• How to use emotion to create tension that keeps people reading your story.

You want your story to have tension to keep people reading. How do you do that though? Card gives some ideas:

SUFFERING

If a character suffers or inflicts physical or emotional pain, he’s more memorable.

• Physical pain is easier to use than emotional because you don’t have to do as much to set it up. Emotional pain needs some context.
• Suffering loses its effectiveness if it’s repeated too often. It either becomes comical, or annoying. (Too many dismemberments make horror films ridiculous, not scary)
• You increase the power of suffering by showing more of its cause/effect, NOT by describing the injury in detail. Show what the loss cost your character, don’t show him sobbing.

“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.”

SACRIFICE

A character’s degree of choice increases the intensity.

• Loss is less intense if it’s out of your control. If you choose to sacrifice something, though, that hurts more. And if someone chooses to deliberately inflict pain on another, that creates stronger loathing and fear than if it was an accident.
• This is why sadistic villains are often more memorable than the hero who is pretty forgettable. The villain evokes stronger feelings from the reader because of his choice to cause harm.

JEOPARDY

What is jeopardy? Anticipated pain or loss. A threat.

• “The greater the jeopardy, the stronger the pain when the dreaded event actually occurs.”
• “Jeopardy magnifies the stalker, the savior, and the prey”
• But jeopardy only works if the audience believes “the dreaded event might actually happen.”

To illustrate jeopardy, Card cites examples from the movie Aliens and Stephen King’s Misery.

Old melodramas had the hero nearly-sawed to death but because audiences didn’t believe the writer would really let the hero get sawed to death, it didn’t work. Modern melodrama writers use less intense threats, but they make the threats come true.

SEXUAL TENSION

This is related to jeopardy, vital to romances, and crosses all cultural boundaries.

• If a man and woman become important to each other, especially in the negative sense (rivalry, contempt, anger), this increases the sexual tension.
• For this to work, characters must meet general attractiveness standards. They don’t necessarily have to be physically beautiful, but they have to have some other form of attractiveness.
• But like killing off your character in jeopardy, if the characters come together, the tension is gone. They have to stay in some kind of conflict to keep the tension.

SIGNS & PORTENTS

If a character’s fate seems to have wider consequences on the world around her, (and not just private concerns) that also increases intensity.

Think Raiders of the Lost Ark. Or notice how writers often pair storms with character’s turbulent moods. There’s a kind of feeling of cosmic connection.

Comments & Analysis

Opening: Reading a story is not a passive process. While a reader may seem to be sitting still, slowly turning pages, in his own mind he is going through a great many emotions.

Closing: You can’t control everything the reader feels, and no two members of your audience will ever be emotionally involved in your story exactly to the same degree. Still, there are some things you can control, and if you use them deftly, without letting them get out of hand, you can lead most of your audience to intense emotional involvement with your characters. The audience won’t necessarily like the characters, but they certainly won’t be indifferent to them.

OTHER COMMENTS

• Although none of the elements in this chapter are surprising, it’s nice to have them in one place, for reference.
• “Reading a story is not a passive process…in his own mind, [the reader] is going through a great many emotions. Underlying all of them is a strong tension. The stronger it is, the more the reader concentrates on finding out what happens next, the more attention he pays, the more intensely he feels all the emotions of the tale.”
• I believe this is called dramatic tension in film and TV as well. You have to keep things interesting, or else — especially in these increasingly digitally distracted days — people will move on.
• “When pain or grief become unbearable in real life, human beings often develop fictions to cope with it — we call it insanity. When pain or grief become unbearable in fiction, readers simply disengage from the story and either abandon the tale or laugh at it.”
• This is a VEERRY interesting point. This is why humor is a disengagement mechanism. It’s also thought-provoking how Card links fiction and insanity. Really worth thinking about more deeply.
• The most interesting takeaway from this chapter for me was Card’s point about how if the character cries, readers don’t have to, but if the character has good reason to cry and refrains, readers will cry.

Chapter 8. What Should We Feel About the Character?

In This Chapter

• How to make characters sympathetic to the reader.
• How to make characters LESS sympathetic to the reader.

When your character faces conflicts, you want readers to care. You want them to root for one side or another.

But be careful: If you make a character sympathetic, you are tacitly saying that you approve of what he does, especially if his enemy is unlikable.

That’s why writers make the villains unlikable from the start.

The tricky thing is if you want to begin with a sympathetic character and slowly make readers lose sympathy. This works better if you have another character to replace this guy in the readers’ emotions.

Even harder is to make both opponents sympathetic.

This creates “anguish, the strongest of emotions you can make your audience experience directly” since your audience doesn’t want either side to lose.

Obviously, this is a bit dangerous:

“When you separate sympathy from moral decisions — exactly what a judge and jury must try to do in a trial — you can’t be sure that your audience will reach the ‘right’ conclusions.”

Your audience may not agree with how you resolve the conflict, but on the other hand, they’ll care more deeply.

The point is, you want to know HOW to make an audience like or dislike a character. Because most readers want to read about characters they like. Why spend hours with a book otherwise?

At times, writers do create MCs who are “pretty repulsive” but the character, even then is not TOTALLY unlikable. As Card says, most anti-heroes are really “heroes who need, metaphorically speaking, a bath.”

How do you do this?

• Remember: First impressions matter. The first time a character shows up in a story, you will like or dislike them right away.
• We like characters who are like us. The word “like” can mean fond of OR similar to. How much you LIKE a character often depends on how much he feels LIKE you in a way that you’re proud of. Do they belong to a community that is important to you? Is he of a similar age?
• Yet there is some truth in “opposites attract” as well.
• And if a character is too much like us, they can be boring. Some strangeness excites curiosity.

Devices that make an audience feel more in sympathy with a character:

• Physical attractiveness: This is the least effective, in print. Powerful in movies, but in books you don’t even have to describe your character’s features too much. And sometimes if the character is too good-looking, readers will resent her.
• Altruism (Victim, Savior, Sacrifice): suffering, sacrifice, and jeopardy can help create sympathy.
• Victims elicit pity (but also seem weak and may induce some contempt, which is why the trope of women being rescued by men is disfavored by some)
• Saviors are admirable, but can also seem like a foolish meddler if they plunge in too much. It helps if the one they are saving ask for help.
• Sacrifice: Self-sacrifice can elicit pity or admiration but the audience must be convinced the cause is important and right and the character has no other choice, or else the sacrifice will be seen as a stupid waste.
• Plan, purpose, hunger, dreams: Don’t just let your hero react to events in the story. That makes him passive. Before the events of your story change his life, he has to have some kind of life to be changed, he’s not just hanging out doing nothing.

“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.”

• Courage and fair play: If your character takes risks (physical, financial, social) to do what she believes is right, audiences will like her more. And if she is proven right, she shouldn’t gloat. If she wins, it shouldn’t be from cheating. And so on.
• Attitude: Your character’s attitude toward others, himself, and the events in the story can do a lot to win sympathy.
• Draftee or volunteer: If a character is facing some difficult task, it’s more sympathetic for her to volunteer for it. If the character is about to come into fame or fortune, it’s better if she DOESN’T volunteer for it.
• Dependability: Does your character keep his word no matter what? If he doesn’t does he have a good reason for it and make up for it later?

I don’t mean that sympathetic characters don’t lie. A lie is a story told about the past, and dependability has to do with promises — stories the character tells about what she will do in the future.

“Don’t underestimate the importance of a promise in fiction. The pledge, kept or broken, is one of the strongest motifs running through all of the world’s storytelling.”

• Cleverness: This is not the same as “intelligence” which “suggests elitism, snobbery, arrogance.” Cleverness is a character able to think of solutions to knotty problems. A character should be clever without being too aware of how clever or superior she is.
• Endearing imperfections: The lovable rogue ~ If your character is too perfect, audiences won’t believe in him. So give him some “endearing imperfections.” Han Solo, for example is great…but boastful.

Now, let’s turn to characters we hate. These are easier to create:

• Sadist or bully: If he enjoys making someone else suffer, we’ll hate him.
• Assassin or avenger: Murder won’t by itself create antipathy unless the killer kills for selfish reasons and the victims don’t deserve to be killed.
• Self-serving, self-appointed: People dislike those who are unambitious…and those who are too pushy. Just think about the “little brother trying to tag along when his older brother is out with his friends.” Even with villains like Macbeth Shakespeare didn’t make him self-appointed, but chosen by witches.
• Oath breaker: People hate characters who betray trust or break promises. Readers take that personally.
• Intellectual: This isn’t true in every culture, but at least American audiences resent characters who are smarter/better educated than others, especially when they think it makes them superior.
• Insane: “We are terrified of people who don’t live in the same reality we do…you can’t reason with them, there is no common ground.” Madmen are particularly scary if they can convince others they are right.
• Attitude: Whatever good and admirable attitudes your good guy has, make your bad guy’s the opposite. Whiny, selfish, judgmental, etc.

“So strong is our aversion to people trying to put themselves in a position where they weren’t invited that it can overcome a great deal of sympathy.”

(Interesting. This may be why “freedom of association” is such an important freedom, and why integration was challenging, back in the day…It’s not like it was the wrong thing to do, but sometimes there’s a wrong way to do the right thing, and forcing people to do the right thing means they might do it, but for the wrong reasons. And that means they may revert to prior bad behavior as soon as they have the opportunity to do so.

(In other words, as it relates to writing — the better we understand human nature, the more skillfully we can render fictional people.)

But what if you want to create a villain that has SOME redeeming qualities?

First, remember that the villain is the hero of his own story, so has reasons (and excuses) for what he does.

“What you can’t do, however, is make a sadist or a bully or a madman or a usurper into a completely sympathetic character.”

You’re only chance is to show that the character was NOT really a sadist/bully/etc., but was only pretending…but that would mean that he’s not really a villain.

Comments & Analysis

Opening: Any time you show conflict between characters, you want your audience to care about the outcome.

Closing: The most you can do is soften their hatred for her, show that she is more to be pitied than to be hated or feared. Even if the readers come to feel great pity for Nora, at no point will they want her to emerge victorious. // Nobody wants Oedipus to stay married to his mother. Nobody is rooting for Macbeth to win.

OTHER COMMENTS

• “Any time you show conflict between characters, you want your audience to care about the outcome.”
• Caring comes in two forms: intellectual or emotional. The latter is better for a story really resonating with people.

Chapter 9. The Hero and the Common Man

In This Chapter

• There is no audience without THIS.
• Even if you want your character to be an ordinary everyman, you still need to do this to make him worth following.

In storytelling, the main character is sometimes an extraordinary hero, sometimes a common everyman. In fact, readers’ preferences tend to swing back and forth between these two poles over time, like a pendulum.

Romantic heroes can become overly cliched, but realistic heroes live lives too similar to readers’ and aren’t super interesting. So the key is to strike the right balance between the two.

Another thing to consider is that even if you have a “commoner” as a character, he or she needs to have SOMEthing extraordinary to not be boring.

Because: “If there is no awe, there is no audience.”

“We read stories to get experience we’ve never known firsthand or to gain a clearer understanding of experiences we have had…In comedy, heroes go through all the terrible things that we fear or face in our own lives — but they teach us to look at disaster with enough distance that we can laugh at it. In noncomic fiction, the hero shows us what matters, what has value, what has meaning among the random and meaningless events of life.”

Card advises:

If you’re stuck with your story, it may be because you have “forgotten or have not yet discovered what is extraordinary about your main character.”

So ask yourself: What is special (larger than life) about your character that people should hear her story? Why does her story matter to you?

And then make sure your story reveals that.

Comments & Analysis

Opening: When the ancient Greeks and Romans told a serious story, the characters were kings ad queens, great warriors and heroes, the sort of people who expected to receive visitations from the gods — heck, the gods were often their aunts and cousins anyway.

Closing: Some readers will reject your story because your hero isn’t heroic enough for them to bother with; others because you made him too heroic for them to believe. That will always happen, and there’s nothing you can do about it. // What you can do is search for what is “larger than life” in your characters and then make sure that your story reveals their nobility, their grandeur, however subtle and well-disguised it may be amid realistic and common details.

OTHER COMMENTS

• This was an interesting commentary on the pendulum between heroes and everymans. I think it’s not so much one pendulum as multiple different mediums or traditions or genres each with their own pendulum.
• For example, comics are both superhero-heavy (Marvel, DC), but then you get popular comics like Calvin & Hobbes, Peanuts, and Dilbert.

Chapter 10. The Comic Character: Controlled Disbelief

In This Chapter

• What truly makes a story humorous (or not).
• How to translate “a take” on stage onto the page.

Card begins this chapter with some comments on how Mad Max’s New York Jewish accent in The Princess Bride made the movie funny, but that an incorrect accent in a movie based on Tess of the D’ubervilles just took him out of the story.

Why? Because the Tess character’s incorrect accent in a serious story took him out of the story, broke suspension of disbelief.

But the NY accent for Mad Max, because it’s in the context of a comedy, worked, because it was supposed to be unbelievable.

“comic characters cannot be believable in the same way that other characters are…comedy almost always deals with pain, and comic characters almost always suffer. If we believed in them with the same intensity we bring to straight characters, their pain would be unbearable.”

So authors deliberately twist something about the character so readers will laugh instead of sympathize.

Writing comedy is a lot harder than straight fiction because you have to balance being too believable and not funny with being too unbelievable, and losing people’s interest.

Now, Card talks about the “simplest way of signaling comic unbelievability:

DOING A TAKE

A take is when, in acting, a character who experiences something outrageous stares in exasperation at the camera, making the audience laugh.

In writing, you can do this by inserting comments for the reader. Or, Card gives the example of a man who saves a baby squirrel from a cat, and then at the end says “Of course it bit my hand.”

The words “of course” is the “take.”

You can also do a “take” without the “of course” — using the same story of the squirrel, the author simply starts a new paragraph to say one sentence: “It bit my hand.”

In this case, the paragraph break is the “take.” It forces readers to pause a beat, just like in movie “takes.”

EXAGGERATION, DOWNPLAYING

Next, to make things funny, you can either expand on it (my hand swelled to the size of a football), or downplay an unfortunate thing or problem in the character’s life.

ODDNESS

Here, Card points out that certain actors and public figures would be particularly strange playing certain roles and characters, just because of their inherent personalities clashing with the characters.

(Using names like Bob Newhart or John Candy dates this book, the more as time passes)

Eccentricities is exaggerated, becomes funny. But be careful:

Humor can “reduce your ability to move your audience. The Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers made people laugh, but they never really made people care.”

Comments & Analysis

Opening: I’m reminded of Rex Reed’s review of Rob Reiner’s film The Princess Bride. One comment he made in this review was worth remembering. He said that Reiner’s idea of creating a comic character was to give him a funny accent — and for Reed, that just wasn’t enough.

Closing: Comedy of humors carries exaggeration right to the edge of unbelievability or monstrosity. Your story can still be funny, but it also reduces your ability to move your audience. The Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers made people laugh, but they never really made people care.

OTHER COMMENTS

• The most valuable tip in this chapter was Card’s take on the “take,” especially the concrete example of using “of course” (in this situation), or a space.

Chapter 11. The Serious Character: Make Us Believe

In This Chapter

• How to get your readers to mentally “say yes” to your character and reduce skepticism.
• One big mistake amateur writers make regarding character attitude.

This chapter is if you want to create a character that readers can believe in, using the tools of realism to win readers’ trust.

“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.”

The key is to provide (relevant) details that sound true, that makes readers nod and say “yes” mentally — “the more information about a character, the more the audience will believe in him.”

This will make readers “let down their barriers of skepticism” and allow you to lead them through your story “making [your heroes’] stories a part of themselves in a way that factual stories never can.”

ELABORATION OF MOTIVE

To make characters more real, give them more complex motives, not just one simple obvious one.

“Each new revelation of a main character’s motive is not a simple matter of adding more information — it revises all the information that has gone before. Events that we thought meant one thing now mean another. The present constantly revises the meaning of the past.”

But careful, because taking time to examine motive can “come at the expense of action.”

(Just like in real-life navel-gazing)

ATTITUDE

Amateur writers, Card says, write POV characters who don’t have an attitude toward strange or important events that happen around them.

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

You can include attitude in the way you describe the setting.

“it is primarily through attitudes that we establish the meaning of relationships between people. Attitude tells us what people notice about each other, and what value they assign to what they see.”

(This reminds me of Luke Burgis’ book, Wanting)

Attitude helps you discover your character as well since “each bit of attitude you come up with will help you decide what your character will do next.”

“Attitude and motive thus become inextricably intertwined. The character’s response to event X will provide his motive for doing Y and Z.”

THE REMEMBERED PAST

“To fully realize a character…you must give him a whole life.”

That includes a past history, meaningful connections to other people.

“you have to begin the story at exactly the point where the main character becomes interesting and unique.”

So don’t begin at birth, unless the character is supposed to be larger than life from the cradle.

FLASHBACK

The problem with flashbacks is they stop the action.

And don’t include a flashback that isn’t paired with something going on in the present. The flashback is supposed to provide additional information about the character, not the ONLY information.

If readers are well rooted in the story and care about the character, then a choice flashback works well, but it still costs the story the action.

Keep flashbacks rare and brief.

MEMORY AS A PRESENT EVENT

To bring up the past, you can have one character tell another a story from the past. If you do it right, the telling of the story can be part of the present action, not just delivering past information.

“If…a character’s memory of a past event causes him to make a key decision, or take an action he would otherwise not have taken, then the memory is part of the present action, not really an interruption.”

But be careful not to make the timing of the memory too convenient and implausible/coincidental.

Ideally, the memory is something that the character didn’t understand until this moment, so your character “isn’t just remembering, she’s also revising.”

(Is this why Australians call “reviewing” “revising”?)

QUICK REFERENCES

You can also drop in short sentences about the past that don’t feel like a break in the action if they don’t significantly change the story. The less important the memory, the shorter it should be.

Card gives the example of:

“I don’t recommend the restaurant. Worst food I ever had since I ate six live crickets on a two-dollar bet.”

THE IMPLIED PAST

A few other ways to add to the character’s past without stopping the action:

• Expectation: What people expect will happen tells us what has happened to them in the past, like a child who cringes from a raised hand has probably been hit before.
• Habits: Your character should have “specific habits that tell something about their lives” like an former clerk who still counts money a certain way.
• Networks: “Anyone who has been alive for any length of time has also made many connections with other people” and unless that person has been removed from their “milieu, those connections are going to show up.”

JUSTIFICATION

“There’s nothing so…impossible or bizarre or outrageous that you cannot make it believable within a story. It all depends on how hard you want to work at justifying it.”

Just remember to set up relevant background details earlier in the story so it doesn’t feel too convenient and unbelievable to your readers.

“The more bizarre and unbelievable the character’s behavior and the more important it is to the story, the earlier in the story you have to begin justifying it and the more time you’ll need to spend to make it believable.”

Comments & Analysis

Opening: Do you want your readers to believe in your characters? The one thing you can never do is appeal to the facts.

Closing: As a general rule, the more bizarre and unbelievable the character’s behavior and the more important it is to the story, the earlier in the story you have to begin justifying it and the more time you’ll need to spend to make it believable.

OTHER COMMENTS

• Card’s discussion on attitude was the most important in this chapter for me, as well as his thoughts on how to weave the character’s past into the current story.
• In general, I think the better writers learn to multitask — use one scene to do more than one thing — in this case, have a past memory impact present action.

Chapter 12. Transformations

In This Chapter

• Three ways people change (or not).
• Why human change matters to people.

People change. Physically, and in terms of their roles.

“What really disturbs us is when people’s basic nature seems to change.”

WHY PEOPLE CHANGE

“We try to bind people into their roles so that we can be sure of them…One of the reasons fiction exists at all is to deal with that fear of inexplicable change…Because fiction lets us see people’s motives, the causes of their behavior, these stories about made-up people help us guess at the motives and causes of real people’s behavior.”

Fiction can talk about the theme of change in a few ways:

• You can’t change: Some stories have characters who stay the same through the whole story.
• Other things change you: As in things outside your control
• You change yourself: Via an act of will

JUSTIFYING CHANGE

“So deeply ingrained is the human need to find causes for human change that if a story denies that there is any kind of discoverable cause, that denial becomes the most important issue in the story.”

‘Of course you can do anything. But your implicit contract with your readers says you won’t do just anything — that your story will mean something, even if the meaning is that there is no meaning.”

Comments & Analysis

Opening: Real people seem to change.

Closing: The zanier the farce, the sillier the reason you can offer for a character’s change — but there must still be some reason or you lose the audience’s trust.

OTHER COMMENTS

• Not too many notes for this chapter, because it’s fairly self-evident. As Card himself said earlier, people read stories to learn about why others do things (or, in this case, change).

PART III: PERFORMING CHARACTERS

Chapter 13. Voices

In This Chapter

• On person and tense.

“When it comes time to speak the words of the story, whose voice will the reader hear?”

Writing is intrinsically different that talking. “It’s another voice.” You have time to think about the words you use.

Every person has different voices they use when speaking to different people — parents, business, siblings, etc.

PERSON

The most common is first and third person.

TENSE

Past tense is most common.

“Almost every time, your story and your audience will be best served by the tense that is so universally used that audience don’t notice it…Because past tense and first or third person are the conventional choices, they are invisible.”

Great writing is often easily understood, contrary to young writers’ thinking that if a story is too clear, it’s “childish.”

Even Dante and Chaucer were clear in their time, they used the vernacular so people understood them.

“every story you tell is experimental — you have never told that story before, and your audience has never heard you tell it…Even when you write as clearly as you can, many readers will misunderstand you or reject your vision of the world. So why would you want to make the story even more difficult [for readers?]”

“great writers will always be the ones who have passionate, truthful stories to tell, and who do all they can to help their readers receive them [so] choose the simplest, clearest, least noticeable technique that will still accomplish what the story requires.”

(In other words, KISS — keep it simple, silly)

Comments & Analysis

Opening: Who is telling your story? // You are, of course. You choose what story to tell, which incidents matter, which scenes to show, which events to tell about.

Closing: A rule of thumb: Choose the simplest, clearest, least noticeable technique that will still accomplish what the story requires.

OTHER COMMENTS

• Same comment here as above.

Chapter 14. Presentation vs. Representation

In This Chapter

• The difference between presentational and representational fiction.

Card says there are basically two ways to present a story, using theater as an example:

“In a representational play, the actors all act as if there were a fourth wall between them and the audience.’

“Presentational theater, on the other hand, tears down that imaginary fourth wall. The actors don’t just admit the audience is there, they make constant contact with the audience.”

And there are ranges in between.

Fiction can be both. Like The Princess Bride, “a presentational [sic] story within a representational one”

You have to decide where your story falls on the continuum and cue your reader into what to expect so as not to jar them unnecessarily.

In representational stories, “there is no sense of the narrator intruding with his own evaluation of things, or supplying any information [the main character] couldn’t know.”

“It is much easier for readers to get emotionally involved in a representational story.”

In a good representational story, audience will forgive some clumsiness because they care about the character/events. In a good presentational story, audience will forgive some shallowness because they enjoy the writer’s style and attitude.

Comments & Analysis

Opening: There are two ways of relating to the audience during the performance of a story. The difference is clearest in theater.

Closing: In a good representational story, audience will forgive some clumsiness because they care about the character/events. In a good presentational story, audience will forgive some shallowness because they 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.

OTHER COMMENTS

• Card often uses examples from theater (stage and film) to illustrate writing points, which is interesting. I’ve thought about reading more on acting and theater…

Chapter 15. Dramatic vs. Narrative

In This Chapter

• Why “show don’t tell” isn’t always a good idea.
• When “telling” is useful.

“Show, don’t tell” isn’t always the right advice. It depends.

First of all, technically, you never show anything in fiction, because the story always has a narrator — as opposed to movies, which have to show almost everything.

The point is, you can’t show everything that happens, because it would bore the audience. And that’s when you tell.

Narrative technique: tell what’s happening without taking up much time, aka “tell, don’t show.”

The important scenes are the ones that should be presented dramatically, and they take up a lot of time, because “showing” is time-consuming. But “what you show as a scene will stick in the audience’s memory far more than things that are only told about.”

And here, Card gives a few examples of the difference between dramatic/showing and narrative/telling in fiction, by using the same characters in the same situation, but changing the way in which the information is given.

Pure narrative feels like a “mere prelude…leading up to the story.” You expect narrative to be followed by a scene, or else readers will feel like “nothing’s happened.”

(This reminds me of musicals. There’s dialogue, and then there’s a song and dance number. The songs are to emphasize emotional moments, usually, and are the main point of the musical. Otherwise you could just turn it into a stage play)

How do you know when to show and when to tell? Card says lots of figures come into play — rhythm, pace, tone, etc., but these are outside the scope of this book.

Comments & Analysis

Opening: You’ve no doubt heard the slogan “Show, don’t tell.” Under some circumstances, that advice is good; under others, it’s exactly wrong. Storytellers constantly have to choose between showing, telling, and ignoring.

Closing: Characters are made more real thorugh scenes than through narrative.

OTHER COMMENTS

• None for this.

Chapter 16. First-Person Narrative

In This Chapter

• Things to keep in mind with first person narration.
• Difference in distance and time with first and third person narration.

Don’t have all your first person narrators talk like yourself. Discover “a new voice for each story told by a different narrator.”

Use attitude and implied past to create the narrator’s voice.

Remember that if you use 1st person, the narrator must be present at every important scene.

But the narrator doesn’t have to be the main character. Think Watson in Sherlock Holmes.

If your 1st person narrator is boring, the story will be boring.

The reason for using 1st person? “to let us live for a while in a strange or twisted world, to see the world as someone else sees it.”

NO FOURTH WALL

“the first person narrator…must have some reason for telling the story. By implication, he must also have some idea of who his audience is” even if you keep the fourth wall up. The narrator “is not keeping that fourth wall between himself and the audience he thinks he’s telling the story to.”

UNRELIABLE NARRATORS

“Even then, your audience has a right to expect that you, the author, will let them know which of the narrator’s statements to believe and which are lies.”

DISTANCE IN TIME

“The narrator, as a participant in the events, is telling about what happened in the past. He is looking backwards. He is distant in time from the story itself.”

“Even though most third-person accounts are told in past tense, they feel quite immediate…However, with third person there is distance in space…the narrator…is never a person who is actually there. She is always an invisible observer, always at some distance.

1st person — distant in time, 3rd — distant in space.

“Storytellers struggle to breakdown both barriers and achieve immediacy.”

WITHHOLDING INFORMATION

“Telling the end at the beginning is a fatal error only with idea stories; many a character or milieu or event story thrives on the dramatic irony that comes from knowing the end from the beginning.”

Readers will let the 1st person narrator withhold the ending “as long as he tells us at each stage in the story all that the character knew at that point in time.”

LAPSES

1st person is very difficult, Card says, more than 3rd.

1st person narrators can’t know all that 3rd person narrators know about others and their motivations, etc.

1st person narrators also can’t watch themselves from a distance and interpret actions as well as 3rd can.

He can’t talk about his own actions as if he were a camera watching himself. He would remember events from the inside, as it were.

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

Comments & Analysis

Opening: When you use a first-person narrator, you are almost required to tell the story in someone else’s voice — the voice of the character telling the tale.

Closing: First-person narration must reveal the narrator’s character or it isn’t worth doing. The narrator must be the kind of person who would tell the tale, and her motives and attitudes must show up in the story. If you find that you can’t do this, then you have three choices: You can admit that first-person narrative isn’t going to work in this story, and switch to third person; invent your first-person character and create her voice by discovering her attitudes, motives, expectations, and past; or experiment with other first-person narrators until you can find one whose character you can create.

OTHER COMMENTS

• Looking at the difference between first and third person in distance and space is something that’s new for me, but it makes sense.
• Also, I agree with Card, default to third person, unless you want to learn and experiment.

Chapter 17. Third Person

In This Chapter

• The difference between omniscient and limited.
• Why the limited third person is the “overwhelmingly dominant voice in American fiction today”.

Within your story you have all the power

OMNISCIENT VS LIMITED POINT OF VIEW

The omniscient narrator “flies” over the story but the limited narrator leads the reader through, step by step.

Omniscient narrators can see all the minds, meaning that in a scene with two people, “neither character’s point of view is accurate, but ours is.”

Limited narrators can also switch viewpoint characters, but not in mid-paragraph like the omniscient can, and there needs to be a clear transitional break, like a chapter break.

This kind of jump can be hard for readers to make, so it helps if the new viewpoint character is already introduced, and important.

The greatest advantage of the omniscient narrator? He can “tell more story and reveal more character in less time than it takes the limited third-person narrator.”

What about the limited narrator?

Why is limited third the “overwhelmingly dominant narrative voice n American fiction today”?

Limited narrators reduce the sense of distance between reader and character. Omniscient narrators slip in and out of different character’s minds which “keeps the reader from fully engaging with any of the characters.”

Omniscient may save time, but limited third “trades time for distance.”

You take more time to go through the story, but you get a more intense involvement in the character as you do.

Omniscient puts you on the outside looking in, but limited thrid gets you in.

“Think of the limited third-person narrator as a combination of the most important representational features of the omniscient and first-person narrators.”

Limited third lets you get closer to the viewpoint character, but the viewpoint character isn’t telling the story, constantly reminding readers that “he is showing us himself.”

And even though things are described in the past, it feels “present.”

And it avoids the 1st person effect of always having “an unconscious assumption about why [the narrator] is telling [about an event] in such detail.”

MAKING UP YOUR MIND

Final tips to keep in mind when deciding what viewpoint to use:

1. 1st and omniscient are more presentational than limited third. AKA readers will notice the narrator more.
2. In humor, the intrusive narration of first or omniscient can help you create comic distance, dropping in ‘wry comments” or writing “with the kind of wit that calls attention to itself” without “jarring or surprising a reader who is deeply involved with the characters.”
3. Omniscience allows you brevity — the ability to cover great spans of time and space quickly.
4. First person feels less fictional, if you want a “sense of truth that comes from an eyewitness account”
5. Limited third person is great for beginning writers. It’s the most unobtrusive…

And that’s why limited third is most common in today’s fiction.

“Just be aware of the limitations of each narrative strategy, so you can compensate for them.”

LEVELS OF PENETRATION

Even in limited third, you have to decide “how deeply to penetrate the viewpoint character’s mind.” There are three levels to consider:

1. Light penetration
2. Deep penetration
3. Cinematic

You could narrate the events neutrally, but not experience the scenes as if seeing them through the viewpoint character’s eyes, or you could have readers experience the scene as if seeing through the viewpoint character’s eyes.

There’s also the cinematic point of view, where you only see what the POV character sees, but never inside his head, or anyone else’s. There’s a lack of attitude, which can be frustrating for readers.

A good writer learns to match the level with what the story calls for. Card talks about student writers who wrote stories where readers were “so deeply into the character that even such tiny intrusions [like he thought/she thought tags] were distracting and unnecessary.”

“No one level of penetration is likely to be right for a whole story…I suspect, however, that one reason some writers resort — often inadvertently — to the cinematic viewpoint is that they don’t know their viewpoint character well enough to show his attitude toward anything. They start writing without first inventing their characters, and instead of inventing and exploring them as they go along, they avoid their characters entirely.”

In these cases, writers often try to compensate using dialogue to do everything from narration to attitude.

But this makes the story feel melodramatic, like “watching two complete strangers showing powerful emotions and talking about personal affairs that mean nothing to us. It would be embarrassing to watch in real life, and it’s embarrassing and off-putting to read.”

“Mastery of different levels of penetration is a vital part of bringing your characters to life.”

(This is a skill in storytelling, like perspective is in art. Beginning writers often don’t realize what a craft writing really is, how it takes not just a “good idea” or “passion” to tell a good story. That’s what I appreciate about Card’s thoughts here, and the tools he describes in this book)

Comments & Analysis

Opening: Most writers don’t actually think of themselves as God. We are much too humble for that. But within the world of our story, we do have nearly absolute power.

Closing: Mastery of different levels of penetration is a vital part of bringing your characters to life. This is where you have the most control over your readers’ experience, where you have the best chance to determine how well readers will know your characters and how much they’ll care.

OTHER COMMENTS

• I think the concepts of light to deep penetration is one of those practical skills that writers need to develop, similar to how artists need to develop an eye for matching color. The more accurate your “feel” for exactly how much your virtual camera is zoomed in, the more

Chapter 18. A Private Population Explosion

In this short final chapter, Card reminds readers of how far they’ve come, going through this book.

“As long as your mind is alert to possibilities, your characters will grow and develop and deepen and change with every outline you make an every draft you write. // And as you become more aware of what’s possible in characterization, the more experience you get in storytelling as a whole, the better the decisions you’ll make and the fuller and more believable your characters will be.”

Card implies that readers need to practice their craft:

“If you’re serious about storytelling, you’ll write many stories and people them with hundreds of different characters.”

And as you do this, you will find that your characters are worth knowing, “because you took the time and trouble to discover them, develop them, and present them skillfully.”

Your readers will know these characters “better than they’ll ever understand the people of flesh and blood around them.”

(And that is both the draw and perhaps a bit of a danger of fiction)

“If your fictional vision was a good and truthful one, your characters will help your readers understand their families, their friends, their enemies, and the countless mysterious and dangerous strangers who will touch their lives, powerfully and irresistibly.”

And that’s it for this chapter, and for the book!

Comments & Analysis

Opening: We’ve come a long way through this book, from invention of your characters to analysis of their role in the story, from making your characters sympathetic to letting your readers see inside your characters’ minds.

Closing: If your fictional vision was a good and truthful one, your characters will help your readers understand their families, their friends, their enemies, and the countless mysterious and dangerous strangers who will touch their lives, powerfully and irresistibly. And you, looking back, will join them in saying a resounding Yes to the people in your tales. // Yes. I know you, I believe in you, you’re important to me. Yes.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Why I Rated This Book 4.3 Stars

I use this criteria to rate every book (out of 6 points per category):

Star ratings:
1 star = Basically, trash. Or worse.
2 stars = Only worth it if you really like the topic.
3 stars = Average.
4 stars = Quite Good.
5 stars = Worth re-reading more than once.
6 stars = Life-changing.

3. Craft ✍ ✍ ✍ ✍

Is this work is well-written, and are the ideas clearly and skillfully presented?

Overall, this book presents a solid toolbox of ideas that are actually useful, if a bit theoretical and not immediately apparently practical.

The one drawback of this book was Card’s use of “Pete” and “Nora” as the characters in his sample excerpts.

Whenever he’s demonstrating the use of a specific literary technique, he always uses Pete / Nora, and never any other names, which is good in the sense that he won’t inadvertently offend someone by using their name to illustrate a dislikable character…but to be honest, it’s a bit distracting to always use the same names for all the different examples (hard to keep track of)

But that might just be me 😉

Other than that, I appreciate the use of specific examples, and the topics laid out are fairly interesting too.

2. Concept 📖📖📖📖

Is this an interesting concept, well-executed? (Are implicit and explicit promises paid off?)

LMA/LDB: This is a “learning” book, with a slight hint of “doing.”

This book is written as a resource, a toolbox, a reference. It’s not necessarily meant to be read through so much as reviewed in parts, as needed.

The full read-through is still useful, just to get a birds’-eye-view of what the content is about, but this is the kind of book you want to keep by your side as you are analytically reading fiction, or trying to plan or edit your own story.

It can be slightly dry at times, as all textbook-style books are, but still more useful than most books of this type that I’ve seen. Card actually has some insights to share about things like viewpoint (specifically, levels of depth or penetration), which is one of the most boring topics I’ve seen other “how to write” authors address…

…Because for the most part, the concept of first person versus third person is so obvious for anyone who has read a lot of fiction in their life, that I’ve rarely seen writing teachers say anything about POV that is actually surprising, new, or helpful.

Somehow, Card does manage to do it, though, at least to a small degree, which was a nice surprise.

The reason I say this is more of a “learning” than “doing” book is because there are no “applications” in this book.

The information in this book is fairly high level, theoretical, and dense. To make that kind of information memorable and useful for readers, writers can do two things:

1. Give concrete examples of the concepts they’re talking about
2. Ask readers to apply what they learned through suggested exercises

Card does the first, but not the second. And I’m not convinced if that’s a good or bad thing.

Because having an “assignment” can be helpful if the author knows what they’re doing, and have a good “teaching sense” — aka, they know what kind of applications and activities are actually useful.

If they don’t have this sense, then including a callout box telling readers to “do this or that” to “apply what they learned” is annoying, irrelevant fluff.

So perhaps it’s better for Card to have left out chapter summaries and “practical application” directions than otherwise.

It gives readers the space to come up with their own practical applications, tailored to their personal needs and situations. (I’ve tried my hand at doing a bit of that below in the “writing tips & practical application section of this analysis).

1. Core ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Are the worldview, themes, and arguments of this work true, edifying, and worth learning?

Like other writing craft books, the primary worldview that this book shares is basically 1) writers can improve their skills at storytelling, just like musicians and other craftsmen-artists, and 2) the reason why characters in stories matter is because the reason why people read

Reminds me a lot of Lisa Cron’s Story Genius and Wired for Story, which makes sense, if you think about it…

LED Assessment

How did this book Lighten, Enlighten, or Delight the reader (that would be moi, in this case, since I’m writing this review ^^)?

Ultimately this book was an “enlightening” book. It wasn’t particularly delightful, because Card wasn’t trying to entertain or amuse. And it didn’t necessarily lighten any metaphysical burdens…perhaps indirectly, if a reader is really struggling with characterization

Writing Tips & Practical Application

Because learning doesn’t happen until you change something you do…

• Analyze a story character: Go through Card’s book again, focusing on a main character and a villain in one of your favorite novels, and notice how the author uses techniques like attitude, point of view, and other elements to create characters you believe in.

Ready to be a Brilliant Writer?