Things I've Learned

Chapter 3 talks about where characters are likely to come from:

Characters come from life: observe strangers, people you know, yourself, use your memories.

BE CAUTION WHEN TAKING CHARACTERS FROM LIFE: 

“Taking characters ‘from life’ can lead to bad fiction” (pg 35) mostly because you don’t know them completely. What they think, what they’ve been through, why they say the things they say. 

“Remember that believability in fiction doesn’t come from the facts--what actually happened, It comes from the readers’ sense of what is plausible-what is likely to happen.” (pg 35)  

Orson Card also talks about how taking characters from life can also lead to problems. The people in your life can find themselves in your stories and they will most likely not like what they read. He then goes into how you can avoid such a situation but that’s not important to me. What I found interesting is that on the 37th page, he talks about how you can create a character from yourself. 

Creating a character from yourself! * Use analogy: “...think of something you actually have done that is like what the character does” (pg 38). Your character is a villain but you’re not a villain but you do have feelings of hatred. Use that feeling and magnify it. How that hatred made you treat the others around you. *Use your memory: simple and pretty much self-explanatory. There’s more here but nothing pops out at me enough to make me want to note it down.

Characters come from story ideas: Let’s use The Princess and The Frog. * Who must be there? The Princess and the Frog * Who might be there? The king and queen.  * Who has been there? The witch that turned the Prince into a frog.

These characters, although they’re no longer around. They also play important roles.  “[They]...still helped shape the characters who are present” (pg 46). 

Chapter 4 names

Card believes that the name makes the character. What a character chooses to be named can tell a lot about the person. Do they prefer their last name? Their first name? A nickname? Do they allow a certain person to call them something completely different? Do they absolutely hate it?

Keep your characters straight. Don’t over name them. “One name per character” (pg 56) ex: First & Last name, suffix... read this paragraph for more information.

Keep a bible, as a little note to keep your story straight. Your character’s hair can’t be in pigtails in the first character but then down in the next character. 

Chapter 1. What is a character?

I’ve listed the notes taken on character building from most important to least important.

A character is their:

Actions & motive: everyone acts a certain way but why do they act the way they do?  

Past: “People are what they have done, and what have been done to them.” (8). 

Reputation: what do other people think of you. Or more to the book, people gossip and from that, they make a snap judgment. What reputation does your character have with the others in your story?  

Stereotype (w/in their job, sex, age, family role, race, ethnicity...): here, the author encourages us to use stereotypes to our advantage. we have to “count on” our readers to make these stereotypical judgments. “Characters who fit within a stereotype are familiar; we think we know them, and we aren’t all that interested in knowing them better. [...] Characters who violate a stereotype are interesting...” (11). 

Habits/patterns: what they do on the regular basis and if they try to change it, why? 

Talents/abilities: are they extremely gifted? In what away? Are they not?

Tastes & preferences: do they prefer to look or act a certain way?

Body: what do they look like?

Chapter 2. What makes a good fictional character? 

There three questions readers ALWAYS ask within the first paragraph: So what? Why should they care? Oh yeah? This is the clue/explanation that should persuade readers to trust you. Huh? Make it clear. Make it believable. 

YOU ARE THE FIRST AUDIENCE! - if you don’t care about what you’re writing, your audience also will not care. 

Questions to always ask:  WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? (in my opinion, the best question) Interrogate the situation and your character. Brainstorm a list of possible ways that events can go wrong, but still, drive the story and your character to an outcome/solution.

WHY?  Why is this happening? Why did the character act this way toward this event/person?  * Don’t ever settle for your first answer. The first answer is always obvious and too static. Add a twist (the author talks more about this in chapter 3, page 50):