Elements of Fiction Writing: Characters & Viewpoint
by Orson Scott Card
Writer's Digest Books, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59963-212-4
$14.99, paperback, 240 pages
Read an Excerpt
Award-winning author Oson Scott Card discusses the relationship between stereotypes and fictional characters. This excerpt from Elements of Writing Fiction: Characters & Viewpoint shows you how to avoid common pitfalls and how to use stereotypes to your advantage as a writer
About the Book
This book is a set of tools: literary crowbars, chisels, mallets, pliers, and tongs. Use them to pry, chip, yank, and sift good characters out of the place where they live in your imagination.
Award-winning author Orson Scott Card explains in depth the techniques of inventing, developing, and presenting characters, plus handling viewpoint in novels and short stories. With specific examples, he spells out your narrative options—the choices you’ll make in creating fictional people so “real” that readers will feel they know them like members of their own families.
You’ll learn how to:
• Draw characters from a variety of sources
• Make characters show who they are by the things they do and say, and by their individual “style”
• Develop characters readers will love—or love to hate
• Distinguish among major characters, minor characters, and walk-ons, and develop each appropriately
• Choose the most effective viewpoint to reveal the characters and move the storytelling
• Decide how deeply you should explore your characters’ thoughts, emotions, and attitudes
About the Author
Orson Scott Card is an award-winning science fiction novelist whose credits include the Hugo Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. His novels include Ender’s Game, Shadow of Hegemon, and Speaker for the Dead, among others.
