Characters Walking Out of the Pages

           

             Ever since I was eight years old, I’ve wanted to be an author. Two years ago, I started to write a book and finally finished it six months later. To this day, I am still in the process of editing it and I wouldn’t have been able to get through those stressful and long hours of editing without Hallie Ephron's The Everything Guide to Writing Your First Novel. This guide is a wonderful book that helps writers of all ages edit their first draft and eventually publish their novels. Ephron covers each step to writing a novel and suggests what you should or shouldn’t include in it. Her tips and suggestions have really helped me with my editing progress; I’ve learned a lot. However, there is one part of writing a novel that I have trouble with: character development. Whenever I introduce the characters in my story, I get caught into the plot and completely forget to describe them in brief detail. After reading Ephron's book, I started to develop my characters easier than before, and I know that I'm not the only writer in the world who has this problem. Therefore, this post will teach other writers who struggle the simple steps for developing character.     

            In Ephron’s The Everything Guide to Writing Your First Novel, one of the steps is to describe your characters in one or two details that show their personality. For example, if your character has wristwatches on both arms, the reader gets an idea that your character manages time well and is never late for anything. Or if your character is described as having a lot of wrinkles, the reader gets the idea that the character is old or has been through a lot of stressful situations. Remember to “think about which of the details are most striking” (119) in order to help the reader visualize your character.

            Another thing a writer should do when introducing a character is show them with words (don’t just talk about them). Likewise, Ephron says “one of the best ways to show a character to the reader is by putting [them] on the page and letting [them] perform” (120). In other words, writing about your character’s gestures, nervous ticks or habits is what conveys their inner self. For example, just by saying that “Suzy rubbed her sweaty palms together” indicates that she is nervous or anxious. You don’t have to tell the reader that “Suzy rubbed her sweaty palms together because she was nervous”, the reader already knows that she’s nervous because her palms are sweaty, and she's rubbing them together. In addition, your character can still show their inner feelings even if they are standing still (indicating that they are shocked, calm or indecisive about where to go).

            The final and the most important way to describe a character (in my opinion) is through dialogue. Your character’s personality should be illustrated through voice. For instance, the greeting between two characters reveals a lot. For example, if one character says “Howdy” and the other character says “Yo”, the reader gets the idea that one character is a cowboy and the other is, stereotypically speaking, a gangster or “cool dude”.

            Overall, I hope that I helped make character development easier for those who struggle with it. Personally, Ephron’s tips on writing characters have really helped me overcome writer’s block. Therefore, I recommend her book to every writer who is writing their first novel, or who have already finished their first draft. It is an incredibly, useful guide that will increase your writing skills and hopefully one day land you in a publishing house.

By Victoria Kennedy

Source:

Ephron, Hallie. The Everything Guide to Writing Your First Novel. Massachusetts: Adams             Media, 2011. Print.

opinion is universal

it is my opinion that stories serve a purpose. they entertain firsthand, but also convey the author's opinions of the world we live in and attempts to express it in a way to convince the reader to follow it. furthermore, the idea can never be interpreted the same way. it is my philosophical opinion that there is never a black and white answer to any circumstance. one person will believe that this is an answer to the problem, while the other thinks that is. when is it appropriate to release the criminal, to help him, imprison him, or execute him?


you may think it is proportionate to the crime over the idea of say, if he's a killer as apposed to a murderer, but even then it is never as simple as that. and what makes us question this more than ever, the story. if the written word or the spoken language of the stage or the mythical spectacle of cinema can teach us anything, we will learn anything. as a writer, you have to be open to the ideology of the individual. this doesn't simply mean whether people think your works are good or bad, but that they may interpret what you have written differently.

there is an Aesop fable about the two men and the donkey, the men follow the opinion of everyone they meet in an attempt to please all, but in the end destroy their donkey and lose what they believed in. in other words, if you try to please everyone, you'll please no one. in this blog, i will use cinema as an example, admittedly because i am most familiar with it as a genre.



controversy is never bad. first of all, it means publicity, and furthermore, it just means your work is being taken seriously. example,  the 1992 film "man bites dog", the story of a documentary team following a round a serial killer as he goes about his crimes, is widely controversial even today due to the graphic violence depicted towards such groups as the elderly and children. some called it a scathing indictment of the media's obsession with violence and the masses ever growing admiration and desensitization to it, while others called it a pointless piece of garbage that reveled in grotesque violence and poor writing. today this little no-budget Belgian film remains banned in several countries. it is also one of my favorites.



more recently, we have the epic, Oscar-nominated "Life of Pi". this is on the surface, a simple shipwreck story about a teenage Indian boy trapped in a lifeboat with a tiger. but by the time it ends, we are left with a religious allegory about the nature of belief and reality vs. fiction. those who have seen the movie or even read the book will know of a floating island inhabited by meerkats and dotted with pools of acid.

i myself struggled to understand its meaning. as it turns out, there is more than one. when confronted with a story about what you believe and whether or not it is real, as well as a religious allegory, you can't help but stir up debate. does the island represent Eden, the evil cook from an earlier passage, or something else?


to conclude, this is where it gets interesting. the makers of "dog" claim their movie is about film-making, not violence, and "pi's" author admits the island does not symbolize anything, but is merely a device to make pi's astonishing tale of survival seem more impossible.

as a writer, you give birth to an idea. but that idea spans, changes and reproduces. it is important to remain open to what the world will see, for better or worse. even if it is negative, it just means a person saw, and he was able to breed his own ideology, which in the frightening land of reality, means you inspired a wave of change in someone. who knows, it may be many someones.

that is what i believe. what do you?



Shaun Perrier

Thanks Anne Lamott

     Whenever I talk with people about writing, I always tell them that it is the scariest thing that I put myself through. I'm not sure whether it is the pressure to write something meaningful, or if it is the desire to write something that simply doesn't stink, but writing is a very difficult hobby to pursue. I always find intimidating to sit down and write because I am too afraid that I won't be able to produce something amazing, which is terrible because that means that I never produce anything at all. 

Since reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird it has become obvious to me that I am perfectionist that expects literary gold on the first shot. I am sure that I am not alone in this either, and this is why a lot of people find writing to be frightening. Lamott's advice has been really helpful in moving past these unrealistic expectations. You have to write a really terrible first draft, and maybe more, before you will be able to have a piece that is somewhat good. It is this idea of using the first draft as a means to get everything down on paper that is important. The first time you explore an idea should not be the place that you expect to see Pulitzer Prize worthy writing. Perhaps there will be amazing lines that will come from this first draft, but the majority of it will not be amazing. I think it is when we accept this fact that we can truly begin to write with relatively more ease, as it takes some of the pressure away.

I recently had the opportunity to implement this horrible first draft technique when attempting to write a paper. I sat down and just began to write with the thought in mind that I would just go back and fix anything and everything later. I was just going to throw up all my ideas on to the paper and worry about arranging them in a coherent way later. I can honestly say that this paper was one of my best. I had taken the time to get everything out and then was able to really focus on editing my work.

I would recommend this method to anyone who wants to write, whether it is creatively, or academically. It is a simple piece of advice, but it really does help. Writing can be phobia inducing, so anything that will take away some of its frightfulness, is a big deal. Anyone who loves to put pen to paper would probably agree with me, which is why I owe Anne Lamott a great deal of thanks for her incredibly helpful advice.

 By: Melody Wilson