Clear and straightforward. I think this will be a great book to recommend to certain 8th grade readers. They are dying to write fiction, and this will give them some ideas for places to start.

“The Elements of Fiction Writing - Characters & Viewpoint: How to invent, construct, and animate vivid, credible characters and choose the best eyes through which to view the events of your short story or novel” by Orson Scott Card.

This book was published in 1988 and is still relevant today in 2024. This terrific self help book about writing and is written by the Sci-fi ‘Enders Game’ author Orson Scott Card. I enjoyed reading it and helped me refresh my palette as I’m trying to get back into my childhood hobby.

This book is super helpful. Card goes into depth “the techniques of inventing, developing, and presenting characters and of handling viewpoints in novels and short stories.”

“Writing fiction is a solitary art.”

“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.”

“Vivid and memorable characters aren’t born: they have to be made.”

“An excellent books which will benefit the writer who wants to make his/her work better” - The Coast Book Review Service.

What is a character?
- A character is what he does
- Motive
- The Past
- Reputation
- Stereotypes
- Network
- Habits and Patterns
- Talents and abilities
- Tastes and preferences
- Body - is listed last.
“The most powerful… 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.”

What makes a good fictional character?
- interrogating the character
- Causal questions

Where do characters come from?
- ideas from life
- Observation of strangers
- People you know
- Yourself, analogy, memory

Making decisions: names, ethnicity..

Constructing characters: what kind of story are you telling?
“The four factors are milieu, idea, character and event: The ‘milieu’ is the world surrounding the characters—the landscape, the interior spaces, the surrounding cultures the characters emerge from and react to; everything from weather to traffic laws. The ‘idea’ is the information that the reader is meant to discover or learn during the process of the story. ‘Character’ is the nature of one or more of the people in the story— what they do and why they do it. It usually leads to or arises from a conclusion about human nature in general. The ‘events’ of the story are everything that happens and why.”

The Hierarchy - “Not all characters are created equal.”

How to raise the emotional steaks?
- Suffering: “Pain is a sword with two edges. The character who suffers pain and the character who inflicts it are both made more memorable and more important.”
- Card uses famous characters from Stephen King’s books as examples, like Misery and The Dead Zone.
“If the character is tortured, as in King’s novel Misery, the audience will wince in sympathetic agony even if they don’t know the character well—even if they never seen the character before. Emotional loss does not come so easily. In The Dead Zone, King devoted several pages to creating a warm, valuable love relationship between the main character and the woman he loves. It is a vital moment in their relationship that he has his terrible traffic accident. Now when he discovers that she married someone else during his coma, the readers know how much he loved her, and so the pain of losing her actually outweighs the physical pain he suffered.”
- Sacrifice.
- Jeopardy “is anticipated pain or loss.”
“The films Alien and Aliens crossed the line for me. The jeopardy simply became unbearable. I had to leave the theater..”
- Sexual tension
- Signs and Portents “..are still vital tools in drawing your reader more intensely into the tale. You simply disguise the cosmic connections a little better…”

What should we feel about the character?
“Any time you show conflict between characters, you want your audience to care about the outcome.”
- First impressions - we like what’s like us. Editorial Resistance. Sympathy vs. Curiosity.
- Characters we love: physical attractiveness, altruism: victim, saviour, sacrifice.
- Plan and purpose, hunger and dreams.
- Courage and fair play, attitude, draftee or volunteer.
- Dependability
- Cleverness e.g. “Harrison Ford’s character in Raiders of the lost ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of doom. Indiana Jones is a professor of archaeology. .. in the classroom, lecturing, he’s rather bumbling any confused. Yet whenever things go wrong - he comes up with a brilliant or dumb lucky solution. He’s smart but isn’t intelligent. The audience loves a character who solves problems and knows exactly the right facts when he needs them- but they don’t like a character who flaunts his superior knowledge or acts as if he knows how clever he is.”
- Characters we hate: Sadist or bully, assassin or avenger, self-serving, self appointed, oath breaker, intellect, insanity, attitude.
- Redeeming virtues: the understandable Villain.

The Hero and the Common Man
- what makes X special? How does that affect your story?
- “Searching for the extraordinary in your characters can help you write your story.”
- “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.”

The Comic Character: Controlled Disbelief
- Oddness: “it makes him funny — but doesn’t make us care.”
- Doing a “take”: “The simplest way of signaling comic unbelievability is to talk directly to the audience.”
Card talks about Beverly Hill Cop - “Eddie Murphy .. looks straight into the camera with no expression at all on his face..”
- Exaggeration
- Downplaying
“..have the heroine plead for her life in a comical exaggerated way…. Have her downplay her fear. She could please for her life with comic nonchalance: ‘I think we’ve got a little misunderstanding here. I don’t know how you ever got the impression that I didn’t like you. Actually I look up to you. I want to be just like you. Where did you buy that great knife?’ That same exaggeration nonchalance, that comic coolness, can show in narrative.”

Card gives examples, writing in first person and exaggerate his nonchalant attitude a little more - in the narrative the man find his house emptied not by the ex wife but by burglars.
“..going through things that would make a normal person angry and afraid; but by downplaying his response to them, the narrator makes it amusing instead of infuriating.” - page 103

The Serious Character: Make Us Believe
- Elaboration of motive
- Attitude
- “Motive tells us why he acts as he does; attitude is the way he reacts to the outside events.”
- The Remembered Past: Flashback, Memory as a present event, Quick references.
- The Implied Past: Expectation, Habits, Networks, Justification,

Transformations
- Why people change?
- You can’t change: “..characters are not transformed, they are unmasked.”
- Others things change you: “..for causes beyond their control.”
- You change yourself: “..we can change our own nature by an act of will.”
- Justifying Changes

Performing Characters.
- Voices. “Who is telling your story?”
- Person. “Whose voice will the reader hear?”
First person: (Singular) “I go”; (Plural) “We go.”
Second person: (Singular) “You go” (thou goest); (Plural) “You go” (y’all go),
Third Person: (Singular) “He goes, She goes”; (Plural) “They go.”
- Tense: present tense.

Presentation vs. Representation
“In a good representation story, the audience will forgive a certain clumsiness of writing because they care so much about the characters and events. In a good presentation story, the audience will forgive a certain shallowness of story because they so enjoy the writers 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.”

Dramatic vs. Narrative.
“Show, don’t tell.”
“Characters are made more real through scenes than through narrative.”
Showing is through conversation of the characters..

First-Person Narrative.
“A careless writer will have all her first person narrators talks amazingly like herself, but if you take characterisation seriously, the use of first person will lead you to discover a new voice for each story told by a different narrator.”
- Which person is first?
- No Fourth Wall
- Unreliable Narrators
- Distance in Time
- Withholding information
- Lapses

Third Person
- Omniscient vs Limited Point Of View
- Changing Viewpoint Characters
- The Limited Narrator’s Advantage
“As the omniscient narrator slips in and out of different character’s minds, he keeps the reader from fully engaging with any of the characters..”
“The limited third-person strategy so to trade time for distance…”
- Making Up Your Mind: “Which type of narrator should you use?
1. First-person & omniscient narrations are by nature more presentational than limited third-person. Readers will notice the narrator more. If your goal is to get your readers emotionally involved with your main characters, with minimal distractions from their belief in the story, then the limited third-person narrator is your best choice.
2. If you’re writing humour, first-person or omniscient narration can help you create comic distance. These intrusive narrators can make wry comments or write with the kind of wit that calls attention to itself, without jarring or surprising a reader who is deeply involved with the character.
3. If you want brevity, covering great spans of time and space or many characters without writing hundred or thousands of pages to do it, the omniscient narrator may be your best choice.
4. If you want the sense of truth that comes from an eyewitness account, first person usually feels less fictional, more factual.
5. If you’re uncertain of your stability as a writer, while you’re confident of the strength of the story, the limited third-person narration invites a clean, unobtrusive writing style. … your writing is more likely to be ignored…”

Levels of Penetration
- The Omniscient narrator - looking down at the scent - it can see everything. Show us everything that is going on.
- The first-person narrator- see inside only one characters head.
- Limited third-person narrator - light penetration. We can see inside the viewpoint characters’ mind. We observe the scenes where the character is present. Seeing through the characters eyes, narrator tells what happens in the scene in a neural voice, only giving us the viewpoint characters attitudes.
- Limited third-person, deep penetration, in which we do experience the scenes as if we’re seeing them through the viewpoint characters’ eyes. We don’t see what really happens, only what the character thinks they happen.
- Limited third-person, the cinematic view. We only see what the viewpoint character is present to see. But we never see inside his/her head or anyone else’s head.

A Private Population Explosion.
“As long as your mind is alert to possibilities, your characters will grow and develop and deepen and change with every outline you make and every draft you write.”

I can’t believe I’ve reached the end of this book. It was such a great read. I learnt so much. Thank you Orson Scott Card!

Intelligent and thought-provoking discussion.

Insightful & Helpful

Don’t let the cover keep you from considering this book; it is NOT a stuffy college textbook! It’s a great MODERN writer’s resource for understanding character development. Every page made me stop and think about my own story telling skills and the characters I have created.

There's nothing new in books about writing fiction, only on how they're presented.

Some are written by academics and you need to be one to understand them. Others are written by authors who use them as a means of self-aggrandizement constantly quoting examples from their own work. These may not necessarily be good examples of what they're trying to demonstrate, but they're not about to let an opportunity to promote their work slip by.

In Characters and Viewpoint, Card uses straight forward prose and not a lot of examples from his own work and gives good insight into these two important aspects of writing fiction.

This is a solid book about what is stated in the title.

Overall I found this to be an incredibly valuable book. Card is a gifted writer and a natural teacher.

He clearly explains his points and models them superbly with good examples of what to do and examples of what not to do.

He describes what novice writers will most commonly do and how to avoid those mistakes.

My biggest take away was the idea of spending a lot of time getting to know the character before trying to write a story about them. By creating a character and being open to the possibilities of developing their reactions you open up a lot of possibilities that can make it less likely to suffer from significant writers block.

I look forward to putting Cards insight into practice.

DNF@65%
I've been trying to finish this book for over two months now, but there's something about it that is just not clicking with me. It reads like a text book: interesting, but not engaging.

Had this been my first writing craft book I would have devoured it in like a day or two but I've read so many of them over the years that nothing here is new to me. There was nothing particularly inspiring or motivational about it, didn't gave me any "a-ha!" moments, there wasn't anything I hadn't already read somewhere else. It was just okay. That's the greatest compliment I can give it.

I think I need to stop reading about writing all together and just put by butt in chair time and learn as I go.

An excellent part of the series. I particularly profited from the section about major characters versus minor ones. I can't say that I enjoyed it, per se, because I now know I need to do more trimming of irrelevant details in my own work-in-progress.

A solid resource on the subject, organized into short, clear sections with sufficient examples. As you might expect, Card delves well below the surface of characters, exploring individual and social psychological factors that make characters feel more real and intriguing.

I write fiction and over the years have acquired and read a number of books on writing. There are different types and many cross the categories: some are of the motivational type, some are a writer's memoirs, some are very literary and some are practical. This book is one of my go-to practical books, with detailed thinking about character, and is also for me the most lucid and helpful discussion on points of view and what John Gardner called psychic distance. I've read it cover to cover a few times but often just dip into it when I'm about tot write or when I'm editing and unhappy with my characters.

This is definitely dated and limited, since it only discusses characters and viewpoint, however, it was a solid read. Card has lots of experience and wisdom that novice authors can glean a lot from. His last chapter on types of narration was eye-opening. Another great read for writers of fiction.

A must read for new authors! I picked it up to go straight to the end about Viewpoints and POVs and how to decide which character to tell the story through. But then I started reading his first chapters on Character development and where ideas come from and ended up reading the whole book. Card is not only an accomplished writer but he's a great teacher as well and so he effortlessly communicates some "ah ha!" moments that have helped me to take my writing to a next level.