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Fictional Narrative Basics - Character
Unit Completion Date: End of Week 5
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The opportunity to create, get to know, be surprised by, and follow characters is what initially draws many people to fiction writing. The various uses of the word character itself are an indication of the many facets of fictional characters and how they are important to stories. We talk of people being characters, of people having character, and Bernays and Painter quote Heracleitus as saying "Character is destiny."
Narrative may be widely defined as a written or oral account of a series of events, but if those events are the automated processes used to manufacture spark plugs, I doubt most readers will be swept away by the drama. Even in sports, where the central drama is created through an artificial set of rules, often the fates of athletes' careers, their struggles against injury, the culmination of rivalries, the histories of players with particular franchises--in other words the human narratives--overshadow the purely physical events.
Many writers I know are habitual people watchers. They love train stations, baseball stadiums, parks and malls because of endless variety of people who pass at any given moment. It's a worthwhile exercise to sit in a train station or at a sidewalk cafe and just make notes on the people passing, the ones that stand out from the crowd and why they do so. Why is that woman wearing snow boots on a sunny May day? And that man, why does he have all those rubber bands around his shirt cuffs? Seeing peoples' behavior and then trying to imagine what makes them behave that way is one of the most useful exercises in developing fictional characters.
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