Vivid and memorable characters aren't born: they have to be made. 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 memory, your imagination and your soul. 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 the characters from a variety of sources, including a story's basic idea, real life–even a character's social circumstances • 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 one 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

For more than 10 years, this successful series has helped writers improve their work -- one element at a time. Featuring quality instruction from award-winning authors, each book focuses on a key facet of fiction writing, making it easy for writers to find the specific guidance they're looking for.

Describes the function of characters in a story, discusses motive, stereotypes, models, minor characters, comedy, and transformation.

Create Complex Characters How do you create a main character readers won't forget? How do you write a book in multiple-third-person point of view without confusing your readers (or yourself)? How do you plant essential information about a character's past into a story? Write Great Fiction: Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint by award-winning author Nancy Kress answers all of these questions and more! This accessible book is filled with interactive exercises and valuable advice that teaches you how to: • Choose and execute the best point of view for your story • Create three-dimensional and believable characters • Develop your characters' emotions • Create realistic love, fight, and death scenes • Use frustration to motivate your characters and drive your story With dozens of excerpts from some of today's most popular writers, Write Great Fiction: Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint provides you with the techniques you need to create characters and stories sure to linger in the hearts and minds of agents, editors, and readers long after they've finished your book.

This book is a stylistic study of D. H. Lawrence's presentation of narrative viewpoint. The focus is mainly on Lawrence's third novel, Sons and Lovers, occupying a crucial position in his oeuvre and judged by critics to be his first mature piece. While sharing many features typical of nineteenth-century novels, it marks the emergence of a new technique of writing consciousness that functioned as a precursor to the modernist practice of dialogic shifts across viewpoints. Through a detailed linguistic analysis, Sotirova shows that different characters' viewpoints are not simply juxtaposed in the narrative, but linked in a way that creates dialogic resonances between them. The dialogic linking is achieved through the use of devices that have parallel functions in conversational discourse - referring expressions, sentence-initial correctives and repetition. The book uses stylistics to resolve current controversies in narratology and Lawrence criticism. In approaching the study of narrative viewpoint from the angle of discourse, Sotirova arrives at cutting-edge insights into Lawrence's work. This book will be required reading for stylisticians, narratologists, literary linguists and literary studies scholars.

This book addresses different linguistic and philosophical aspects of referring to the self in a wide range of languages from different language families, including Amharic, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Newari (Sino-Tibetan), Polish, Tariana (Arawak), and Thai. In the domain of speaking about oneself, languages use a myriad of expressions that cut across grammatical and semantic categories, as well as a wide variety of constructions. Languages of Southeast and East Asia famously employ a great number of terms for first person reference to signal honorification. The number and mixed properties of these terms make them debatable candidates for pronounhood, with many grammar-driven classifications opting to classify them with nouns. Some languages make use of egophors or logophors, and many exhibit an interaction between expressing the self and expressing evidentiality qua the epistemic status of information held from the ego perspective. The volume's focus on expressing the self, however, is not directly motivated by an interest in the grammar or lexicon, but instead stems from philosophical discussions on the special status of thoughts about oneself, known as de se thoughts. It is this interdisciplinary understanding of expressing the self that underlies this volume, comprising philosophy of mind at one end of the spectrum and cross-cultural pragmatics of self-expression at the other. This unprecedented juxtaposition results in a novel method of approaching de se and de se expressions, in which research methods from linguistics and philosophy inform each other. The importance of this interdisciplinary perspective on expressing the self cannot be overemphasized. Crucially, the volume also demonstrates that linguistic research on first-person reference makes a valuable contribution to research on the self tout court, by exploring the ways in which the self is expressed, and thereby adding to the insights gained through philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.

This volume provides a new understanding of the role and structure of viewpoint in cognition and communication.

This is the first book-length study of how point of view is manifested linguistically in dramatic texts. It examines such issues as how readers process the shifts in viewpoint that can occur within such texts. Using insights from cognitive linguistics, the book aims to explain how the analysis of point of view in drama can be undertaken, and how this is fruitful for understanding textual and discoursal effects in this genre. Following on from a consideration of existing frameworks for the analysis of point of view, a cognitive approach to deixis is suggested as being particularly profitable for explaining the viewpoint effects that can arise in dramatic texts. To expand on the large number of examples discussed throughout the book, the penultimate chapter consists of an extended analysis of a single play. This book is relevant to scholars in a range of areas, including linguistics, literary studies and cognitive science.