Start writing fiction

Introduction

This unit looks at how characters might be drawn and how setting is established. It works on the different levels of characterisation, from flat to round, and how character and place interact. It also works on the effect of genre and how genre can be used.

The main teaching material in this unit is taken from an existing publication, The Fiction Writer's Workshop by Josip Novakovich (1995).

Novakovich is an award-winning writer (of short stories mainly), who teaches fiction writing at the University of Cincinnati. His chapters on ‘Character’ and ‘Setting’ are included within this unit. I'll indicate when you should read these extracts and I'll also outline the listening and writing activities that accompany them.

This unit is split into the following sections:

• Character
• Setting - A particular part of space, described and identified with certain characteristics and qualities, possibly named, though by no means necessarily real.
• Genre - A literary or artistic type or style, e.g. thriller or romance.

This material is from our archive and is an adapted extract from Start writing fiction (A174) which is no longer taught by The Open University.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this unit you should:

• have begun to identify your own strengths and weaknesses as a writer of fiction;
• have developed a general awareness of fiction writing;
• have developed a basic vocabulary to discuss fiction.

Block 2 Character, setting and genre

Fiction Writer’s Workshop

Josip Novakovich

Source: Novakovich, J. (1995) Fiction Writer’s Workshop, Cincinnati,

Ohio: Story Press, ‘Character’, pp.48–66; ‘Setting’, pp.25–42.

Character

Most people read fiction not so much for plot as for company. In a good

piece of fiction you can meet someone and get to know her in depth, or

you can meet yourself, in disguise, and imaginatively live out and

understand your passions. The writer William Sloan thinks it boils down to

this: ‘‘Tell me about me. I want to be more alive. Give me me.’’

If character matters so much to the reader, it matters even more to the

writer. Once you create convincing characters, everything else should

easily follow. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, ‘‘Character is plot, plot is character.’’
 
But, as fiction writer and teacher Peter LaSalle has noted, out of character,

plot easily grows, but out of plot, a character does not necessarily follow.

To show what makes a character, you must come to a crucial choice that

almost breaks and then makes the character. The make-or-break decision

gives you plot. Think of Saul on the way to Damascus: While persecuting

Christians, he is blinded by a vision; after that, he changes, becomes St.

Paul, the greatest proselyte. Something stays the same, however; he is

equally zealous, before and after. No matter what you think of the story of

Paul’s conversion, keep it in mind as a paradigm for making a character.

Of course, not all characters undergo a crucial change. With some

Characters, their unchangeability and constancy makes a story. In ‘‘Rust,’’

my story about the sculptor-turned-tombstone-maker, everything (the

country, family, town) changes, except the character. Even his body

collapses, but his spirit stays bellicose and steadfast. Here he is, at work:

He refused to answer any more of my questions. His hands

- with thick cracked skin and purple nails from hammer

misses – picked up a hammer. Veins twisted around his

stringy tendons so that his tendons looked like the emblem

for medicine. He hit the broadened head of the chisel,

bluish steel cutting into gray stone, dust flying up in a

sneezing cloud. With his gray hair and blue stubbly cheeks

he blended into the grain of the stone – a stone with a pair

of horned eyebrows. Chiseling into the stone, he wrestled

with time, to mark and catch it. But time evaded him like a

canny boxer. Letting him cut into rocks, the bones of the

earth, Time would let him exhaust himself.

Seven years later I saw him. His face sunken. His body had

grown weaker. Time had chiseled into his face so steadily

that you could tell how many years had passed just by

looking at the grooves cutting across his forehead. But the

stubbornness in his eyes had grown stronger. They were

larger, and although ringed with milky-gray cataracts,

glaringly fierce.

14