The Art of Narrative Craft
Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” and Junot Díaz’s “Fiesta, 1980,” present memorable characters whose personality traits make them unforgettable. In “Cathedral” we have a reliable and mostly unlikable narrator whose character undergoes such an overwhelming transformation during the short term of the story, perhaps several hours, that we are astounded at Carver’s ability to depict this most human side of the human Continue reading STORIES FOR CHARACTERIZATION
I. Write a scene about something your character did when she/he was a kid, that now she/he is ashamed of. II. Write a scene for a story, using third-person narration, that opens with your main character having just done something despicable. Despite what he or she has done, find a way in writing the rest of the scene to make Continue reading PROMPTS FOR CHARACTERIZATION
We have learned from Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 335 BC) that a tragic hero should be ‘of noble birth.’ What does this mean? It means he should be a king (Lear), or the cousin of a king (Macbeth), or a prince (Oedipus) both of whom then became kings, or a general (Othello), or a great warrior and leader (Okonkwo). Why? Because Continue reading V. CHARACTERIZATION