The Art of Character by David Corbett

Author:David Corbett
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

Home

Unlike with geography, here we’re not simply asking how the places where our character has lived have affected him; we’re asking where he feels he belongs.

When doing the initial sketches of your character, ask: Does he live in the place he considers home, or is he an outcast or exile in his own community? How do others view him because of this background—hick, city slicker, arriviste, bumpkin, boor?

What of his home lingers in his values, dialect, ambitions, prejudices?

If home is elsewhere, does he long to go back? Can he go back? Or has something happened—a scandal, a tragedy, a loss—that bars that road back forever? Has he made peace with his new home, made it his own, or is there something lacking about it? How long did it take him to get here? What price did he pay?

In Up in the Air Ryan’s discomfort anywhere but on the road is key to understanding who he is; his ultimate turn to wanting something else, a genuine home, lies at the heart of his story.

In Richard Price’s Samaritan, ex-teacher Ray Mitchell loses his job writing for TV and returns to his New Jersey hometown. He begins to settle in, get comfortable, but the old home ground has more than consolations. It has secrets, and one catches up with him when he’s beaten senseless in his apartment.

Quoyle in The Shipping News was “born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns,” ending up in a nowhere called Mockingburg. Then his faithless wife, Petal, breaks her neck in a car crash. Desperate for some sort of solid ground, he uproots his two daughters and heads for ancestral property on the Newfoundland coast, and through the unwitting intervention of the locals does indeed begin to feel as close to home as he’s capable.

When Frodo returns from the War of the Ring, his ordeal has rendered him so emotionally and physically spent he no longer feels at peace in the Shire. Instead, within two years, he departs with Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel across the sea, leaving Middle Earth forever.

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