Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer

Author:Jeff VanderMeer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABRAMS, Inc. (Ignition)
Published: 2018-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5: CHARACTERIZATION

For many writers, all else comes out of characterization: plot, situation, structure, even the reader’s perception of setting. However, the ways in which writers view characters and characterization can vary greatly. World Fantasy Award winner Jeffrey Ford says “I don’t convey things through the characters, they convey things through me. I’m merely a conduit, but they’re in charge.” But Vladimir Nabokov famously scoffed at the widely repeated idea that characters “leap off the page,” especially for the writer. His point? That to the writer this sensation of sudden life can occur with regard to any element of story, and is closely tied to inspiration—that all the components of fiction are equally unreal, words on a page, animated by the writer’s imagination.

Brown University Literary Arts Program chair Brian Evenson, an O. Henry Award winner, agrees but also notes that “anything I can say about an actual living person to a friend in life is something I can also say, or that a narrator can say, in a story about a character. I may never have met my second cousin, but my father can tell me stories about him or do things to give me a sense of who he is, and how he thinks about the world. From that I can come to feel like I know him—if I feel that my father is a reliable judge of character and has enough knowledge of my second cousin to convey him. I can tell similar stories about a character and give the reader the similar illusion of ‘knowing’ someone they have never met,” who has never existed except on the page.

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