"There is nothing to writing. You sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
~ Ernest Hemingway
~ Ernest Hemingway
websites that will help!
- 91 Ways to Respond to Literature
The Creative Response in English is an assignment that gives students an opportunity to develop their creative thinking and expression in response to the study of a particular piece of literature. ... You may think about the text as a whole or narrow your focus to even a single paragraph in a novel or speech in a play.
- How to Write a Creative Essay
by Michelle Williams
- Step-by-Step Guide to Writing a Great Reading Response Paper
Depending on your feelings towards the English language and the study of its literature, the thought of having to write a reading response paper probably fills you with either dread or slightly less dread. But fear not! Writing about what you read isn't as tough as it may sound. Follow the six steps to help get a better handle on producing compelling papers.
- Creative Responses
Creative student responses to literature are a standard part of many English classes. Working with new technologies opens up many new avenues for creation, collaboration and sharing of students’ work. These resources are designed to help you support you students of creative expression, and finding new ways to share their ideas and creations with others.
Kurt Vonnegut created some of the most outrageously memorable novels of our time, such as Cat's Cradle, Breakfast Of Champions, and Slaughterhouse Five. His work is a mesh of contradictions: both science fiction and literary, dark and funny, classic and counter-culture, warm-blooded and very cool. And it's all completely unique.
With his customary wisdom and wit, Vonnegut put forth 8 basics of what he calls Creative Writing 101:
With his customary wisdom and wit, Vonnegut put forth 8 basics of what he calls Creative Writing 101:
- Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
- Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the end as possible.
- Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
- Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
- Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
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Writing Exercises writingexercises.co.uk/index.php
Creating Character
CHARACTERISTICS OF COMPELLING CHARACTERS
The most compelling characters are those who appear internally consistent and yet are capable of surprise. In my own work, I’ve found that the art of crafting such fully realised characters can be boiled down to four crucial elements: a driving need, desire, ambition or goal; a secret; a contradiction; and vulnerability. Let’s take a closer look at each one.
A Driving Need, Desire, Ambition or Goal
The fundamental truth to characterisation is that characters must want something, and the stronger the want, the more compelling the resulting drama. This is because desire intrinsically creates conflict, the primordial goo in which character is formed.
Take, for example one of the most memorable characters in American literature—Blanche Dubois, from Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. At the start of the story, Blanche has lost her family home and has been left with nowhere to stay. Desperate, she has come to New Orleans to find her sister, Stella, and ask to be taken in.
This is a perfect demonstration that simply by giving the character a deep-seated need or want, you can automatically create conflict, for the world is not designed to answer our desires as easily as we might hope.
A Secret
For your character, a secret is that inclination or trait (such as a psychological disposition to dishonesty, violence, sexual excess, or the abuse of alcohol or drugs, to name a few) or an incident from the past that, if revealed, would change forever the character’s standing in her world, among co-workers, neighbours, friends, family, lovers. Secrets inform us of what our characters have to lose, and why.
Drawing on the example of Blanche Dubois, her secret is that through drink and illicit sexual liaisons, she has become so emotionally and physically dissipated she could not hold on to the family home.
We are our own best source for understanding secrets. We know our own, and if we’re insightful, we understand how they affect our behaviour—specifically, how they make us afraid.
A Contradiction
We all know people who are both shy and rude, cruel but funny, bigoted but protective. This complexity, which seems to particularly manifest itself during times of stress or conflict, is what can make a person inherently unpredictable, setting the stage for the kind of surprising behaviour that can keep readers enthralled, wondering what might happen next.
Our senses and minds are tuned to focus on irregularities—the thing that doesn’t quite fit, doesn’t make sense, or is simply changing. This is an evolutionarily adaptive trait; it helps in analyzing the environment for threats. But it also attunes us to whatever is unusual in what we perceive; contradictions reveal what we couldn’t predict, the enigma, the surprise.
Again, let’s look at how this applies to Blanche Dubois: She is desperate and weak, hopelessly vain, with an alcoholic’s capacity for denial and delusion—but she is also fiercely proud and resourceful with a surprising steeliness. It’s contradictions like these that can automatically pique a reader’s interest.
Vulnerability
Nothing draws us into a character more than her vulnerability. When people appear wounded or in need of our help, we are instantly drawn to them—it’s a basic human reflex. We may also sometimes be repelled or frightened, but either way, the fact of the matter is that injury to another person instantly triggers a strong response.
Obviously, vulnerability may be the result of the character’s secret: He is afraid of being found out. Or it may come from the intensity of his need or want—because, as we all know, desire can render us naked in a fundamental way. For your character, the ambition and focus inherent in a strong desire can imply some form of inner strength, while at the same time rendering the character vulnerable to being deprived of what he most wants.
Blanche’s desperation to find a safe place makes her vulnerable, as does the tawdry nature of her secrets, which threaten to shame her beyond redemption if revealed. In other words, needs or desires, secrets, contradictions and vulnerability are almost always interconnected.
METHODS FOR DEEPENING CHARACTERISATIONS
Often our characters first appear to us as we flesh out the idea for a story. But characters who emerge from story ideas can often be flat or two-dimensional; this is because at that early stage, they serve the purpose of filling a role, rather than acting as independent beings with needs and fears and affections and concerns “outside
the story.”
Compelling characters are not cogs in the machine of your plot; they are human beings to whom the story happens.
Some stories begin with the characters, of course, and the narrative emerges from an exploration of their needs, their defenses, their secrets and contradictions, or some problem they face. The trick in those cases is making sure the narrative doesn’t meander, creating, as writer Philip Larkin called it, “a beginning, a muddle and an end.”
But more often in mainstream fiction and especially genre fiction, the novel begins with a story idea, and the characters need to be fleshed out to keep them from being stock players in the drama. We might wonder how many uniquely memorable world-weary detectives there can be, for example—and yet every year at least one more seems to emerge from the wave of crime novels crashing onto bookstore shelves. It takes skill and insight to breathe life into stock characters, something too often dismissed by those who disdain genre fiction as inferior.
So how do we flesh out our characters when they arise from the needs of our stories, or when they otherwise lack the specificity, uniqueness or power necessary to engage a reader (or the writer)? The best inspiration often comes from within us—and from our experiences with the people in our lives.
Dialogue
What characters say to each other in a book will make or break it. Their dialogues not only move the story along, mask and unveil truth, slow or quicken pace, cause or dampen conflict; they make the work credible or incredible.
And as if that doesn't already sound hard enough – they must also make us forget we're reading them.
A few basic laws govern dialogue and, once applied, their effect will be immediate. If you're beginning to make your characters speak, I promise these basics will help.
Unnatural is natural
Our programming as listeners and readers creates a need for technique in dialogue: these are two different things, as you'll discover when you try to write what you hear. At first I couldn't understand why the conversations around me wouldn't translate verbatim to a page; but a refraction effect applies, sentences strangely bend, like light hitting water. The first law then: natural speech looks unnatural when written.
Record someone's speech and you'll hear how peppered with reversals, repetitions and omissions it is. In its quest for meaning, the brain filters these out, delivering us a clean, packaged concept, which is great – until you try to write it. The way around this is concision. As an exercise, start with the dialogue you want to write, then remove every third word, or cut the sentence by half; cut it until the meaning no longer survives, then add back the few words which return the meaning you want.
You'll be surprised by how few words a sentence needs to do its job. Readers will fly through dialogue, it's one of the great pleasures of reading and one which puts them at the heart of the action – don't slow or stop them, except by design. Tight dialogue may look curt at first, but let it rest overnight then look again; you'll see that in the reading brain, economy is natural.
Show, don't tell
You might be sick of this catchphrase, but it's a rule which applies particularly to dialogue, as this is where you will show things rather than tell them. Where it might be easier to describe an action or setting in prose, the reader will become more involved in your work if your characters expose things through dialogue and action. For instance, this might be an interesting piece of prose:
Then there was Barry, wearing his usual sour face. Rather than complain of the cold, or put on a jumper, he had a habit of drowning his food in salt, as he said this stimulated the body's temperature-regulating mechanisms. Of course it was because he simply liked salt but was ashamed to admit it after warnings he'd received about his health. Still, he usually froze at dinner to prop up this facade.
Now note how engaged we become when we see the tale unfold through dialogue. This exchange says all the same things:
"Pass the salt," said Barry. Mother frowned at this and he didn't meet her gaze. "Not a crime, is it?" he mumbled, "a bit of salt? Against the cold?"
"If I thought it'd cheer you up I might pass it," she said. "Or you could just get a jumper like the rest of us."
"They say chillies regulate body temperature," chimed Silvia. "And tea."
Dan finished a mouthful, leaning back: "Tea regulates by making you sweat. He's hardly going to sweat. Lucky if he's any fluids left, I've filled the shaker twice already."
"Not a crime, is it?"
"Ask Doctor Brice. Ask him after you've popped a vein."
One element of spoken dialogue which we aim to preserve is indirectness. If you listen to how we speak you'll note much of what we say assumes that we know each other. More than this, much of our speech is just a cover – for barbs, for questions, for things we don't want to deal with directly.
This is all good in writing. It draws readers in because it not only seems natural, but makes them eavesdroppers, it gives mysteries to unravel, suspicions to confirm, which are as rewarding in books as in life. Your character Richard, for instance, in life or in a book, would never come out and say: "Nell, I hold you and your absences responsible for the pressures on our marriage." Instead, we would guess it from an exchange like this:
Nell clattered downstairs: "I might be late home."
"Could've sworn I left it around here."
"Feel free to ignore me."
"Works well enough for you."
Let it flow
Flowing dialogue has to be balanced with letting readers know which character is speaking; but dialogue with too many "he said"s and "she said"s is irritating. It's a perennial challenge to clearly identify who's speaking without lumbering the exchange with repetitious words. While the beginning of a dialogue should firmly show who speaks and who answers, if the conversation continues you will need some new tools to keep it natural, unobtrusive and rhythmic.
One of a new writer's first responses can be to substitute other verbs for "said". While you can get away with a certain number of basic substitutions, they quickly wear thin. There are more elegant ways to identify your speakers.
First, don't put all your attributions at the end – try breaking sentences with them:
"By the time I left the pub I could barely see them," said Richard.
"By the time I left the pub," said Richard, "I could barely see them."
Try shifting attributions around to find where they fit best. Better still, attribute with action; take the opportunity to show what Richard is doing as he speaks:
"By the time I left the pub," Richard lifted the blind: "I could barely see them."
Tag your voices
Perhaps the sharpest tool in the armoury, one that removes attributions altogether, is the speech tag – this is one of the grunts or tics we agreed to eliminate at the beginning. Across the length of a story readers come to know a character by the style of their speech, by idiosyncrasies. Everyone has their habits, whether beginning replies with "Hmm" or "But" or "Well", pronouncing things a certain way, or having a characteristic pause.
The key here is to pick one or two for each main character, and lead their sentences with them. Don't overuse these tags, wait until you're at full stretch to attribute dialogues – but then, with a tag each, your characters can chat at some length without needing to pause for a "said Richard".
Don't worry if the tags seem awkward at first – add them to mark for yourself who's speaking; they'll develop and become more subtle as your characters settle into themselves.
Few tools in writing have such immediate effect on the page as these do, fuelling confidence, boosting the work along. We live in the best time for dialogue-heavy books – because it's fast, and we're fast, and it makes us eavesdroppers and ticks commercial boxes if you want to be published. Pace sells and dialogue is pace; you can still make unique, compelling characters, and you can still write a unique work around them – but a reader who falls into good dialogue on the first page of a book is in your pocket.
"Treat him bloody well," said Richard.
DBC Pierre will be teaching a Guardian Masterclass on How to Write a Book When All You Have Is a Feeling at Voewood House, Norfolk, on 25-27 November
• DBC Pierre is the author of three novels including the debut Vernon God Little, winner of the Man Booker prize, the Whitbread first novel award, the Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize, and the James Joyce award. To order his latest novel, Lights Out in Wonderland (Penguin), for £9.99 (RRP £12.99) visit Guardian Bookshop
And as if that doesn't already sound hard enough – they must also make us forget we're reading them.
A few basic laws govern dialogue and, once applied, their effect will be immediate. If you're beginning to make your characters speak, I promise these basics will help.
Unnatural is natural
Our programming as listeners and readers creates a need for technique in dialogue: these are two different things, as you'll discover when you try to write what you hear. At first I couldn't understand why the conversations around me wouldn't translate verbatim to a page; but a refraction effect applies, sentences strangely bend, like light hitting water. The first law then: natural speech looks unnatural when written.
Record someone's speech and you'll hear how peppered with reversals, repetitions and omissions it is. In its quest for meaning, the brain filters these out, delivering us a clean, packaged concept, which is great – until you try to write it. The way around this is concision. As an exercise, start with the dialogue you want to write, then remove every third word, or cut the sentence by half; cut it until the meaning no longer survives, then add back the few words which return the meaning you want.
You'll be surprised by how few words a sentence needs to do its job. Readers will fly through dialogue, it's one of the great pleasures of reading and one which puts them at the heart of the action – don't slow or stop them, except by design. Tight dialogue may look curt at first, but let it rest overnight then look again; you'll see that in the reading brain, economy is natural.
Show, don't tell
You might be sick of this catchphrase, but it's a rule which applies particularly to dialogue, as this is where you will show things rather than tell them. Where it might be easier to describe an action or setting in prose, the reader will become more involved in your work if your characters expose things through dialogue and action. For instance, this might be an interesting piece of prose:
Then there was Barry, wearing his usual sour face. Rather than complain of the cold, or put on a jumper, he had a habit of drowning his food in salt, as he said this stimulated the body's temperature-regulating mechanisms. Of course it was because he simply liked salt but was ashamed to admit it after warnings he'd received about his health. Still, he usually froze at dinner to prop up this facade.
Now note how engaged we become when we see the tale unfold through dialogue. This exchange says all the same things:
"Pass the salt," said Barry. Mother frowned at this and he didn't meet her gaze. "Not a crime, is it?" he mumbled, "a bit of salt? Against the cold?"
"If I thought it'd cheer you up I might pass it," she said. "Or you could just get a jumper like the rest of us."
"They say chillies regulate body temperature," chimed Silvia. "And tea."
Dan finished a mouthful, leaning back: "Tea regulates by making you sweat. He's hardly going to sweat. Lucky if he's any fluids left, I've filled the shaker twice already."
"Not a crime, is it?"
"Ask Doctor Brice. Ask him after you've popped a vein."
One element of spoken dialogue which we aim to preserve is indirectness. If you listen to how we speak you'll note much of what we say assumes that we know each other. More than this, much of our speech is just a cover – for barbs, for questions, for things we don't want to deal with directly.
This is all good in writing. It draws readers in because it not only seems natural, but makes them eavesdroppers, it gives mysteries to unravel, suspicions to confirm, which are as rewarding in books as in life. Your character Richard, for instance, in life or in a book, would never come out and say: "Nell, I hold you and your absences responsible for the pressures on our marriage." Instead, we would guess it from an exchange like this:
Nell clattered downstairs: "I might be late home."
"Could've sworn I left it around here."
"Feel free to ignore me."
"Works well enough for you."
Let it flow
Flowing dialogue has to be balanced with letting readers know which character is speaking; but dialogue with too many "he said"s and "she said"s is irritating. It's a perennial challenge to clearly identify who's speaking without lumbering the exchange with repetitious words. While the beginning of a dialogue should firmly show who speaks and who answers, if the conversation continues you will need some new tools to keep it natural, unobtrusive and rhythmic.
One of a new writer's first responses can be to substitute other verbs for "said". While you can get away with a certain number of basic substitutions, they quickly wear thin. There are more elegant ways to identify your speakers.
First, don't put all your attributions at the end – try breaking sentences with them:
"By the time I left the pub I could barely see them," said Richard.
"By the time I left the pub," said Richard, "I could barely see them."
Try shifting attributions around to find where they fit best. Better still, attribute with action; take the opportunity to show what Richard is doing as he speaks:
"By the time I left the pub," Richard lifted the blind: "I could barely see them."
Tag your voices
Perhaps the sharpest tool in the armoury, one that removes attributions altogether, is the speech tag – this is one of the grunts or tics we agreed to eliminate at the beginning. Across the length of a story readers come to know a character by the style of their speech, by idiosyncrasies. Everyone has their habits, whether beginning replies with "Hmm" or "But" or "Well", pronouncing things a certain way, or having a characteristic pause.
The key here is to pick one or two for each main character, and lead their sentences with them. Don't overuse these tags, wait until you're at full stretch to attribute dialogues – but then, with a tag each, your characters can chat at some length without needing to pause for a "said Richard".
Don't worry if the tags seem awkward at first – add them to mark for yourself who's speaking; they'll develop and become more subtle as your characters settle into themselves.
Few tools in writing have such immediate effect on the page as these do, fuelling confidence, boosting the work along. We live in the best time for dialogue-heavy books – because it's fast, and we're fast, and it makes us eavesdroppers and ticks commercial boxes if you want to be published. Pace sells and dialogue is pace; you can still make unique, compelling characters, and you can still write a unique work around them – but a reader who falls into good dialogue on the first page of a book is in your pocket.
"Treat him bloody well," said Richard.
DBC Pierre will be teaching a Guardian Masterclass on How to Write a Book When All You Have Is a Feeling at Voewood House, Norfolk, on 25-27 November
• DBC Pierre is the author of three novels including the debut Vernon God Little, winner of the Man Booker prize, the Whitbread first novel award, the Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize, and the James Joyce award. To order his latest novel, Lights Out in Wonderland (Penguin), for £9.99 (RRP £12.99) visit Guardian Bookshop
UNDERSTANDING POINT OF VIEW
Point-of-viewPoint-of-view is a term for the narrative mode, and is a primary characteristic of prose. It is the way in which the author narrates the story. There are many options, the most common of which are first person singular and third person limited; authors also sometimes choose to mix different points of view in the same novel. Here is a list of the types of point-of-view:
- First person singular: This point-of-view uses an “I” character to narrate the story. The narrator is not necessarily the protagonist, though this is often the case as this point-of-view is the most intimate and allows for the most direct access to a character’s thoughts.
- First person plural: A relatively uncommon choice for point-of-view, the first person plural uses the pronoun “we” as the narrator. In this case, there must be some uniting factor between the group of people narrating the story. One example of this is the 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides in which a group of unnamed young men from a small town observe and comment on a family with five sisters. For example:Whenever we saw Mrs. Lisbon we looked in vain for some sign of the beauty that must have once been hers.
- Second person: Even less common is the novel narrated with “you.” This is a very difficult point of view to sustain, as the reader must identify with the “you”, or it must be clear that the “you” character is, in fact, a way for the narrator to reflect back on his or her own actions. The most successful examples are the Choose Your Own Adventure series, in which the reader is encouraged to imagine himself or herself as the protagonist. For example:You are a deep sea explorer searching for the famed lost city of Atlantis. This is your most challenging and dangerous mission. Fear and excitement are now your companions.
- Third person limited: This point-of-view uses “he” or “she” to refer to the narrator of the story. It is less intimate than the first person point of view, yet being limited to only one person’s thoughts it can still provide psychological access to that character. However, it also allows for the author to add descriptive and narrative details that the character doesn’t necessarily notice.
- Third person omniscient: Here the author uses the pronouns “he” and “she”, but can access the thoughts of any character in the story. This point of view creates the most distance between the reader and any one character of the story.
There is much juxtaposition in the novel between West Egg and East Egg, and the comparable fortunes of the men who arrive at Jay Gatsby’s famous parties. Fitzgerald also uses irony throughout the novel, including readers’ knowledge of Jay and Daisy’s affair of which Daisy’s husband Tom is unaware (dramatic irony) and Daisy’s decision to stay with Tom at the end of the novel, contrary to readers’ expectations (situational irony)