一个好的故事的核心在于其中的人物。在这个课程中，有野心的写作者将发掘如何构思并描绘多面、鲜活，且令人难忘的人物。我们将学习一个写作者如何决定怎样把人物写活，还会做一些写作练习来学习各种写作和写作前准备的技巧，以便写出各种各样的人物。 我们将学习如何利用(以及避免利用)我们的人生经历、我们认识的人写作。我们将为我们的人物构建内在(想法和感受)和外在(外表、习惯、行为)，并观察这样如何引导我们写出更丰富、更有趣的故事。我们将把我们的人物写活，让它们令我们惊讶。
The Conflict Within (Shop Talk with Brando Skyhorse)
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来自 Wesleyan University 的课程
创意写作：构思人物
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从本节课中
Discovering Characters from Your Life and Elsewhere
What happens in the writer's mind before any words are written on the paper? Characters then reveal themselves through conflict and drama. Without conflict there is no purpose to the story. We then discuss desire. Human beings want things, even when we don't really know what it is we wish for. Finally, we conclude the module like Michelangelo, chipping away everything that is not the masterpiece statue of David. Learn to find what is germane to the story you are telling by looking closely at the character.
与讲师见面
Amy BloomDistinguished University Writer in Residence and Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing
Welcome to another segment on The Craft of Character.
We have the opportunity today to talk to Brando Skyhorse, memoirist,
novelist, and brilliant editor, to share his thoughts with us on character.
I'm so glad you're here.
>> Thank you.
>> I was wondering how do you as a writer,
although you probably think about this also sometimes as an editor,
how do you enter the points of view and the souls of women?
I'm thinking particularly about your novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park.
Do you find that that's more of a challenge or
a different kind of challenge for you?
>> I think it was Faulkner that said that a good writer could write a believable
male character, but a great writer could write a believable female character.
And I don't know if that's like Faulkner's typical glib kind of,
I don't know if that's a backhanded compliment or not.
But I think being raised in a house of women helped me understand empathy and
certainly helped me appreciate a woman's point of view more.
My problem with a lot of contemporary fiction, written by men in particular,
is that women are props.
Women are not characters that have their own agency.
And growing up in a house where my mother and grandmother shall, we say,
had plenty of agency- >> [LAUGH]
>> It was very easy to create characters
that wanted things.
And I think that's, I mean isn't that something every writer should aspire for?
To create characters that have their own agency, that have desire,
that want things?
I think that if you're a writer that cannot write credibly and
believably about 50% of the world's population, you should go back and
look and see what you are doing.
And that's the thing that I found when I worked in publishing as an editor,
that most female characters that were not believable did not have their own agency.
They didn't have their own desires, they didn't have arcs.
They were simply in service and they were props in service of narrative.
So I think that, again, finding believable female characters that want something,
as opposed to are servicing the narrator, or
servicing the narrative, is really important.
>> One of the ways which we got to know our characters is what they say as well as
what they do.
So for you, how do you create memorable dialogue?
What goes into a scene and
some dialogue that you hope the reader will never forget?
>> I think we'd actually had a conversation about this last week where we
were talking about, with some of the students here at Wesleyan,
about dialogue and that dialogue should ideally two things.
It should deepen our understanding of character or advance the plot.
More specifically, I think it was a playwright I read somewhere that said
dialog is what characters do to one another.
And I like that word, do.
I like that sort of, that active condition.
The idea that dialog is not backstory, dialog isn't recitation of,
this is everything that's happened in the story up to now.
Dialog isn't a place where you sort of feed all of the mechanics of
what a writer wants to tell in the story.
Dialogue is something that's organic.
Dialogue is something that should be happening
in the moment between two characters.
It should be an exchange, really.
Basically, it should be like a barter,
like one character's trying to get something from someone else.
And so the dialogue is their tool to get,
whether it's an object, or a kind of concession in some way.
Dialogue is something that's active.
And I know this is something that I talk about with my students in my class and
something I'll talk about in my module about plot,
is that you need rising action in a story.
And dialogue is a really excellent place to convey a rising action to the reader.
So by rising action I mean, you are escalating the situation in a way that
makes it interesting for the reader and forces your character to figure a way out.
To figure a way out of this conversation that they're in.
So I think it's really important to keep in mind that dialogue is not a place for
exposition.
It's not a place for regurgitating everything that’s happen in the story for,
it's active, it moves the story forward.
>> I think that's great and to underline what Brando was saying,
dialog is its own form of action.
It's not an information delivery system.
It's not the place where you say to the reader, here are some important facts.
It's the place where you show the reader who the characters are by
what they're saying and how they're saying and when in the story they're saying it.
And that kind of dialogue really advances your story and really engages your reader.
Plot moves the story, but so does character.
>> Yeah, character I mean, it's the key thing, isn't it?
I mean when we talk about the books that we love, whether it's Harry Potter or
James Patterson or a literary novel, whatever the case may be,
it always comes down to the characters, isn't it?
And it's about being able to create that emotional connection
with someone on the page.
And I think that's why for
me writing about my family was an incredibly complicated, it was just so
complicated to deal with and why it was so rewarding when it was actually finished.
[LAUGH] >> Well I'm with you.
I think character is at the center,
that's why my work in my class is on character because it
seems to me that is at the foundation of any good story.
>> I think if I could make just one sort of additional point on that.
I think that's the challenge that I feel with a number of students who are starting
to write fiction.
They have all of these incredibly large ideas that they want to talk about.
Anthony Doerr who's a wonderful writer was talking about how all of his students want
to write about the big ticket items, love, lust, insanity, race, class, etc.
But they forget about the specific details that occur in those very large ideas.
And character is, that's the key.
If you want to write believably about any of these sort of big ticket items that all
of us, I think, have wanted to write about at one time or another,
you do it through character.
And you do it through giving those characters those specific details.
>> I think that's right.
I think you build the big shimmering edifice
one brick, one sentence, one moment at a time.
>> That's right.
>> I wonder if you could describe for
us what you think really makes a memorable character.
You've talked a little bit about flaws.
Are there other things that you think are important for a writer to understand
in developing a character, what they might be looking to try to put in there?
>> I think flaws are key because again,
nobody wants to read about an interesting perfect character.
But desire, I think, is a really key thing.
That's something that I talk to my students about all the time.
I know Kurt Vonnegut's, one of his sort of tenets for character is to make your
character want something, even if it's something as simple as a glass of water.
You want them to go out and do something, because a character that wants something
will then go through the story to try to fulfill that need.
As opposed to a character that maybe needs something.
That character is perhaps relying more upon fate as opposed to desire.
So I think imbuing a character with a sense of flaw and
a sense of desire, and it's amazing how often those two work with one another,
that our flaws are often driven by what it is that we desire most.
>> I love the idea that every character is on a quest.
Thank you so much, Brando, for joining us.
And we will continue with The Craft of Character.
>> Thank you.
