ENG 321  3/29

• Ford and O'Brien
• Story Choices

For Tuesday 4/5 -- Work on Exercise #4

Exercise #4:

1.  Characterization:  Tim O'Brien in The Magic Show says that "too often characterization fails precisely because it attempts to characterize.  It narrows; it pins down; it explicates; it solves.  The nasty miser is actually quite sweet ands generous...  A "solved" character ceases to be mysterious... I believe that a successful characterization requires an enhancement of mystery:  not shrinkage, but expansion.

Which of your characters are too narrow?  How are they narrow? In what way?  Revise your characters to make them more complex, more mysterious.  Revise them--in small ways (at the sentence level and description level) and large ways (in the things they say and do--especially in the things they do, their important actions and choices) so that your story leaves the reader wondering.

What do you want them to wonder about your character, and by extension, the story as a whole? 

Or, to say it another way:  Richard Ford says, "Our imagination loves to be filled with an object or to grasp at anything that is too large for its capacity."  What question does your story raise about living in the world that won't reduce to a simple answer?

2.  Scene building--Dialogue:  Write (or revise) two full pages of dialogue between two or more characters.  Dialogue should (1) advance the conflict (2) characterize the speaker, and (3) imply more than is actually said.

(a) In your dialogue, what is more implied than is actually said?  Are there places where characters say the opposite of what they actually mean?  Can you add gestures, actions, silences that could make unspoken tensions even more apparent to readers?

(b) Look carefully at the dialogue in one of the stories you admire. Deliberately imitate how that dialogue is rendered.  What story?  What do you like about the dialogue?

3.  Generative:  Choose a minor character of another story you've written and write a story in which they are the protagonist.  Have their story in some way intersect with the world of the story you've already written.  (Maybe it's the same story from the other character's point of view?) 

4.  Generative:  Scan the newspaper for an article that describes something odd, quirky, strange, absurd.  Pull five sentences from the article.  Use each of those sentences somewhere in the first two pages of a new story. 

5.  Characterization:  mixed motives.  Have you ever been asked:  Why did you do that?  And you couldn't honestly, or clearly, anyway, answer the question.  You just did it.  You might be able to come up with several possible explanations, but none of them are clearly more "true" than the other.  Give your characters the same freedom, latitude, inexplicability.  Burroway says that characters are consistently inconsistent.  But not all inconsistency is good:  your reader needs to understand those possible explanations.  Too often, your readers don't understand what those possibile explanations are.  Return to a character in your story which has puzzled your classmates.  Come up with five possible explanations for the way they acted.  Build these possibilities into the story, implicitly and explicitly.  (Maybe use the word "maybe.")  Allow the story's outcome (it's climax and resolution) to be influenced by these possibilities. 

NOTE:  If you are working on a story-in-progress, underline the new writing, the development, generated by the exercise in the draft.  

Bring 4 copies:  one for me, and one for each member of your group.