The Seventy Percent, by Yiyun Li
(The story form reminds us that a human being is never static or stable. The form demands that the writer honor this. If a character keeps doing or saying the same thing, keeps occupying the same position, we will feel this as static, a repeated beat—a failure of development.)
George Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
When designing a character, it’s often useful to think of them in terms of their theory of control. How have they learned to control the world? When unexpected change strikes, what’s their automatic go-to tactic for wrestling with the chaos? What’s their default, flawed response? The answer, as we’ve just seen, comes from that character’s core beli
... See moreWill Storr • The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better
When a person dies, they take that inner life with them. The novelist, then, can perform a miracle: approximate that consciousness and reach inside a person. It is make-believe, but maybe the most essential kind of leap. There are few actions that are more human.
This is about the forest again—about the limits of genius, about the need to walk the land, as opposed to intuit and hypothesize from the edge. There are dimensions in your words—rhythm, content, shape, feeling. And so too with the world outside. The accretion of imperfect, discomfiting life must be seen and felt so that the space in your mind, gra... See more
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Perhaps, then, unlikable characters, the ones who are the most human, are also the ones who are the most alive. Perhaps this intimacy makes us uncomfortable because we don’t dare be so alive.