QUOTE OF THE NOW

"I want to go back to being weird. I like being weird. Weird is all I've got. That and my sweet style." (Moss in the IT Crowd)

Monday, May 28, 2012

Learning Character Description from Tom Rachman

For your amoosement:




What I Learned About Writing from Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists - Character Description

The Imperfectionists is a series of related short stories, the tie-in being that they work, or are somehow related to, an English language newspaper in Italy. Because of the short story medium he has little time to establish each new character, but he does so quickly. In a page or two you have a good handle on them; they're nuanced and very real. And even the unlikable ones, I felt compassion for by the end.

Here's the first paragraph of Kathleen's story:


The first paragraph about the copy editor Ruby:


And one of my favorite stories was about an inexperienced, ineffectual young foreign correspondent who doesn't know the first thing about journalism, and the experienced journalist who swoops in, mooches off him, and steals his job:





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