#JAMES WOOD, HOW FICTION WORKS#
The unpractised novelist cleaves to the static, because it is much easier to describe than the mobile: it is getting these people out of the aspic of arrest and mobilised in a scene that is hard.

what really constitutes a character.
narrative can and often does give us a vivid sense of a character without giving us a vivid sense of an individual. We don’t know this particular man; but we know his particular behaviour at this moment.

If I try to distinguish between major and minor characters - round and flat characters - and claim that these differ in terms of subtlety, depth, time allowed on the page, I must concede that many so-called flat characters seem more alive to me, and more interesting as human studies, however short-lived, than the round characters they are supposedly subservient to.

Character 61, 64, 67
摘于06/30/2026