Archive for the ‘reading’ Category
March 10th, 2010
Creating a fictional character can be a very simplistic task. However, creating a realistic fictional character requires a little more effort on your, the writer’s, part. It is more than just a matter of giving a character a name and description of his or her looks. It is a matter of giving a character personality, and working to make that personality come through the paper, so your readers can easily visualize the fictional person you have created. A well-developed character can either be liked or hated by your readers, depending on the characteristics and attributes given. If you can evoke strong emotions from your readers about your character, you have done a good job.
#1 Create a History
Every person has a past, so it is important to create a past for your character – even if you do not share the entire contents of that past. People evolve over the years because of their experiences and surroundings throughout their lives, and your fictional character is no different, so you need to develop a fictional past for him or her. When you are initially developing a new character, you are getting to know that character, just as your readers will get to know that character when they read your story. It is important to understand why your character will react or make decisions the way that he or she does, so it is important to have a back story that goes along with the personality that has been created for that character over the years.
#2 Show (don’t tell) His or Her Emotions
If you have not heard the phrase now, you will a lot throughout most of your English related courses: show, don’t tell. Simply saying that your character is feeling sad is not a proper description of a realistic character. People don’t feel the same emotions in the same way. Some people cry when they are sad, while others scream or go completely silent. You need to show how your characters are feeling, rather than just say how they are feeling.
Bad Example: Nora became angry after reading the letter. She just couldn’t stand it anymore.
Good Example: Nora’s face became hot after reading the letter. She viciously began to tear apart the envelope when she couldn’t look at its content any more.
Showing a character’s emotions through actions lets your readers get a better idea of what kind of personality someone like Nora has.
#3 Give Your Character Habits or Quirks
People are remembered for the little things they do that are different from anyone else, and everyone has something peculiar them that seems unique. Giving an interesting habit or strange quirk lends personality to your character. It can be as small as eating M&Ms all the time, but refusing to eat any other kind of chocolate. Or as big as having your character insist on eating at the exact same restaurant every day, and is thrown off if something disturbs this regimen. Whatever habit or quirk you give your character will allow your readers to get to know him or her better. Sometimes you can give an explanation for the behavior, but you don’t always have to. Either way, your readers will have another reason to think, “Hey, this character is interesting.”
#4 Show Relationships
We can learn a lot about individuals by the way they interact with others. If your character is very sociable, then you should show the character interacting with a lot of random people at work, talking on the phone, and even chatting with strangers on the street. But, if the character is more of a recluse and only has one or two friends, show the bond between those few characters, and maybe even show the uncomfortable feeling that character gets when dealing with new individuals.
#5 Reveal Character’s Hopes, Dreams, Aspirations
People live their lives with a particular purpose. They don’t just go through the motions of school or work without having some reason to do so. If you are going to show that your character is unhappy with his or her job, then be sure to explain why that character continues to keep that job – what is his or her motivation? Is she saving up for a car? Is he trying to pay off a loan? These are the kinds of questions that readers ask about characters who are interesting. And, if you are answering those questions, then your readers are going to enjoy your character and your style of writing that much more.
March 3rd, 2010
It’s cold and wet outside, so there aren’t many options for entertaining activities. Oh sure, you could turn on your television and sit on your butt for the next several hours, but there is only so much time you can spend watching daytime soap operas or court TV. Instead of just staring at a screen, letting your mind go sedentary, there are some exciting books to read that are just perfect for those stuck-in-the-house rainy days. One or two suggestions may be educational, but they are too fun to read to even notice that you’re brain is keeping active.
Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher
Do not let the name fool, there isn’t anything about marine life in the book. The main character, T.J. Jones, is an adopted teenager who is smart, funny, and an all-around cool guy, who is incredibly humorous to read about. The story deals with a team of underdog swimmers, and T.J. just happens to be the only popular guy on the team. Acting as the wise-butt hero at times, this book had me stifling my own laughter because I was afraid someone would hear me guffaw too loudly.
Darwin Awards Books
For those who are not familiar with the Darwin Awards, they are a comical competition that relay the odd, stupid, and funny things people do in life, as well as the interesting outcomes of these actions. There are at least seven of these books by now, so the options are wide and the hilarity of man’s stupidity just continues to entertain readers. If for some reason you cannot finish one of the books, there is no harm in putting it aside to come back to it on another rainy day. The chapters do not have a sequence of events, so there is no plot to keep up with. You can read one funny story after another. Or, if you somehow finish one book in a day, there are more to read out of the series.
A Bad Beginning, A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snickett
Yes, it is part of a series, but what better day is there to try out a new series of books than on a rainy day? And, there is never a dull moment in A Bad Beginning, not to mention it is a relatively shorter book, which also makes it a quick read. Funny, exciting, and sometimes creepy, the Series of Unfortunate Events relays the story of the cruel Count Olaf, who is trying to take the inheritance of three incredibly talented orphaned children. Don’t knock it just because it’s in the young adult section; this book even has adults enthralled to read the whole series.
Short Stories by Nikolay Gogol
For those who want a fun, yet slightly more sophisticated read, the short stories by Nikolay Gogol never seem to disappoint. Although most short stories are a good pick for rainy days, Gogol’s are both deep and amusing at the same time. Stories like “The Nose” is so incredulous to have a nose as the supporting role, while “The Diary of a Madman” is so funny, I almost felt guilty as I laughed at the poor narrator. Gogol’s short stories are a bit longer than others, but you can still several with a day’s time. And, with a collection of shorts, it is easy to just put the rest of the book aside once you have finished a particular story. There is no commitment to reading all of the short stories if you do not have time.
Psych – A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read by William Rabkin
If you are a fan of the show, you are going to love the books, particularly this one. Although many popular shows are providing a series of books alongside their show, Psych is one of those shows that is both smart and funny at the same time, which is exactly what the books are like, too. A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read happens to be only 273 pages, which makes for a quick read with all of the dialogue and humorous activities.
February 18th, 2010
It is one of the scariest things a writer has to face – writer’s block. You stare at the white sheet of paper, tapping your pen, and spacing out as you try to think of what to write. Looking at the blank page only reminds you that your mind is blank with ideas, too. The problem with writer’s block is that once a person feels stumped, they have a hard time forcing themselves to write anything at all. Quite often, some people even say they have writer’s block just to have an excuse not to write. Writing takes work, concentration, and creativity. Whatever your reason is for feeling that you have come down with writer’s block, here are some simple steps to help overcome your own block.
Step #1 Prewrite
Yes, you hear your instructors tell you all the time to prewrite, but do you ever listen to them? Prewriting (which is listed in another blog) is not just a way to organize your thoughts and get down ideas, it is another way to look at your writing project and force yourself to write. Getting past your writer’s block is often just a matter of looking at your task from a different perspective (or looking around your writer’s block, if you will). If you can brainstorm or outline some ideas for your writing, then you have a better chance at feeling confident and putting your pen to the paper to start writing. With all of the different methods of prewriting, there really isn’t any reason not to use at least one of them when you’re stumped.
Step #2 Write Backwards
Even after the prewriting is finished, you may still feel uncertain how you want to word your thoughts exactly. If that’s the case, jot down your ideas out of order – write the end first and the beginning last if you must. Sometimes your ideas may be scattered, which is why you are having trouble focusing on just one idea. Maybe your mind is blank with your introduction, but you know what you want to write for your body paragraphs. If that is the case, then just skip ahead. Write down whatever good ideas you think you have and reorganize them later.
Step #3 Take Your Opposing Side
If you are really uncomfortable with your topic and feel you have absolutely nothing to write about, then you may want to take yourself out of your own head and put it into someone else’s. This has nothing to do with cheating. You are supposed to write the opposite of what you really feel. Or, think of what other people would say about your subject. It may be easier putting down what you think other people feel or believe than what you actually believe. Your confidence in your own ideas may be what stops your writing. Do not use this technique all of the time though. There are some assignments where you need to give your honest opinion, and this method of breaking writer’s block may not always be suitable.
Step #4 Just Write!
It may sound harsh, but sometimes you just have to force your pen to move on the paper or to have your fingers move across the keyboard. Often people refuse to write anything because they don’t think their ideas or words are good enough. Well, when you’re struggling, writing something is better than writing nothing. Put down whatever comes to mind whether or not you think it sounds good. You can always fix it later, which is how we come to Step 5 in breaking the writer’s block.
Step #5 Walk Away… and Come Back
Sometimes students are just not in the right state-of-mind to write. If there are a bunch of things running through your head, you may need to just set up your writing assignment as best as you can and walk away from it for a while. When you come back to whatever writing you have put down, you may feel more inclined to fix your ideas and even add more ideas down on paper. Depending on how much time you have for your writing, walking away from your assignment for an hour or a full day may be just what you need to come back to your writing and look at your project with a clear head. When you come back to your writing, look it over with a critical eye, as if it were someone else’s paper, and see what you do and do not like about it. And then, take your writing from there. Unless you are taking an in-class essay, this method can be a great way to clear your mind. Otherwise, you’ll have to rely on a different method of break down that writer’s wall.
January 13th, 2010
By Amelia Anderson
New backpacks, clothes, folders, pencils, classes, and of course new books are typically bought at the beginning of classes. Although the expenses can add up, some of the most trying things to buy have got to be the books. Maybe you can reuse an old backpack, maybe you don’t necessarily need a new wardrobe for school, and you may very likely have spare pens, pencils, and binders for the new school year. But, new books are something that has to be bought. Depending on the types of classes you are taking, books can be very expensive for students and can easily put a hole in a person’s budget. However, there are ways to make buying new books for the semester a lot more economical.
Order Textbooks Online
It is usually more convenient to buy textbooks through the school you are attending, however that is typically the most expensive way to buy books for school. There are many websites online that sell textbooks for a much cheaper price. Just make sure that you buy your books a week or two in advance, so you have your books in time for school. Popular websites like cheapesttextbooks.com, half.ebay.com/ , textbooks.com/, and even http://www.barnesandnoble.com/textbooks/index.asp are great resources for inexpensive text books. If you can’t find what you want at these sites, research more to find others and compare prices – there are plenty to choose from.
Read Online
There are many novels that are available to read online, without having to spend a dime. Textbooks are probably not accessible, but classic novels are often found. As long as you do not have sensitive eyes to reading for an extensive period on a computer screen, then reading online is a great way to save a little money. I read the entire text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin online, which was required for one of my literature classes. Since the book didn’t need to be brought into class, there was no problem just reading the book online.
Buy Used Books
Both textbooks and novels can be a lot cheaper when they are bought used. And, since most students do not keep their school books after they have finished their class, there is no point in buying a book in pristine condition that you have no intention of holding onto anyway. Novels can be found for half price at used book stores, and used textbooks that are available at the local bookstores can be ¼ the price of a brand new textbook.
Rent Textbooks
It may be the newest form of getting textbooks for school – Renting! Yes, there is actually a website that offers students to rent texts. You can rent and even sell textbooks to make money at http://www.chegg.com/. Renting books is even cheaper than buying used books, and with the speed this new option is taking in popularity, I am certain that there will be more online sites available for renting books in the near future.
Borrow Textbooks from the Library
It is one of the oldest tricks, but it really does work. Borrow books from the library. School libraries are supposed to carry the textbooks that are required for your school’s classes, so just borrowing those books instead buying them is way cheaper. I recommend double checking to be certain that the library does carry the textbook you need and to check the policies for borrowing a textbook (some libraries are stricter with the length of time you can keep a textbook out of the library). If everything seems to work in your favor, borrowing textbooks from the library is a free option instead of having to buy a book that may cost anywhere from $50 to $100.
December 22nd, 2009
by Adam Krause
Writers have every right to end this decade in a state of as much uncertainty and confusion as everybody else. Will there be paper books in ten years, or will everyone be curling up with the Kindle? Will there still be investigative newspaper journalism, or will all public information be provided by bloggers like yours truly? And what should we even call this ten-year period at the beginning of the twenty-first century that we have just lived through? “The oughts” sounds regretful, “the ‘00s” sounds sinister and “the turn of the century” still sounds like we should all be wearing petticoats.
However, while most of us are anxiously watching the skies, the hurricane coasts and our stock portfolios to see where the next disaster will come from, a few novelists have kept their eyes focused where they should be: on, as William Faulkner memorably put it, “the old verities and truths of the heart… love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice” and on epic stories of conflict, culture clash and family that bring these qualities to the fore. Each of these five books is sprawling and ambitious, able to leap generations in a single bound and observe, as if with X-ray vision, the intensity of a single moment. They should be required reading for anyone who wants to write in these times: anyone who thinks they can step up and give our recent history a name.
British-Jamaican author Zadie Smith finished this stunning first novel when she was a 22-year-old undergraduate at Cambridge. It concerns the lifelong friendship between two war veterans in London, Archibald Jones and Samad Iqbal, and the intertwined destinies of their offspring. Archie gets regular letters from the Swedish cyclist with whom, in the greatest triumph of his life, he tied for thirteenth place in the Olympics (“your earnest competitor, Horst Ibelgaufts”) and Samad’s wife, in punishment for his decision to send their son away to Bangladesh to study Islam, resolves never again to give him a yes or no answer on anything (“Where have you put the remote control?” “It is as likely to be in the drawer, Samad Miah, as it is behind the sofa.”) It is as funny and penetrating a look at our multicultural society as has been written yet this century.
Though no graphic novels have been included on this list, the next three novels draw on comic books for their inspiration. This decade has brought about the belated acknowledgment that comics can be as affecting, and take as many risks, as the best literature. Two other related developments: movies based on comic books are now cemented in the mind of Hollywood as the most reliable way to get audiences to the theatre (which may not be such a good thing) and writers of more traditional literary forms are more and more often invoking superheroes as a powerful metaphor, a part of our collective unconscious in the way that the myths of Odin and Hades informed the imaginations of earlier cultures.
Oscar Wao is a Dominican-American nerd, who as we follow him through high school and college, desperately wants a woman but is much more comfortable talking to his Doctor Who figurines. His story is narrated by Yunior, the on-again-off-again boyfriend of Oscar’s sister, who also narrated the author’s earlier story collection Drown. Yunior has been given the task of watching over Oscar, but cannot protect the brilliant misfit from his tendency to fall madly in love with any woman who talks to him, even when he goes to visit his relatives in the Dominican Republic and the curse of a hated dictator finds him from beyond the grave. Author Junot Diaz’s chief accomplishment is in the language, the way it blends epic storytelling and street slang, Spanish and English, the confident narration of a folk tale with the awkward scrawled-diary intimacy of an adolescent who thinks nobody else has ever been in love before.
One of the great things a novel can do is show the way the passage of time changes people: how many different times in a day or a lifetime our identity shifts to meet what the world asks of us. Jumping swiftly from one point of view to the next (“You’re white! Winegar wanted to scream. Man can fly! Dylan wanted to scream”) Jonathan Lethem tells the story of Dylan Ebdus, a “whiteboy” whose well-meaning bohemian parents move to a black neighborhood of Brooklyn in order to raise him. After leaving for college but failing to escape his past, Dylan returns as an adult to take care of unfinished business. The bulk of the story takes place in the late seventies, as phenomena that would define American culture for the rest of the century – rap, crack, graffiti and punk rock – were being forged in the crucible of New York. Its supporting characters change with their times – one goes from chess nerd to wannabe gangster to landlord in a new, gentrified Brooklyn – and we believe the authenticity of each, not because the character has finally found their true self but because the world Lethem creates is so constantly in motion. Oh yeah, and there’s a magical ring that sometimes gives flight, sometimes invisibility: two superpowers that the amateur should never confuse with one another.
Master magician Michael Chabon transforms meticulous research into a world that never was: a New York circa 1940 seen through the eyes of two young comic book creators, all sharp angles and jutting jaws that mask the human frailty behind the heroics. In America it is the Golden Age of comics and in Europe it is an age of unprecedented darkness, of World War II and the Holocaust, from which Joe Kavalier, a budding artist in Prague, escapes by smuggling himself inside of a giant golem. He winds up in his American aunt’s small apartment with his cousin Sammy Clay, and the two of them create the Escapist, a Houdini-like superhero who makes them famous. The immersive, addictive novel (which my college roommate claimed to read in a single day, by doing nothing else for eleven hours but flip through its 656 pages) articulates, more brilliantly than any of Chabon’s work before or since, the author’s vision that it is the dreams we dream that make our lives all the more real.
This dark, hilarious novel came out in September 2001, just after a decade that many pundits called “a holiday from history,” to announce that however happy we thought we might be while on Prozac, the holiday was over. At its center are three siblings, products of a prosperous Midwestern childhood: Chip, a lecherous academic who ends up working for an Eastern European Internet scam that allows investors to buy pieces of Lithuania; Gary, a successful but miserable investor who has to hide his drinking from the surveillance system rigged up by his ten-year-old son; and Denise, a trendy chef who breaks up her boss’s marriage by sleeping with both him and his earnest hippie wife. Their father is losing his mind to Parkinson’s disease and their mother wants them to come home for one last Christmas together. The writing is so sharp, the failures of the characters rendered in such excruciating and recognizable detail, that you can open the book to any page and find a sentence that draws the eye, compelling you to read to the end of the scene. Jonathan Franzen, who has not published a novel since, managed to write what is, so far, the century’s most important American novel by focusing on an image we have seen a thousand times – witness the happy family on its cover – and zooming in to pick at all the warts, veins and scars.
