Bird By Bird Response

Character

In this chapter, Anne Lamott talk about how to develop characters in a story. She stresses the importance of knowing every aspect of each character. Know everything they would think and do from their political beliefs to what they would eat for breakfast. She says that some of your characters you will love and some of them you will hat, but that's what makes a good story.

As with everything in writing, it takes time to get to know your characters. You should let your characters develop as the story does. A character that plays a small role in the beginning of the story may end up being the most important character in the book. You have to just let it happen how it happens and not force anything. Anne quotes a good line at the end of the chapter that Fredrick Buechner wrote: "...Just as in the real world it may take you many years to find out that the stranger you talked to once for half an hour in the railroad station may have done more to point you where your true homeland lies than your priest or your best friend or even your psychiatrist.

I think that really knowing each character is the most important part of a story. It shapes the story and makes us feel like it's real and like we really know these characters. It also gets us emotionally involved. A good story plays with our emotions. If something sad happens to our favorite character, we will feel bad.

Anne describes a few ways to get to know the characters that you will be writing about. She says you can think about different aspects of your own personality and play on those. You can turn each aspect of your personality into a character. Another thing you can do is to base characters off of people that you know. Using these to strategies helps because it gives you a better idea of what these characters would think and do.