The South was Colm Tóibín’s first novel, published in 1990. Katherine Proctor, an Irish protestant, arrives in Barcelona in the 1950s having abandoned her husband and ten-year-old son. She discovers the city and meets local artists. Franco’s dictatorship and the still recent civil war haunts the immediate past of those around her. [...]
I have spoken before about the drawbacks of long and detailed descriptions. But here I would like to concentrate on how character development is created most satisfactorily, not in description, but in action.
In defining someone by their possessions, you do not do yourself a favour by writing, “She owned a Saab convertible,” nor by showing [...]
The most important single ability of a fiction writer is to be able to characterize. Unfortunately it is also an ability which can never be taught. That being the case I’ll confine myself, in this post, to try to show some of the most particular faults that beginning writers make in trying to assign characteristics [...]
When I was at college, too many years ago now to recall coherently, I remember an essay assignment which prompted me to write a portrait of an old guy who used a piece of rope to hold up his trousers. It was an objective depiction of the character, done in almost the same way that [...]
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