— Learning to Write XX

How do you know if, instead of creating a rounded character or a personified trait, you have inadvertently created a caricature?

A caricature is someone who can have no other existence except within the special atmosphere of the story. So what you must do is take this figure and try transferring him or her out of the surroundings you have provided, and place him in your own home. The test here is not to determine if that person would be happy or comfortable in the different environment. It is to see if he can live and breath at all outside of the fictitious world of your narrative. Can this character walk through your front door, continue his conversation at your kitchen table and avoid being regarded as insane by anyone else who happens to be there?

Bertie Wooster couldn’t do it. Hannibal Lecter would fail to impress your girlfriends. Huckleberry Finn would certainly not be comfortable, but unless you were of a nervous disposition you wouldn’t call a doctor or the police. And Sally Bowles with her emerald green fingernails may well cause a stir in the neighbourhood, as neurotics do, but people would recognise her. She would be a bit of a character.

Wooster and Lecter are caricatures. They can’t make the transition. The other two are characters.

Caricature certainly has its place, as the above two examples demonstrate. But if you create a caricature inadvertently as your main figure, out of laziness, when what was really needed for the narrative was a rounded character, then there is little you can do to correct it. Caricature has a habit of sticking around. You can try tinkering but nine times out of ten you would be better off abandoning the story and starting again.

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— Out-takes XXV

‘Yeah, I’ve been reading those books again. I read all kinds of books. That’s one of the things I do. Everybody in the world does a few things, you know that. Or you might get some people who do lots of different things and they’re crap at all of them. Most of us, we’re good [...]

— Learning to Write XIX

All fictional characters are not drawn in the same way. The writer has to decide if the person he is about to represent is to be a full character or merely an embodied trait. The difference between these two presentations lies in the way in which the reader responds to them.
Everyone responds differently to a [...]

— Simile & Metaphor

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“Like a Night Club in the morning, you’re the bitter end.
Like a recently disinfected shit-house, you’re clean round the bend.”
from Twat by John Cooper Clarke

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“Americans have different ways of saying things. They say elevator, we say lift. . . they say President, [...]

— Out-takes XXIV

What it was about those uncanny scenes, and not just in movies but also in novels and stories, was a parallel with real life happenings. That instinctual compulsion to return to a prior state of being. Marie knew that whatever pleasure she attained in her life, no matter how much happiness she found, there would [...]

— Learning to Write XVIII

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 [...]

— Learning to Write XVII

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 [...]

— Out-takes XXIII

‘This is one of the big divides between your generation and mine,’ Celia said. ‘Feminism’s been a wonderful thing and I’m glad I lived long enough to be part of it. But evil isn’t really anything to do with gender. People of either sex are capable of anything. This man who is set on destroying [...]

— Politics and the English Language

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use [...]

— Learning to Write XVI

There is no novel without character. You can have all of the other ingredients, plot, thematic content, pace, action, style, psychology, tension and poetry, but if your characters aren’t credible and if they don’t live with each other then you don’t have a novel.
Characters are what hold the different parts of your narrative together and [...]