Expositing or Dramatizing

Calendar July 10, 2009 | Posted by John Halasz
Novel Writer for Hire

Novel Writer for Hire

Although there have been noted who have successfully used the technique of exposition such as Lloyd Abbey in his novel “The Last Whales” and Gabriel Garca Marquez”, it requires great skill that only few have come off.

For novice writers and some professionals who do not have enough of that skill, have to dramatically present information rather than “exposit” them. The characters and their emotions should be dramatized in order to keep the readers lively.

ELEMENTS OF FICTIONAL CHARACTERS

The kinds of characters that you introduce play an important role in the success of your story. Freelance novelists need to make them complex but believable. There are several ways on how freelance novelists can build them up.

  1. Substantiality. Freelance fiction writers need to make the characters as real as possible by conveying to the readers information about them that will also be beneficial for the development of the story. Examples of these particularized facts are possessions, a specific residence, medical records, his personal preferences and opinions.
  2. Using symbolism to reveal the character’s nature. It is appropriate to relate the character’s nature with objects or settings in your plot even though the readers may not instantly comprehend. According to Northrop Frye using symbols can be knowingly “archetypal” which means a writer is representing or constituting an original type, the writer’s character in this case, after which other similar things are patterned; this refers to comparable characters in the world of literature. It is also possible to use symbolism in a manner that readers may not willfully comprehend. Using characters’ names is a classic means of achieving symbolic associations although it is now commonly applied only in comic or ironic writing and seldom in other forms of modern fiction.
  3. Verbal Communication. The content and manner of the verbal communication of each of the characters in your story, helps suggest to the readers the personality of your characters, whether a character is assertive and blunt, quiet and reserved, flirtatious or funny. Avoid letting your character speak in such a way that readers presume him as part of a classification of people. In this way, prejudice can be avoided. His speech should effectively reveal to the readers his social and ethnic background. In turn, the character’s manner of speaking should be justifiable by his background.
  4. Conduct. The actions of your character should be in harmony to his attributes that the writer has brought into the minds of their readers since the beginning of the story. However, his actions should also reveal a new aspect of his personality through writing down events that will serve as opportunities to stress his behavior.
  5. Stimulus and Drive. The fiction freelancer should let the readers believe that all the actions of their character are justifiable. Not only that, they should not sound so far-fetched that readers lose their suspension of disbelief.
  6. Transformation. People usually respond to experiences by making an intimate transformation or avoiding this transformation. All the conflicts and struggles should be instrumental in causing a development in the character’s personality. If there is no such development, the readers should learn what hindered the character from growing.

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