Student Handout
CharactersStories are about imaginary people. Even if your story is about animals or creatures from another planet, the animals or creatures act like people. The imaginary people, animals, or creatures in your story are called characters. The most important characters in your story are your main character and your secondary characters.
The Main Character
The most important character in your story is called the main character. You can only have one main character. The main character has a problem to solve, wants something, or tries to do something. This is called the central conflict. In The Wizard of Oz, for example, Dorothy wants to get home to Kansas. In E.T, E.T. wants to phone home. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes wants to solve the mystery. Your first prewriting decision is to choose your main character. What does your main character want? That's your central conflict
The Secondary Characters
The secondary characters are the other important characters besides the main character.
For example, the Tinman, the Scarecrow, and the Lion are secondary characters in The Wizard
ofOz. Elliot, the little boy who helps E.T, and Dr. Watson are also secondary characters. Youcan choose just one or two secondary characters or a whole crowd of them.
The difference between the secondary characters and the main character is that the central conflict belongs to the main character. The Tinman and Scarecrow help Dorothy get back to Kansas. They just happen to solve some of their own problems along the way.
You don't need to have a secondary character, but be careful not to have too many. One or two is usually more than enough to make a good story.
Minor Characters and Bit Players
There are two other types of characters that you should know about, although you don't need to make any decisions about them now. You can make them up as you write. These are minor characters and bit players.
Minor characters usually have names. The reader learns a little bit about them, but not much. For example, the Wizard and all the witches in The Wizard of Oz are minor characters.
Villains are often minor characters. In E.T, Elliot's mother is a minor character. Sherlock's clients are minor characters.
Bit players, though, are hardly people at all. They do their little bit for the story and disappear. They open the gates to Oz, drive taxis to the airports, answer questions at hotel desks. They usually don't even have names.
If you think of your main and secondary characters as being "round" (that is, the reader knows all about them in detail), your minor characters and bit characters are "flat." Your reader never learns very much about them; they are just there to move the story forward in some way.
From Teaching Writing in Middle School. © 1998 Beth Means and Lindy Lindner. Teacher Ideas Press. (800) 237-6124.
36 <^s 2—Planning Central Conflict
The central conflict is your main character's biggest problem. It's easiest to think of a central conflict by asking yourself, What does my main character want? Does he or she want to do something? To solve a problem? To get something? To make something? The answer is your central conflict. When your main character gets what he or she wants, your story ends.
(Sometimes your main character doesn't get what he or she wants. In this case, the story ends once it's clear that the main character will never get it.)
Beginners often make the mistake of creating several central conflicts. Stick to just one.
Just because you choose one central conflict doesn't mean there won't be plenty of other problems for your characters to solve. Dorothy didn't make it home to Kansas without bumping up against witches and dark forests. Secondary characters have their problems, too.
The Tinman wanted a heart, and the Scarecrow wanted a brain. The central conflict, the problem that started all these problems, was Dorothy's desire to go home.
Think of your story as a series of stair steps building up to a high point. Each step forward is another step to solving the main problem, but each step also has complications or setbacks to overcome. The story builds up to a final, big setback—a crisis. All seems lost. Then the main character overcomes the last setback, the central conflict is resolved, and the story quickly ends.
Crisis
Central Conflict over
Beginning
The Story Line.
Because you know that the story ends once the central conflict is resolved, it may help you to first decide how the story will end. Then decide what the crisis will be and, last of all, how to begin.
Setting(s)
Your characters are who your story is about. The central conflict is what your story is about. The setting is where your story takes place.
Your story may have one setting or several settings. If you have more than one, it helps to think of settings as big settings and little settings. The big setting might be a town. The little settings might be the school, the local hardware store, or the town square. Your big setting might be a country. The little settings might be a city in that country, a small town in the mountains, or a roadside cafe on a main highway. If you are writing a science fiction story,
From Teaching Writing in Middle School. © 1998 Beth Means and Lindy Lindner. Teacher Ideas Press. (800) 237-6124.
End
Part 1: Finding a Focus ^ ^ ^ 37 your big setting might be another planet. The little settings might be various places on that planet.
You can have more than one big setting, but try not to use more than two or three. Once you choose a big setting, think of two or three smaller settings within the big setting.
How important is the setting to your story? If your story is set in an unfamiliar place, such as another planet or a far off country, your setting might be very important. If your setting is uninteresting, such as a house that could be anywhere, the setting may not be important at all. You decide.
Narrator
You have one more imaginary person to create before beginning your story—the narra- tor. The narrator is the person who tells the story. Of course, in real life, you tell the story because you made it up, but readers like to pretend that stories really happened. They want to know how the person telling the story knows it. Is the narrator a character in the story who knows about it because he or she was there? Or is the narrator someone who found out about it who is retelling it.
If you pretend to be a character telling the story, your narrator will use I to tell the story.
This is called a first-person narrator. If you pretend to be someone who found out about the story but wasn't part of it, your narrator will tell the story using he or she, not /. This is called a third-person narrator. (The third-person narrator is sometimes called the omniscient narrator. Omniscient means "all-knowing." The omniscient narrator knows what every char- acter did and thought.) The next time you read a story, notice the narrator. Is it a first-person narrator or a third-person narrator? (Do not worry about the second person narrator. Few stories are written in second person.)
EXAMPLES
I walked the dog and then went to the store, (first-person narrator—a character in the story named Mary)
Mary walked the dog, and then went to the store, (third-person narrator)
Here are two good rules to follow:
1. Create whatever narrator you like, but stick with the same narrator all the way through the story.
2. Pretend that your narrator is telling the story after the story has ended (past tense).
Don't pretend that your narrator is telling the story as it happens (present tense).
It's hard to tell stories in present tense.
EXAMPLE
I walked the dog, and then went to the store, (past tense) I walk the dog, and then go to the store, (present tense)
From Teaching Writing in Middle School. © 1998 Beth Means and Lindy Lindner. Teacher Ideas Press. (800) 237-6124.
38 <^>> 2—Planning