Orson Scott Card . . .

. . . is brilliant. He is a fantastically compelling writer, who has the amazing knack for churning out novels that have -- get this -- different plots and characters in them. He even writes novels that are vastly different in tone when they have the same characters in them. He is the only writer who has two whole books on my favorite books of all time list.

This is why I am thankful for him today. Having read pretty much all of his books (I'm not that excited about his Alvin the Maker series, simply because I don't love fantasy -- which for those of you who are not up on the genre, is way different than science fiction.) I just discovered he has a non-fiction book out there -- Characters and Viewpoint. It's a book on how to write interesting characters, and so in my current Definitely Need Others To Jumpstart Me phase (which is still going well, by the way), I bought it.

Card pointed out that while the temptation is there to write about characters based on people you know (and one should of course draw on what one knows) this doesn't actually work in practice. For the simple reason that you don't know the people around you as well as you need to know your characters. If you draw from real life you might tell a story and justify it by saying: "Well, that's what happened." But the reader is left bewildered as to why the character might have done that. If you don't delve into your character more deeply and let the reader know the character's motivation -- something you truly don't know at a fundamental level about the person who did it in reality -- then your prose will fall flat.

And wow did I need someone to tell me that. I'm not, obviously, writing about people I know. I am writing about something even harder. Real people whom I've only read about. Or read their writing. And I have been trying to stick to that -- I use dialogue culled from words they actually wrote, I rely on versions of their personalities that others have described. I mean, no wonder I have gotten bored when writing about Tycho. He's as one-dimensional as I could possibly make him. He's totally the character I got stuck on; writing from his perspective was what jammed me up two months ago. I have to let my creativity really fly free and turn him into a much rounder person.

I am realizing that I have to take this attitude when working with the plot too -- just because that's what really happened doesn't make it interesting. I am smart enough to know this to a certain degree. I have definitely embellished, or at least tried to come up with explanations for why things happened the way they did. In addition, I am lucky because most of the stuff that these guys did really is fantastic and enthralling. But I am understanding in a way that I didn't before how much I need to make sure that the whole book reads with that level of excitement -- and I am finally freed to really make the story interesting.

Card is brilliant I tell you.