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"Eliminate every trait or deed which does not help peculiarly to make the character's part in the particular story either intelligible or open to such sympathy as it merits; "Paint in only the 'high lights, that is...never qualify or elaborate a trait or episode, merely for the sake of preserving the effect of the character's full reality."
And now he's saying, 'Be cavalier it might be awkward for me to meet Art and Joe just at present. Do you want to fix this character's wagon bad enough? Your customers could get mean if he ever did them dirt." "Just one thing I've got against Tiflin!" Art snarled back. "Every time I hear his voice, it means trouble. But I've never seen the crumb face-to-face since that Moonhop.
So sometimes a story opens the doors of a character's heart and mind, and invites us to look within. Such a story is called psychological. Sometimes there is action, not for action's sake, but for its revelation of character. Sometimes nothing happens. "This," says Bliss Perry, "may be precisely what most interests us, because we are made to understand what it is that inhibits action."
The self-obliterating author endeavors to hide his own opinion of the characters, in order not to interfere with the reader's independence of judgment concerning them; but the author who writes personally does not hesitate to reveal, nor even to express directly, his admiration of a character's merits or his deprecation of a character's defects.
Triumphantly Jim walked up and down before the men on the sidewalk, and his voice rang through the shop where Joe sat on his harness-maker's horse under a swinging lamp hard at work. "I tell you, character's the thing that counts," the roaring voice cried. "You see I'm a workingman like you fellows, but I don't join a union or a socialist party. I get my way.
An adult with marked character is, consciously or unconsciously, his own character's victim or sport. It is his whole system of impulses, ideas, pre-occupations, that make those critical situations ready, into which he too hastily supposes that an accident has drawn him. And this inner system not only prepares the situation; it forces his interpretation of the situation.
And, through it all, he seemed to hear Conrad Lagrange saying that in his story of life this character's name was "Sensual." The artist, in that instant, knew that this meeting was inevitable. It was only for a moment that the two men who in their lives and characters represented forces so antagonistic stood regarding each other, each knowing that the duel would be must be to the death.
It was an anonymous letter, and an author should respect his character's secrets. "You are only taking credit for a natural phenomenon," said the letter, "and trying to advertise yourself by your letter to the Times. You and your Boomfood! Let me tell you, this absurdly named food of yours has only the most accidental connection with those big wasps and rats.
"'If anybody 'as got anything to say agin my character, says Bob, 'I wish as they'd say it to my face. I'm a pore, hard-working man, and my character's all I've got. "'You're poorer than you thought you was then, says Mr. Bunnett. 'I wish you good arternoon. "'Good arternoon, sir, ses Bob, very humble.
He will strike out whole passages in the most drastic manner, and alter others until they are almost unrecognisable. He will even at the last moment change some character's name, and I know all the inconvenience that arises on certain occasions from having had to prepare portions of my translations from first proofs, through lack of time to wait for the corrected matter.
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