Short Fiction III

Characters can change slowly or all at once. Change often grows out of a clash of values in the story or a change in the character's situation, and an epiphany, a sudden moment of understanding, can push a character to act and move the plot forward.

Characters deal with more than other individuals: they also face groups and forces like a town, a family or society, and a group can act almost like a character. Whether a character is welcomed or shut out shows how the group sees them, and often how they see the group.

When the setting changes, look for a matching change in the plot, a character or the mood. Contrasting settings, like city and country or home and away, often stand for competing values, and the way characters act in or describe a place shows their attitude toward it.

Pacing is how a story speeds time up or slows it down. Writers control it through how many events they include, how much detail they give, sentence length and jumps in time, and the order in which they reveal information shapes how you feel as you read.

Some stories use more than one narrator. Each one may know things the others don't, and their accounts can even contradict each other, so compare them and ask what the gaps and disagreements reveal.

A setting becomes symbolic when it gets tied to feelings, beliefs or ideas, and a motif is a pattern of images or objects that keeps coming back to stress an idea. Notice why a writer picks the two things in a simile, and what it says when a person is described as if they were an object, animal or force.

Strong arguments go past the obvious reading. You can show sophistication by connecting your interpretation to a broader context, weighing other possible readings or using a helpful analogy, and you should be ready to revise your thesis when the evidence doesn't support it.