An epigrammatic reference on literary genres

Wiblinglen Abbey Library – Ulm, Germany (Rococo style)

Essay: An essay in literature, is a product and result of deep thought, personal or subjective. It exists in the penumbra, meaning in the interim, in between literary texts and short studies. It does not relate to literary texts or comprehensive studies. It usually examines one subject (e.g. scientific, social, philosophical) in its most basic areas, without exhausting it and by principal it is short in extent. It usually states the subjective and personal point of view of the creator about the subject which he deals with.

The writing presentation follows the tetraptych structure and development:

a) thesis-presentation of the subject

b) exposition-expansion of the basic views of the author

c) evidence- verification of the views with the mentioning of citations/ references

d) conclusionary tailpiece

An Essay in not: dissertation, doctoral thesis, scientific study, article.

An Essay is: nonfiction. That means that the writer of an essay is trying to tell the truth, not merely entertain.

Epistolography: The epistle (a letter) is of interest to the reader, the student of literature and the writer from many point of views. Epistles existed since time immemorial as a distinct genre. They are highly detailed, edited texts, with many of literary virtues. 

There are two types:

Categorization of literature

The categorization of literature is distinguished in:

Literary species, Literary genres, Genre subcategories or subgenre

The term “species” concerns the three biggest categories of artistic forms: prose, lyrical and dramatic, while the term “genre” and “subgenre” are being used to characterize big or smaller subcategories of the species.

We will explain below in a simple manner the classification and categorization of literature, as well as their meaning. We will not stick to drama and lyric but only epigrammatically.

LITERARY SPECIES

• Prose writing
• Dramatic writing
• Lyrical writing

Prose writing is our speech, written down on paper. It differentiates from poetic, the verse. It doesn’t have a meter, nor rhyme.

Presenting a Character, part b

Good afternoon. In this article, I will conclude the information on fictional characters. So let’s continue by beginning from where we left off.

Self-portrait

With this technique, the writer presents his character to the reader letting the character do the talking for him! This technique belongs to the instant description category so you should only use it in the beginning of your book. A shining example of this technique can be found in the book: The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice. Here’s a very small extract from the beginning of the book:

“Prologue

DOWNTOWN-SATURDAY NIGHT-IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY-1984

I am The Vampire Lestat. I’m immortal. More or less. The light of the sun, the sustained heat of an intense fire — these things might destroy me. But then again, they might not. I’m six feet tall, which was fairly impressive in the 1780’s when I was a young mortal man.”

Appearance

External appearance isn’t everything but it usually predetermines us against another person. You can predetermine your reader as well, positively or negatively, depending on what you want to achieve.

Scene

Scene is the place we want to put our character to act and show from there his personality, his habits, how he reacts, talks and everything that has to do with him or her. Presenting a character through a scene, the reader can feel him in depth. The best thing of all is to “show” a character through combining techniques as dialogue, action and appearance. I urge you to do the latter for a richer text.

Presenting a Character

Good evening. Today I will talk about how to present fictional characters in the setting we prepared for them. We can achieve that with different means.

Instant description

You can give a short description of your fictional character where you’ll be referring to their external features and what’s their purpose in life. In my previous article, I said that you can interview him. Bind all the answers you had asked your character and give your reader an immediate description. In my book, “The Vampire Mansion”, I use this technique to describe brother Nero in the chapter “The ambush”:

“Brother Nero, a bald but well preserved old man for his advanced age, was the last to leave alone. He was the Head Elder of his local church, one of the highest ranks in his religious order, a position of which he was very proud. He firmly believed that to every congregation he served, he contributed a great amount of spirituality and believed that everyone ought to pay attention when he was delivering his sermons.”

A technique of such kind should only be used only in the beginning of your book or near the beginning of it. The disadvantage of this method is that you don’t show your character dramatically, a technique

Designing fictional characters

How can we create fictional characters?

Creative writing tells us that there are four methods:

The first method and the ideal one is to give birth to them inside your head but you must make sure you make them look like real, vibrant people taken straight out of real life. Something that might help you is to give your characters properties based on the zodiac they belong to, i.e. the sign of Virgo has positive properties such as modesty, gentleness and a sense of order. His negative properties are stressful behaviour, being wayward and overformal. Aren’t the above nice traits for a fictional character? The above paradigm is indicative but I don’t want to be blamed for urging people to study astrology!

The second method is autobiographical but you should use it wisely because otherwise you won’t be writing literature but an autobiography. You can put bits and pieces of yourself in characters so you

Ideas and sentences

New ideas for writing

Some writers in their first steps may find it difficult to find fresh ideas for writing. Nevertheless, I can give them information that will change their writing lives.
Ideas are all around us!
And to go one step further, a very famous Greek author once said that “a writer needs only a sentence to pop up in his mind to then turn it into a book” and that “a writer who writes about the real lives of others is a thief of lives and not a writer”.

What happens inside the mind of an author?

Unlike journalists who record true events, a writer is content with what is happening in his mind because fiction is born there. And as we said in a previous article, each of us perceives the world around him differently, so a writer can not

About characters- An introduction

Good afternoon. In this second round we will talk about the most important part of creative writing, the characters of a story.
Why the most important? Because the plot IS the characters. Mainly they are the ones waving the plot.
You will surely ask: “Doesn’t the writer write the plot?”
You definitely must have heard of interviews from writers saying that “from a certain point on, the book wrote itself”.
A successful plot that excites the author, making him return to the first draft over and over again is that the characters drive the pen of the author and not the opposite. Let me also clarify that I am referring only to fictional text and not historical, political or academic writing.

Our conversation about characters will be extensive and will occupy much of our time. On the one hand this is good because you will have a very good understanding of the matter because the goal is for you to learn how to create

A writer’s reading point of view

Are you a writer who wants to have access to the best teaching that exists? Just step into a bookstore or library and get a lot of novels. Everything is exposed on the pages. It is for the writer to scan a novel to see the techniques which were employed in its creation.

A writer in the beginning of his career and also during it realizes that reading his or her colleagues’ work is invaluable.

As you read other colleagues’ novels, you become enlightened and discover elements of the toolbox of authorial art, learning how to use them. In this way, you see how to deal with problems that you might be facing. For example, while I was writing the “The Vampire Mansion”, Anne Rice’s books were my best friends. Whenever I took a break from writing, I always read her books.

Nevertheless, attention must be paid! You must distinguish the good from the bad colleague in order to notice his or her mistakes so you won’t make them yourself.

Ask yourself: What do you dislike in a novel? Why you did not like it and how you would have written it better? It is helpful to observe the mistakes of other writers. So the next time you read a bad book, enjoy the reading, thinking as you read what went wrong with this book. Also, you have every right to laugh at what you read whenever you feel like it.

In our next conversation will talk about expressions and clichés which will close the first round of our conversation. The next round of our discussion will be about characters and setting.

The editing process

A writer can’t be a wannabe. It’s a word for someone who simply writes. If you write, you’re a writer. Published books though, don’t get released on the market in the perfection they‘re presented to the public. They have undergone many changes in order to reach the bookshelves.

“The Vampire Mansion” for instance was changed in many ways until it got published, like the order of the words, sentences and paragraphs. The plot was changed in many places as I discovered it while writing the book; it wasn’t based on a synopsis from the start but it had points to be said throughout the story. Lastly, words were cut, paragraphs and even whole pages. Two thirds of the number of words that were cut from the “Mansion” were censored by me, leaving the physical number of words in the book you are holding.

So when does the editing process start?

As soon as we finish the first draft, that is the entire text that we‘ve written by hand from start to finish of the book. The editing process, after we have finished writing our book, is the only way to clarify what we want to say, to say it as clearly as possible.
Sometimes we might have written a perfect paragraph but during editing it seems that it doesn’t fit with the rest body of the text.

The beginning, words and grammar

Do not wait to write the perfect first line. When I was younger, when I decided to write my first book, after I had written a synopsis of the story to work on, I started writing the first lines of my novel. My career as a writer ended after 4 lines. I wrote a bad piece of literature which would never have been published. You see, I did not have the necessary knowledge that in reality, the first lines will be changed with the editing process. I did not know that the first lines are those that will warm me up in order to start the plot of my story, which is the most important thing.

And remember: You have every right to go back to your draft at any time, in order to add or remove words or sentences. Anyway, your first draft will (almost always) not be very good. Most writers spend most of our time editing our work.