Using helvetica now alternate characters
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In creating two fictional women in two successive generations to stand alongside Woolf, he reveals the real tragedy may be that Woolf was simply ahead of her time. He lets us inside a beautiful, tortured mind, and crafts a story with sensitive and well-constructed insight into mental illness, expanding upon Woolf’s idea that sanity involves a certain element of impersonation. But his portrait of Woolf is much more about living than dying. hack?Ĭunningham, in his Pulitzer prizewinner, resurrects Virginia Woolf as one of three protagonists, only to drown her again in his prologue. After all, shouldn’t it be easier to make a person for whom we all have a common image jump off the page as opposed to an entirely made up person who has to live and breathe from scratch? Dee argues that “creating a character out of words and making him or her as vivid and memorable as a real person might be the hardest of the fundamental tricks a novelist has to perform.” If that’s true, would writing a real person into fiction make the writer somewhat of a. To an outsider, it may seem that using a real person as a character is letting history do much of the heavy lifting for you. Thus, using a real life person in a novel seems like a failure of imagination. Writers of fiction are limited only by their creative power, they have the freedom to make up entire worlds. Writer and critic Jonathan Dee in a 1999 essay for Harper’s magazine went so far to deem it macabre: “literary grave-robbing,” he called it.ĭetractors argue the practice is lazy. Some critics find the idea wholly unnecessary when there are so many superb, compelling biographies.
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Using real people allows novelists to anchor a reader in a very specific moment in time, to comment on their societal influence (or society’s influence on them), explore a mystery surrounding them, or consider a lesser-known, perhaps more human, side of an outsized public persona. Many writers see opportunity, a way to use historical-or even modern-figures to draw readers into a story that they might otherwise overlook. The practice has ardent defenders and detractors. Since the dawn of storytelling itself, authors have employed real life characters in their fictional work think Shakespeare and any number of kings.