Chapter 10:

Summary

Test of Character: Clark explores the connections between narrative and character in this chapter. He mentions the writer Kurt Vonnegut's three rules for characters in narrative writing.

• Give the reader at least one character to root for.
• Every character should want something.
• Be a sadist to your characters.

Naked in a Storm: This section focuses elusively on the story arc of King Lear. The suffering that the character goes through is a prime example of the three suggestions form Vonnegut. By the middle of the play Lear has lost everything, only to die at the end and restore the human self to the character.

Lifelines from Despair: This sections talks of The Grapes of Wrath. The main family in the story is only constantly dragged down by the events, only to find out that all decisions made are futile. Eventually the dialogue established some home from the character Tom, who clings to hope through the hardship seen in the novel.

Mystery at the End: Honing in on The Grapes of Wrath, Clark talks about the novels dismal and character action driven ending. He mainly attributes the appeal to dealing with suffering characters as that of catharsis.

Writing Lessons

1. It is often the friction between opposites that generates the most dazzling effects. No friction, no heat. No heat, no light. No light, no wisdom. In Shakespeare, wisdom often comes from the lips of fools, as it does when Lear's fool tames his master's dark vision of mankind with a bawdy joke. Don't be afraid to mix the comic and the tragic.
2. As you imagine the arc of a story, think of the middle as a place where all seems lost, but also as a place from which important character and values can be restored. The middles of stories, both fiction and nonfiction, never get the attention they deserve, elbowed out of the picture by their more beautiful siblings: beginnings and endings.
3. Ive harped on the power of a single word at the end of a passage. Its powerful at the end of a sentence, but more and more powerful as the text grows to paragraph, passage, chapter, and the work itself. I've always thought of adverbs as weak parts of speech until I noticed that Steinbeck ended his greatest work with the word mysteriously.
4. Always remember that your stories are forms of vicarious experience. You have the ability to influence, though not control, your reader's attachment to characters. You can shape those characters so that we identify with their struggles. And you can make them suffer so that, in Vonnegut's good words, we can see what they are made of.

Critique

There are two ways to look at Clark's writing lessons in this chapter. One is through the idea that using competitive viewpoints creates "good" writing. The other is that structured speech effects the rhetorical effectiveness of writing. In each instant his ideas can be supported by theorist. The first idea of using others arguments to lend credibility to your own can be found in the article "Reading for the Conversation" by Graff and Birkenstein. In which they introduce the effective structure of computational papers used by many, "they say, I say" which is an effective way to structure a rhetorical argument.The second article that Clark aligns with is Nancy Sommers' article "Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers" in which her findings show that the more effective adult writers focus on the revision of structure over that of lexical changes.