(Phillip Lopate, “Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself Into a Character. It means you have achieved sufficient distance to begin to see yourself in the round: a necessary precondition to transcending the ego-or at least writing personal essays that can touch other people.” But rather a potential release from narcissism. I would further maintain that this process of turning oneself into a character is not self-absorbed navel-gazing. The need thus exists to make oneself into a character, whether the essay uses a first- or third-person narrative voice.The point is to begin to take inventory of yourself so that you can present that self to the reader as a specific, legible character.The art of characterization comes down to establishing a pattern of habits and actions for the person you are writing about and introducing variations into the system. Forster, in ‘Aspects of a Novel,’ drew a famous distinction between ‘flat’ and ‘round’ characters-between those fictional personages seen from the outside who acted with the predictable consistency of caricatures, and those whose complexities or teeming inner lives we come to know. Flat characters are two-dimensional in that they are relatively uncomplicated and do not change throughout the course of a work.
And I use the word character much the same way the fiction writer does. Other articles where round character is discussed: flat and round characters: round characters, characters as described by the course of their development in a work of literature.
“, the writer needs to build herself into a character.
Narrator as a Character in the Personal Essay
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