Creating characters

When you are setting out to write a story, one of the first questions to ask yourself is

Who is the story going to be about? Another way of putting this question is, Who

are the characters? The people in a story are called characters and creating good,

believable characters is one of the most important skills in story making.

The first thing to remember when you are trying to create characters, is to keep it

simple. You don’t need lots of characters. Most stories have no more the two or

three main characters in them. You need to begin by thinking of the central

character, the person who the story is really about.

The central characterThe central character is the most important person in the story, in fact he or she may

be the only person in the story. The story is usually told from his or her point of view.

This means that the reader sees everything just as the central character does,

like this:

There may be other people in the story but the central character is the person at the

heart of the story. Everything happens to the central character and the story is about

how he or she deals with things. In the passage you have just read Emma is the

central character. The reader hears what she hears, sees what she sees and feels

what she feels.

First person singularThere is no reason why you cannot make yourself the central character if you wish,

using I instead of he or she. Using I is known as using the first person singular. Using

he or she is known as using the third person singular. But it is important to stick to

one form or the other. You should not change half way through.

Complete the passage as if you were the central character and not Emma. The first

sentence has been done for you.

Suddenly I was awake...

Suddenly Emma was awake. She could not say exactly what had

woken her up but she was certain that something was wrong. She sat

up in bed and listened. She could hear a creaking sound, as if someone

was coming up the stairs very carefully, trying not to be heard. She was

scared. She wanted to call out, “Who’s there?” but her voice wouldn’t

come out.

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Writing dialogue

When one character talks to another character in a story, we call it dialogue.

Dialogue is just conversation that takes place in a story. If you look at the way

dialogue is written in a story, you will soon see that there is a special way of laying

it out. This makes it easier to understand. Otherwise the reader might not be able to

tell what a character has said from the rest of the story.

Let’s look at this special way of laying out dialogue in detail. Read the passage

below carefully:

Speech marks

As you can see, special punctuation marks ““ are placed at the beginning and end

of the words which are spoken by Kathleen and Alice. These have several different

names. They can be called speech marks, inverted commas or quotation marks. The

important thing to remember about them is that they only go around the wordswhich are actually spoken. For example, look at this extract from the passage:

“No, I didn’t,” Kathleen replied.

The speech marks go around the words No I didn’t but not around the words

Kathleen replied.

Try it outLook back at the passage you have just read. Underline all the words which are

actually spoken.

Commas and capital lettersA point to note is that a comma is placed after the words which are spoken to

separate them from the words which tell us who spoke. Look at this example: “No, Ididn’t,” Kathleen replied. If you look carefully, you will see that there is a comma

after the word didn’t to separate it from the words Kathleen replied.

“Hello,” said Kathleen. “I haven’t seen you for ages.”

“That’s because I’ve been away,” said Alice. “Didn’t you know?”

“No, I didn’t,” Kathleen replied in surprise. “Where did you go?

Was it somewhere nice?”

“Yes, it was tremendous,” Alice told her. “I went on a trip with

my school to Quebec in Canada. We stayed with Canadian families. I

had such a good time.”

“You lucky thing,” Kathleen said.

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Mysterious Monuments

Many ancient civilisations have left behind monuments.

Some of these take the form of standing stones. These are huge rocks that have

been deliberately arranged in some sort of pattern. You can find standing stones all

over Britain and north-Western Europe. They are very old indeed. Some of them were

put in place over 6000 years ago.

Many of these standing stones, or megaliths as they are called, are of enormous size

and weight. The job of moving them without any machinery must have been

incredibly difficult involving large numbers of people. It is thought that they probably

used rollers made from tree trunks and built ramps out of earth to help raise up

some of the stones.

Although these monuments were built by prehistoric people who could neither read

nor write, they seem to have been constructed very precisely to very exact

measurements. One expert, Professor Thom, believes that the same unit of

measurement was used all over the British Isles in building them. He has calculated

that it was 82.9 centimetres.

The most famous megalithic monument is probably Stonehenge which stands on

Salisbury Plain in southern England. The main part is a great circle of standing

stones. Each one is more than twice as tall as a person and weighs 30 tonnes. Flat

stones have been laid across the tops of the standing-stones to form a ring. Inside the

ring there are smaller stones and one great block that people believe may have been

an altar. Archaeologists have discovered that it was not made all at once. In fact, it

was probably added to over a period of a thousand years.

There are a number of other monuments even bigger than Stonehenge. At Carnac in

France, for example, more than 3,000 stones are laid out in a vast, complicated

pattern that can best be appreciated from the air. One cannot help wondering how

these prehistoric builders could build something that was too large for them to

appreciate from the ground.

No one really knows why these megalithic monuments were created. There are

many theories, however. Some people believe they were used for religious

ceremonies, but others think they were a way of studying the stars, a bit like the

way a sundial is used to tell the time by the sun. Other people believe that they were

put in place to mark mysterious lines of energy, called ley-lines, which are supposed

to run all over the earth. Whatever the truth, one thing is certain: the ancient people

who erected these monuments must have had very good reasons.

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Questions on the passage Mysterious Monuments

Look back to page 35 to see how to answer these questions.

Many ancient monuments are formed from huge stones arranged

1 according to at random in a pattern where the dead

their size are buried

We know that large numbers of people must have worked to build these

monuments because

2 they could not they had nothing the stones were they lived in

read or write else to do so heavy large groups

Stonehenge, the most famous of these ancient monuments, was built

3 very quickly over 30 years over a thousand over night

years

Answer these questions in writing

4 What are megaliths?

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5 Name two ways in which ancient people may have moved the huge stones:

i ......................................................................................................................................................................

ii .....................................................................................................................................................................

6 Explain why it is strange that these monuments can have been built so

precisely by people who could neither read nor write.

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