【正文】 make a novel ye. To make a novel, a plot is prerequisite. A look at the example suggested by . Forster will help to distinguish between the story and the plot. “The king died and then the queen died” is not a plot, but a story. If we make it “The king died and then the queen died of grief,’ we have a plot. This causal phrase “of grief” indicates our interpretation and thus arrangement of the happenings. In the world of reality events take place one after another in the natural temporal order, but in the world of fiction it is the novelist’s design that one particular event occur after another particular event. The very word “plot” implies the novelist’s rebellion against the natural law and his endeavor to make meanings out of the happenings that may otherwise be meaningless. “The happenings” may or may not be real happenings.(So what plot is ) A plot is a particular arrangement of happenings in a novel that is aimed at revealing their causal relationships or at conveying the novelist’s ideas. A plot is sometimes called a story line. The most important of the traditional plot is that it should be a plete or unified action, that is, something with a beginning, a middle, and an end.3. The dramatic situation in a story.4. The three parts of a plot: a beginning (exposition), a middle (suspense or a series of suspense ….foreshadowing… crisis –a moment of high tension), and an end(a climax, the moment of greatest tension…the conclusion—falling action, resolution or denouement).Plot a beginning a middle an end exposition some other events climax (the moment(suspense, a series of suspense, of greatest tension,foreshadowing, crisis) the conclusionfallingaction, resolution or denouement)II. Read the stories of ‘Rip Van Winkle’(Washington Irving) and ‘David Swan’ (Nathaniel Hawthorne)III. Questions: (Finish reading the two stories and point out the plots of the two stories, the descriptive details, the exposition, characters)Rip Van Winkle1. Descriptive details: the plot of the story?2. What part of the story seems like the exposition? 3. Where does the dramatic conflict? 4. What is the climax of the story?David Swan5. the plot of the story? 6. How fully does the author draw the characters in the story? (Character traits are the qualities of a character’s personality. They are revealed through a character’s actions and words and through description).7. More works to do: something about the writers of the two stories.Chapter Two CharacterIn the introduction we have said that fiction is an image of people in action, moving towards an undeclared end. Thus character is always involved in fiction, even in the story of the simplest action. Sometimes character is at the center of our interest because in character we may see many facets of the people we meet in our daily life and even of ourselves. Fictional character is always character in action and the character gets into action because it is caught in a situation of conflict and he/she is always provided with motivation: he/she has sufficient reasons to act or behave as he /she does. The character is doing something and the reader while reading fiction wants to know the “why” as well as the “what” of the affairs. (Sometimes a character’s motive for an action is not explained on acceptable grounds, for example, the villain in Adgar Allan Poe’story “The TellTale Heart,” and thus the reader feels cheated. In this case, the writer of detective fiction who makes the criminal a mere lunatic has cheated the reader by avoiding the problem of motive.) And generally, the action itself is humanly significant and it ends usually in a shift in or clarification of human values, as displayed in John Updike’s “A amp。 P,” and the motivation of a character in a story—one of the answers to the question “why”—is of fundamental importance.I. What is Character?Closely related with the story is the character. Henry James said, “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” (The Art of Fiction”) When we read a novel, we read about our fellow beings, and that is one of the motives in reading at all. The “fellow beings” in the novel is termed characters. By “fellow beings” is meant not only “human beings” but also “other beings,” such as animals. George Orwell uses animals to represent human beings in his novel Animal Farm. Lewis Carrol creates many lovely animals in his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that appeal to both children and adults.Orwell does not intend to convince the reader that animals can speak human language or that he is a translator between animals and humans. No sensible reader, after reading Orwell’s Animal Farm, would go to the pigsty to look for a talking boar. This proves the agreedon fictionality of characters in novels. So broadly, a character is an invented personality to resemble but never to equal a real person in life. It is not difficult to see that characters in novels resemble people in real life in many ways. They have names used in the same way ours are used, they have hatred and love, and they have desires and fears. Above all, they act the way we act or the way we can understand (like or dislike).But we must bear in mind that the characters are not real persons, but merely inventions, however ingenious. Compare the physical life and spiritual life of the characters and ours. We have to answer the nature’s call several times a day, but characters seldom do this, even in the most realistic or naturalistic novels. We have to live our life hour by hour and day by day, but characters never do this. They choose to live some time more fully than others, and are able to skip over periods on ten months or twenty years without seeming weird, a feat which we can never attempt. In our life, our minds are a gray matter even to scien