Introduction

In this lesson’s snippet, Ort briefly describes the people in his family, including himself.

My name is Morton Flack, though people call me Ort for short. Ort is also a name for bum in our family. It means zero too (you know, like nought), but in my case it just means Morton without saying all of it. My Dad's name is Sam Flack. Mum is called Alice. Her last name was different when she was a maid. Tegwyn in the next room with her magazines is my sister. She finishes school next month. Grammar lives in the room behind with her piano she never plays. She never does much these days. That flamin' rooster going again.

That Eye, the Sky(1986)

You can see this passage is very simple: it's mostly "name the character and add a detail" x 4.

Why do a lesson on this passage at all? Because in a later lesson you'll need to make reference to the background characters, which is easier if we set them up here.

This passage is a good example of summary description: using a couple of details to sketch out a character.

We tend to assume that more is better, so we might believe detailed description is better than summary description. But really, more is just more—it's not necessarily better or worse.

Writers will use both summary and detailed descriptions, depending on what is important at that point of the story, and what effect they want to achieve.

This lesson builds on the previous lesson, so you should already have a world and some core characters.

All you need are two new non-speaking background characters to put somewhere in the world, and you'll need to bring back the background detail from the previous lesson.

First person in That Eye, the Sky 2: Summarising the characters