Quotes About Dramatis

Its dramatis personae are not so much the worker and the industrialist, but rather the money-owner (and money-lender), the wholesale merchant, the trader and the entrepreneur or 'functioning capitalist'.

For the fiction students I teach, one of the most common mistakes is to start in the wrong place. Often the actual story doesn't begin until about a third of the way into their narratives. They start off instead with excessive scene-setting, metaphysical speculation, introducing nonessential dramatis personae, throat-clearing, etc.

I was sent an advanced proof of "The Last Bookseller" — due out in November — and highly recommend it, partly for Goodman's portrait of a lost world, but also for its colorful dramatis personae. Goodman once knew a book scout — the biblio-equivalent of an antiques picker — who "was so far off the grid he lived in the woods under a tarp. Michael Dirda, Washington Post