Authors: Sol Stein
I couldn’t make eye contact with her. She was looking for invisible spots on the wall.
She said, “I don’t love you anymore,” but her eyes belied her words.
She didn’t answer me. She just continued to glare as if her eyes said it all.
Another error of inexperienced writers—or journalists in a hurry—is to confine characterization to the obvious physical attributes. For females, facial features, breasts, hips, buttocks, legs. For males, broad shoulders, strong arms, chiseled features, and so on. That’s top-of-the-head, thoughtless writing. Such clichés are common in speech. We expect better of our writers.
Instead of clichéd attributes, consider using physical characteristics that relate to your story. For example, if you are writing a love story between a woman and a man, consider the belief of some psychologists that a woman’s most prominent sexual characteristic is her hair. (If that surprises you, imagine a woman you think attractive as bald. Would she still be sexually appealing?) The same psychologists hold that the most
important sexual characteristic of a man is his voice (And if that surprises you, think of a man you believe to be attractive and imagine him with a squeaky, high-pitched voice. Would he still be sexually appealing?)
If you want to convey an antisexual attribute to your reader, consider the characteristics of hair and voice in a negative way.
There are at least five different ways to characterize:
You’ll want to avoid generalizations or similes that have been overused, such as “She shuffled like a bag lady” or “She carried herself like a queen.” One of my students described a character this way: “George was a big fellow.” That passes on information, but evokes nothing. The student was encouraged to think how he might revise his material to stir a feeling in the reader. This is what he did:
When George came your way, you thought you were being run down by a truck.
We know immediately that George is a big fellow, but more important we feel his size as threatening. The writer has characterized by an action, which is far more effective than characterizing by description.
Characterization should be kept visual whenever possible:
“He walked against an unseen wind”
is visual. Opportunities are available in a character’s gait, posture, demeanor, and other physical behavior. For instance, there are a lot of ways that a character can get across a room. Walking is the easy, lazy answer. The writer’s aim should be to pick a way that both characterizes and helps the story.
Think of the many ways a character can walk. She can promenade, take a leisurely walk, stroll. She can amble, which means to move easily, to saunter. She can wander aimlessly.
You can pick up the pace, and have a character hasten, scurry, scoot, rush, dash, dart, bolt, spring, run, or race. Each of these words harbors a nuance that can help both to characterize and to convey a visual image.
You can even use a metaphor effectively, as in “She flew to the store to get there before it closed.”
A writer who always has his characters “walk” is missing opportunities. Variants on walking should be used with caution, however. Their overuse annoys readers. In considering the possible variations for walking, you have been doing what writers should do every day—reflect on the meanings of individual words.
It is also possible to characterize by going into great detail about how a particular character walks. Witness the following from a John Updike story:
She didn’t look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white primadonna legs. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn’t walk in bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it.
One author whose work I edited found a way to walk his character straight to bestsellerdom. The story hinged on the relationship of a husband to his wife and his mistress. The novel wasn’t working because the husband and wife were characterized successfully, but the mistress seemed to be all sex, a one-note characterization that failed to make her come alive. A triangle doesn’t work unless all three participants are characterized fully.
I asked the author to describe how the mistress would walk across the room. He said he saw her walking across the room like a young lion—a male simile that opened up a new way of characterizing the mistress. Male traits were then used to describe her elsewhere in the book. It made her come alive, which in turn made the relationship credible. The book went on to become the number-one bestseller for thirty-seven consecutive weeks.
One can describe a way of moving that gives us a sense of personality:
Henry moved through the crowd as if he were a basketball player determined to bounce his way to the basket.
The character needn’t be in motion. Posture can provide personality:
He had the bearing of a man who had been a soldier a long time
ago.
Physical behavior can give the reader a sense of personality: tapping a finger, pointing with eyeglasses, snickering, laughing, clapping hands wildly.
A broad range of psychological attributes is available to the writer. Let’s look at one that can create a dramatic effect:
He said nothing.
I demanded an answer and he just stood there.
“Say something,” I said.
His silence was like a brick wall between us.
“Come on! Speak!”
That’s an example of someone who gets his way by refusing to do something. Psychological attributes can be much more direct:
She bombarded them with questions nonstop as if their answers were irrelevant.
Calvin’s glazed expression said, “I’m not paying attention. I’m listening to the music in my head.”
She was only nine years old, but she could look directly into your soul as if in a previous life she had been a Grand Inquisitor and your lies were condemning you.
Characterizing through psychological attributes can be rewarding because they often connect to the story:
He dealt with his friends as if they were employees. He talked and they listened.
If you got in a car with her you’d find that her sentences were at least ten miles long.
At a party he’d come on to a woman—any woman—as if she were the only woman in the room.
Physical and psychological attributes can also be combined for purposes of characterization:
As
he moved slowly across the room, age and arthritis made him seem brittle, but when he spoke—anywhere about anything—people stopped to listen as if Moses had come down with new commandments.
If you develop a characteristic that’s especially pertinent to your character, or original, it’s a good idea to use it on the character’s first appearance, to “set” the character. For instance, if you now know that your character will first be seen walking, then gait is a characteristic that should appear right away. If the character is the kind who always interrupts other people in conversation, you might consider introducing that character as he or she interrupts. For instance:
George and Mary were at the kitchen table, debating how to handle their misbehaving teenager when Alma walked in and said, “I don’t know how you people can just sit there talking instead of getting off your butts and giving that child of yours a lesson with the back of your hand.”
There are many ways in which characterization can go wrong in the hands of a less experienced writer, but two stand out because they are so common in rejected fiction. There is the protagonist with a weak will, and the villain who is merely badly behaved.
First, consider the “hero” who is not heroic, who lacks drive, a will to attain his objective. Let’s face it, readers aren’t interested in wimps. They are interested in assertive characters who want something, want it badly, and want it now.
Test yourself. Would you want to spend ten or twelve hours with a wimpish character who is weak and ineffectual? Don’t ask the reader to. A wimp in life is a social bore. A wimp in fiction is an obstacle to reader enjoyment.
I have talked to writers whose problems with wimpish characters in their work had a direct link to their own lives. There are children who, damaged by authority, become fighters against authority. There are also people who, damaged by authority in childhood, become relatively passive adults as a means of camouflaging their aggression and anger to save their hearts and lives. Camouflaged anger is useful in stories, but it is the final unleashing of the anger that attracts readers most.
In working with such writers, or with shy writers who produce shy heroes, I have found a way, once they understand the inhospitality of
fiction to passivity, to help them get rid of a wimpish protagonist who is de-energizing their fiction. I ask the writer to imagine that he is in his study with the door closed. A person outside wants to come in. The writer orders the intruder to stay out. I ask the writer to imagine a second person outside his door who says to the first, “Get out of my way,” then comes into the writer’s study without asking. The writer starts to object and this second intruder says, “You shut up and listen for a change!”
That second person is the writer’s replacement for the wimp. That’s his new protagonist. I urge the writer to listen to the character, rude as he is, and then compose a letter from that new non-wimp character to the writer that is assertive, candid, and at least a touch eccentric.
As to villains, bad behavior on its own is not as effective as mean spiritedness, deriving satisfaction and even pleasure from hurting the hero or preventing him from attaining his goal. (A section on characterizing villains begins on page 68.)
In the course of developing a character, there are some questions I will ask myself. Does he behave differently toward strangers than he does to members of his family? Such a difference is revealing. Would my character behave differently when he met an old friend who is now famous than when he bumped into another friend of the same vintage who is down on his luck and ashamed? I also ask myself if my character ever talks to people in a way they find offensive. Does he realize he is offending them? Does he try to apologize or change? Or doesn’t he care? We know that people reveal themselves more when they raise their voices than when they speak normally. If my character had reason to shout, what would we hear? Or if my character is the kind of person who would never shout, what thought is he repressing? It adds to the drama to have contrast between what the character is doing and what he is saying to himself. As you can see, my questions provoke both good and bad characteristics and lead me into the character’s relationships and into story scenes.
When I’m planning a character, I also try to listen to his or her dialogue as if the character were in the room with me. Do they use figures of speech and expressions that characterize strongly? I search for conscious and unconscious mannerisms of my character. As to a character’s clothing, I try to focus on one item that will stand out in the reader’s mind, for instance the fact that my character always wears a raincoat even when the sun is shining.
Eventually I have to ask myself about my character’s attitude toward himself. If he is sometimes self-deprecating, does he reveal it through some physical tic or in things he says when he first meets people? If he is arrogant, what does he do that will make the reader feel he is arrogant without his saying a word? An arrogant action, I find, works better than arrogant speech.
I have seen talented writers hurt their chances of publication because they persist in writing about “perfectly ordinary people.” Of course there have been numerous successful novels in which the main characters were not extraordinary. What the writers mean by “perfectly ordinary people” are characters who are seemingly no different from the run of people we meet who do not seem in any way distinctive.
People who are exactly like other people probably don’t exist. But people who seem like most other people litter our lives, and we don’t usually seek their company because they are boring. Readers don’t read novels in order to experience the boredom they often experience in life. They want to meet interesting people, extraordinary people, preferably people different from anyone they’ve met before in or out of fiction.
The experienced writer will give us characters—even in common walks of life—who seem extraordinary on first acquaintance. Are there exceptions? Of course.
In my novel
The Resort,
the leading characters are an “ordinary” middle-aged couple, Henry and Margaret Brown, who find themselves in horrific circumstances at the end of chapter one. If Henry and Margaret Brown were truly ordinary, they wouldn’t have interested the reader. And so I had Margaret Brown become a physician at a time when few women were in medical school. I also made her outspoken, extraordinarily curious, and smart as hell. And I had Henry, a businessman, spend his off hours in ways few businessmen do.