When you are writing a story, one of the most important elements of the story is the characters it contains. Without interesting characters to help drive your story forward, the reader will lose interest and stop reading. Henry James, one of the founders and leaders in the realism school of fiction, went as far as to say, “Character is plot.” Since character is so important to writing a story, how do we make the characters in the story come alive on the page for the reader?
You can bring your character to life by:
- The things they do.
- The things they say.
- The things they think.
- They way they look.
- Gestures they use.
- Their reactions to other characters.
If you only use a couple of the above methods to help bring your character to life, you are missing a chance to make them as complex and individual as real people, and as a consequence your reader will not care about the character as much. Let’s take a closer look at each of these 6 elements which help reveal the characters to the reader.
The Things They Do
A character reveals themself by the things that they do. The expression “actions speak louder than words” is especially true for character development. Your character can say one thing, but then act in a completely contradictory manner, just as people do in real life. Let’s see what Harvey reveals about himself in this excerpt from Misfit McCabe. Katie and Harvey have just arrived at the malt shop.
Harvey was standing right behind me.
“What do you want to eat or drink?”
“Nothing, thanks. I don’t have any money with me.” I felt somewhat self-conscious by having to say that, but I didn’t want him to ask why. That would have been worse.
“I already fixed it with Max, so go ahead and order what you want.”
“Thanks, Harvey.” Maybe he did have a good side to him. I was a little surprised by it though.
So Harvey has given Katie the impression that he would pay, and that she could order anything she wanted. But then later, when Katie was getting ready to leave with Tom because Harvey had already left:
When we got to the door, a plate banged on the counter. “Hey! Where do you think you’re going?”
My head whipped around. Max was leaning forward, his fists bunched on the countertop. He didn’t look very happy either. “You can’t leave until you pay for the hamburger, fries, and malt.”
“Pay for it?” Tom had already paid for his, so this must be Harvey’s petty little way of getting back at me for having hit him. “Harvey told me he would take care of it for me.” I didn’t even have a hamburger and fries. He must have stuck me for both his and my bill.
Max frowned. “He told me when you walked through the door that you would be paying the bill.”
That little snake.
While this is a relatively minor incident in the course of the story, it reveals a lot about Harvey’s personality and character. While all 6 of the elements are necessary to create a fully developed character, emphasis on the actions of the character as a first priority will help make the character real to the reader. By putting the focus on the actions of the character, you are showing the reader who your character is rather than telling the reader, which is the goal of good characterization.
The Things They Say
In your classroom, in a restaurant, in a grocery store, and everywhere else you go, listen to the conversations around you. By listening to actual conversations, you will learn that no two people talk exactly alike. Each person has a distinct speech pattern that is all their own. What our characters say and how they say it reveal some of the qualities of their character, and can even reveal attitudes and current mood. Something as simple as expressing that the character is thirsty can be done in several different ways. Here are a few examples:
“It’s hot today. Would you mind if we stopped to get something to drink?”“Oooweee! I’m hotter’n bacon in a fryin’ pan. I need a drink.”
“I’m sweatin’ like a pig here, are we gonna stop for a drink, or what?”
“Do you think I’m part camel? If I don’t get a drink soon, I’ll shrivel up.”
Spend some time developing your character’s speech pattern. Think up different situations and figure out how your character would say certain things in that situation. It is important to be able to distinguish each character by the way that they speak to make them distinct. Use speech patterns, conversational style and diction (the accent, inflection, intonation, and speech-sound quality manifested by an individual speaker) to separate your characters.
The Things They Think
Thoughts enable the writer to further individualize their characters as long as the thoughts allow the character’s attitude to come through rather than just summarizing situations. For example, in Misfit McCabe, when Katie first meets Harvey Junior, her thoughts reveal that she doesn’t like Harvey from the start.
He smoothed back his hair, which had fallen into his eyes again, before answering. “I thought I’d take you to see my old man first. He owns the bank, and just about everything else in town.”
He sounded smug. I could tell he thought his father owning things made him important. Maybe he was, but to me he sounded like a weasel.
Just that one line where Katie thinks Harvey sounds like a weasel sets up the beginning of the conflict between them and leaves the reader with no doubt that she doesn’t like Harvey. A characters thoughts can also allow the reader a glimpse of the inner self of the character. By sharing the character’s most intimate thoughts, it brings the reader closer to the character and helps them care more about the character or dislike the character more when the character is unlikable.
I wanted to be by myself so no one could bother me. A rock lay in my path, and I kicked it as hard as I could. I wanted to go home and have things back the way they were. At
home I had friends, things to do, people who loved me. Here, I had nothing. I didn’t fit in.
In the above passage, Katie’s loneliness clearly comes through. She is not happy with where she is and is feeling isolated by her situation. A paragraph later we find out more about Katie’s state of mind.
I missed my Daddy. I missed the strength of his arms hugging me, comforting me. Why was this happening? I should have known he was sick, why didn’t I see it?
Part of her isolated feeling comes from blaming herself for not recognizing that her Daddy was sick. Without this scene, her reactions to Sarah and Uncle Charley would make her seem like a spoiled brat, but since the reader knows that she is acting out her pain, her actions become a little more understandable.
The Way They Look
The way your character looks should not be limited to the physical characteristics of the character. While it is important to describe the physical characteristics, you can reveal more about your character’s personality by describing appearance factors that they can control than simply the physical appearance. What is meant by looks that the character can control? How do they dress? What is their level of cleanliness? Do they habitually carry an object? Consider a character who’s eyesight requires correction. Do they wear contacts? If they wear glasses, are they wire-frame, thick frame, broken frames that are taped together? What does the choice say about your character?
Elizabeth Peters has a series featuring a character named Amelia Peabody who is an Egyptologist, and she carries a parasol everywhere. The parasol is used not only to provide shade, but in the case of Amelia, she uses it as a weapon as well. She started carrying one when they were fashionable, but as the fashion changed, the parasol had become indispensable to the character, and she continues to carry it despite fashion.
It is easy to fall into stereotypes when developing characters, such as the beautiful blonde, the tall, dark stranger, and so on. When characters fall into stereotypes, they tend to become caricatures (any imitation or copy so distorted or inferior as to be ludicrous) rather than real characters. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have a blonde character who is beautiful, but you will want to establish some appearance issues outside of that stereotype to help make the character real to the reader.
Gestures They Use
Body language can be used to show character, mood, or attitudes. By describing the characters minor actions while speaking, the body language can add a different layer to the scene, or reinforce what is being said. Minor actions would be things like slouching while walking with hands in the pockets, staring into space, slumping down in a chair, smoothing the wrinkles out of clothing. Let’s take a couple of examples from Misfit McCabe of gestures to see how they convey meaning and add to the personality of the character.
Placing his hands on his hips, his blue eyes pierced straight into mine.
The above description comes from the beginning of the book when Katie’s dad asks her what she had to do with burning down the shed and Katie was trying to bluff her way around it. The hands on hips gesture shows that her Daddy was upset and not going to put up with any of Katie’s nonsense, even without having the accompanying dialogue.
“Stop right there and turn around and look at me.” There was a new demanding tone to her voice that irritated me even further. I stopped and kicked my foot against the ground. Who was she to be ordering me around anyway?
While the surrounding words tell the reader that Katie is irritated, the kick of the foot against the ground shows the reader Katie’s petulance, coming close to temper tantrum, which reveals that Katie has anger control issues.
One of the methods I use to assist in interspersing gestures throughout the story is to visualize every scene. What does the character look like when they are talking? Are they doing anything with their hands? Does their hair need to be brushed out of their face? When your character is deeply perturbed, do they rub their forehead between their eyes, or start cracking their knuckles? Once you can “see” everything, you can then add enough gestures to the dialogue and thoughts to help move the story along, but not so many that the pace of the story becomes bogged down with too much description. You want your reader to get the flavor of the emotions without becoming bored by the description.
Reactions to Other Characters
When someone says or does something and we react to it, we are revealing information about ourselves. It works the same way for our characters, by the way they react to a situation, they reveal more of their personality to the reader. In the below excerpt from Misfit McCabe, Katie is returning to the shop with Harvey and expecting that Harvey will tell Sarah that Katie punched him.
Sarah had her back to us as we entered the shop. “It’s about time you two. I’ll be with you in a minute.” When she turned around, the smile of greeting quickly faded from her face and her hand flew up to her mouth. “My goodness Harvey, what on earth happened to your face?”
Now I’d get it. Harvey pulled himself up as tall as he could make himself, kind of a losing battle I thought, and looked like he was going to try and bluster his way through the story of what happened. “Some guys down by the lake started picking on Katie, and I tried to stop them.”
What? I couldn’t believe my ears.
“There were three of them and they started by making rude remarks and then things got worse. One of them started stroking her hair, even though she told them to stop and tried to walk away. Then another of the guys caught her and forced her to hug him. She was struggling to get away, so I grabbed one of their arms and then they all got mad. One of them held me with my arms behind my back while the other two started to hit me.”
I just stared at Harvey. I think I was going into shock. “Katie started screaming, so they let go of me and ran off.” I still couldn’t believe it. I expected him to say right out that I hit him, and then sit back and watch me squirm.
“That’s awful.” Sarah took a closer look at his jaw. “Go on back to the office and let your mother take care of it. If she needs me to, I’ll stay until she’s had a chance to ice it to get the swelling down.”
“No, you go ahead. I’ll be all right.”
Sarah still looked pretty horrified with the damage that was done. She turned to me. “Katie, are you okay?” Sarah seemed to believe the story, unbelievable as it was. Maybe I was off the hook after all. “Did you get the names of the boys who did this?”
I started to shake my head when Harvey decided to stick the knife in and twist it. “I think it was Tom Pike and his buddies. I’m not sure because I don’t really know them that well, but I think it was them.”
My jaw dropped. What a filthy, rotten, lying, scumbag. No word I could think of was too bad for Harvey.
Sarah looked very concerned. “I know Tom, and that just doesn’t sound like something he’d do. He’s always seemed like a very nice, polite boy.”
Harvey tried to give her a world-wise expression, but the swelling caused his face to twist into a grimace. “You’d be surprised how much he has changed now that he’s on the varsity football squad. He thinks he can do anything he wants, just because he might be the starting quarterback this year.”
Sarah put her arm across my shoulders and gave me a quick squeeze. “I’m so sorry that something like this had to happen on your first day in town. Uncle Charley will be very upset, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t go and visit Tom’s parents.”
This was getting worse and worse. “No. I’m fine. Really.” I barely stammered the words out.
“Well, we’ll talk about it later. I can’t thank you enough Harvey for looking after Katie for us.”
I was at a complete and total loss of how to start fixing this whole mess. If I had called Harvey out on his lie right at the beginning, it would have been better, but I was speechless. I didn’t even know what to say. And then the little creep decided to throw Tom and his friends, who had been perfect gentlemen, unlike the slimy Harvey, into the mix and it felt like the whole thing was spiraling out of control. For once in my life, I wasn’t getting into trouble for something I had done wrong, but this was even worse.
Instead of telling Sarah that Katie punched him, Harvey lied. What was Katie’s initial reaction? Did she put the record straight immediately, or did she keep quiet in the hopes that she wouldn’t get into trouble? When Harvey saw that Katie was going to keep quiet and let the lie stand, his reaction was to extend the lie and blame Katie’s new friends. What does that say about Harvey’s character? To this continued lie, Katie had some choices, she could speak out and call Harvey a liar, or continue to keep quiet. Katie chose to continue to keep quiet, because she was still trying to figure out how to make the situation go away without getting herself into trouble. What does that say about Katie’s character?
So, before you can put a character on the page, you need to get to know the character; they need to be “alive” in your head. When writing Misfit McCabe, when I got to the part where Harvey entered the story, I started having some trouble writing. I didn’t have a good feel for who Harvey was, I just knew that I needed him as a character. It was like I could see him coming down the street, but didn’t know anything about him, and couldn’t see all of his features, he was just a figure in the distance. I spent a lot of time struggling to continue writing, but couldn’t get anywhere until I walked away and spent some time letting Harvey tell me who he was. Once I could “see” his hair hanging in his eyes, his shirt half untucked, and the beads of sweat across his upper lip, and could sense his underlying nastiness, I was able to return to the blank page and start writing again.
Once I was able to start writing about Harvey, more and more of his personality and character traits became apparent to me and his character started taking on a life of his own. In a sense, Harvey took the book in a direction that I had not contemplated at the outset, but it worked and made a much better book. To me, it is always exciting when the character starts to get away from me and starts doing their own thing rather than what I have pre-ordained because then I can rely on the characters in the story to tell me what the story is, and I become merely the chronicler of the events. It gets to be new to me, in the way that it would be for the reader.
If you are having trouble with a character, take some time thinking about the character and asking yourself simple questions that help define who the character is. What is their favorite food? Do they text message or call people? In a clothing store, pick out items that the character would wear and pick out items that they wouldn’t. Imagine a scene that is not a part of the story with the character in it, and watch how they react to the situation; how are they talking, what are they doing, what gestures do they use, what are they wearing, what are they thinking? Once you are able to do this and know your character better, return to your story and you will find that it will be easier to work with your character.
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Copyright 2008 © LK Gardner-Griffie
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