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[ DESCRIPTION OF CHARACTERS ]

The characters who become the inhabitants of your fiction are the actors that will take to the stage in your reader's mind. They are the channels for the fine dialogue you'll write and the players in your conflicts and resolutions. You'll have to conjure up all manner of folks to get the job done, and one of the very first decisions you'll need to make when a story is forming is how you'll go about describing these characters, especially central characters.

Let's say your protagonist, a woman of thirty or so, arrives at a party in your first scene. She might gravitate toward the safe harbor of a corner, losing herself there in the dull pattern of the wallpaper. Or she might stride purposefully in and guffaw loudly, planting her feet wide: a force to be reckoned with. More than likely, her conduct will fall somewhere between these two extremes, but however she behaves will call for skillful description. The protagonist carries a significant share of the workload in the whole process of storytelling, and your readers' first impression of her is crucial.

That skillful description can't stop with the first scene; neither is it restricted to major characters. Most of your characters — perhaps even down to the boy who delivers a telegram and is never seen again — will need to be sufficiently described so that your reader can get a good picture of them. I've never physically seen John D. MacDonald's protagonist Travis McGee, other than the various actors who have played him in movies, but based solely on MacDonald's descriptions of him in his many novels — the way he walks and stands; his gangly, suntanned structure; his haircut and choice of clothing — I believe I could pick him out of a police lineup.

Your goal should be for your descriptions to work that well for your readers, too.

BREATHING LIFE INTO YOUR CHARACTERS

Here are three examples of character description from three fine writers. You will notice that they'll get longer as we progress. But you'll hopefully notice something else, too: Each takes a unique approach to the task.

We'll begin with a few sentences from “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” by Carson McCullers:

The boy went toward him. He was an undersized boy of about twelve, with one shoulder drawn higher than the other because of the weight of the paper sack. His face was shallow, freckled, and his eyes were round child eyes.

McCullers gives only physical description and leaves this boy's attitude, motivation, and worldview until later in the story.

Now look at these sentences from the beginning of William E. Barrett's Lilies of the Field:

His name was Homer Smith. He was twenty-four. He stood six foot two and his skin was a deep, warm black. He had large, strong features and widely spaced eyes. A sculptor would have interpreted the features in terms of character, but Homer Smith's mother had once said of him that he was two parts amiable and one part plain devil.

Here, the author uses short, to-the-point sentences to give us a few physical traits, then dovetails the image of this man in with something his mother said about him. In a mere sixty-one words, we not only know what Homer looks like; we have our first good peek into who he is.

Now, let's have a little something from Flannery O'Connor, but none of her philosophy about writing this time, rather a taste of her fiction itself. Here are the first few sentences from her story “Good Country People”:

Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all of her human dealings. Her forward expression was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck. Her eyes never swerved to left or right but turned as the story turned as if they followed a yellow line down the center of it. She seldom used the other expression because it was not often necessary for her to retract a statement …

O'Connor employs an extended analogy to describe Mrs. Freeman's various expressions, floating us along on a William Faulknerish current of details. At the end of it, we know as much about this woman's obstinacy as her appearance. In your writing, you'll want to do the same thing: convey as much about personality as looks. Don't limit your descriptions to their most utilitarian function: giving the essential facts regarding what somebody looks or sounds like. Work attitude and philosophy and vulnerability and tons of other things in also. Kill a multitude of birds with one smooth stone.

The extent to which you'll describe your characters will depend on what you will have them doing at any given time in your tale, but whatever the situation, and whatever the level of description, you will do well to remember this: Your reader needs to see the people in your fiction as clearly as you do. So two things are essential at the outset: a complete and detailed image of your cast of characters in your mind and an adept conveyance of them to your reader.

Let's look at several ways for you to bring that second part about.

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION OF CHARACTERS

Providing an image of what your characters look like can come in very short doses — like saying that someone had butter-colored hair — to much longer ones, like this one by William Faulkner (who couldn't write small doses of anything) in “A Rose for Emily”:

They rose when she entered — a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.

The essence of the physical description here is that this lady is short, overweight, dressed in black, carrying a cane, and her eyes are quite small in her plump face. Remember what I said earlier about the difference between literary and popular fiction; well, saying that Faulkner wrote literary fiction is like saying the Titanic was a big ship. He carefully works in detail after detail, like a painter using small strokes with a fine-tipped brush. In a story aimed at readers of popular fiction, you would need to stay a bit closer to what exactly you need the reader to know about this woman. If you need them to know all of this — the plumpness versus obesity, the image of a body long submerged in water, the simile with the pieces of coal — then all of it should go in. Just remember that readers of popular fiction aren't as tolerant of long descriptions as readers of literary fiction.

Keep in mind what I said a few pages ago about letting your descriptions carry more of the load than just describing. Here's a good example from David Westheimer, from his novel Von Ryan's Express:

The colonel was tall and conspicuously erect. His dark blond hair was short and bristling, with a scatter of gray at the temples. His face was deeply tanned except for two ovals around the unblinking gray eyes where his skin had been shielded by sunglasses. His eyes were finely wrinkled at the corners and squinted a little from looking into the sun for enemy fighters. His was a tough face, grim almost, with no vestige of softness of any kind. It was, from a distance, a young face, but viewed closely was older than its thirty-six years.

In addition to some detailed description regarding what this man looks like — tall; erect; the color, length, and texture of his hair; the bit about his eyes — we also learn how old he is and get some foreshadowing as to his philosophy: that he's a tough customer rather than a soft one. And that toughness will come into play quite prominently in the story.

One way to go about this multiplicity of purpose in your own story or novel is to list everything that you can think of regarding a particular character in your writer's journal. Get it all down — height, weight, coloring, beliefs, faults, strengths, the way he sits in a chair — anything and everything you can come up with. Don't just put down things that you're pretty sure will end up in your story; your knowledge of this guy will have to be broader than that in order for him to work in your fiction. If he ends up being left in charge of a child in one of your scenes, it's essential for you to know how dependable he is, whether it is important for your reader to know it or not. Good writers know the motivations of each and every character they write: what drives them and what stops them cold. And the only way for you to know a character that well is to immerse yourself in his or her persona. So make the list; you'll be surprised how complex your creations end up being.

Anne Lamott provides a good example, in her novel Crooked Little Heart, of something we talked about in chapter four. Sometimes it is quite effective to simply tell what somebody looks like or acts like quickly, and get on with it:

Elizabeth studied James, his wild fluffy hair, his beautiful green eyes, and he looked at her and smiled. She loved being with him; it was that simple. She felt happy when he was around.

The author could have dragged this out, giving us more details about James' appearance, elaborating on how much he meant to Elizabeth and just how he made her happy. But she chose to make these things a given in the story, since they are obviously a given in Elizabeth's life.

In your own fiction, don't be guided by how much description you can come up with — let's face it: you're a writer, and you can come up with tons of it — but by how much something or someone in your story needs to be described. Many times, brevity will win out over elaboration, as it clearly does in the Lamott example.

Kent Haruf in his novel Plainsong needs to describe two old bachelor brothers who live together and are receiving company in their farmhouse:

Harold had removed the greasy pieces of machinery from one of the extra chairs and had dragged it up to the table. He sat down solidly. When they were inside the house the McPherson brothers' faces turned shiny and red as beets and the tops of their heads steamed in the cool room. They looked like something out of an old painting, of peasants, laborers resting after work.

The image itself — of the pair of old men who are so unfamiliar with having guests that they must displace farm machinery in the kitchen to make room for them, and so out of their natural element when indoors that they physically change — surpasses simple description; it tells much of the story. Then the author drives the image even further home with the old painting simile.

Load your own description up with tidbits like these — actions and references that help build your overall story. If your character is a teenaged girl on the way to the prom with a boy, but she continuously looks down into her purse at the screen of her cell phone, then your reader will assume that her interest is elsewhere. And a small action will point your readers in the direction that you want them to go.

CHARACTERS BASED ON REAL PEOPLE

Let's spend a little time now on how to describe characters based on real people: those that are based on historical figures or famous people and those that are based on more common folk that you actually know or have known. What the two have in common is that they are each patterned after actual people who drew breath and walked around and lived (or live) their lives outside of just your imagination.

We'll start with people that you know. You can vent here, you understand. Putting a real person that you can't stand in your fiction, with all their warts and foibles in tact, can be downright therapeutic. But tread cautiously. That old “any similarity to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental” might not prove to be as magically cleansing as most folks think. And if the so-and-so you've woven into your tale is too easily recognizable and still falls into the “living” category, he might cause you some grief. That's not to say that you can't just sort of slip him in, or parts of him — the worst parts I suspect.

The other danger of putting in people that you know is to give in to the desire to honor them by making them recognizable in your fiction. This is almost always a mistake, since your characters should be exactly who you need them to be. More precisely, they must be who your story needs them to be. Allowing your decisions regarding characters to be dictated by a grocery list of friends that want to be included will dilute this essential process and weaken your writing. People who don't write fiction don't always understand the precision of the craft. Think back on how many times someone has said to you — regarding something cute their child did or something funny someone said — you'll have to put Aunt Mary in one of your stories. What they don't understand is that good writers don't just put things in; they put things in that fit. Give your Aunt Mary a free copy of your book, or even dedicate it to her, but leave her out of its pages.

Now, on to real people who are a bit more famous and recognizable than your Aunt Mary. Let's start with the sublime and then move on to someone significantly less than that.

All we know about what Saint Paul looked like comes from two millennia of tradition; there's no good description of him in the Bible and precious little recorded about him by the few historians writing at the time. The two characteristics that wandered down the decades are that he had red hair and that he was not particularly attractive. Taylor Caldwell wrote an entire novel, Great Lion of God, about him, and her Paul was redheaded and ugly. Walter F. Murphy in Upon This Rock gives a description of Saint Paul before he was a saint — even in fact before he was Paul. He was Saul of Tarsus, before he had that jolting encounter on the road to Damascus. Here's how Murphy paints him in his novel:

… Saul was homely. His face looked like its parts had been thrown together at random. None of his features was ugly, but they did not fit together. His ears were as jug-handled as those of a Celtic legionnaire and protruded at right angles from his head. His hair was a bright, brassy mop of tightly curled red, his complexion light olive instead of fair. His beard was thin and scraggly, more that of a teenager than of a man almost thirty. It, too, was red, but several shades paler than his hair. If his Roman nose was too long for his face, his mouth was too wide. His teeth were irregular and there was a space between the upper two in front that sometimes forced a half-whistle to punctuate his sentences.

Rather than labeling him as ugly, Murphy goes into some detail regarding why he might be considered unattractive. He mentions the Roman nose, wide mouth, gapped teeth, and sparse beard in order to give readers a living, breathing human being — not the image of the ugly redhead they might have brought with them to the reading of the novel.

If you pluck a character out of history and plop him or her down in your fiction, you'll have to make sure you bring the era also. For instance, where Murphy says that Paul's ears were jug-handled, it wouldn't have worked at all to describe them as Bing Crosby ears, since Bing Crosby, though we think of him as a large-eared crooner from the recent past, was, where Paul was concerned, a resident of the distant future. So, while using an allusion regarding his ears will work for you in a story set anytime later than the 1930s, it won't work at all here in the first century.

Murphy and Caldwell could have made their Pauls handsome fellows with blond hair. With the scant historical material to work from nobody could have faulted them for that. But since many of their readers had a preconceived notion of what Paul might have looked like, they both chose to conform to the traditional image, each modifying it with their descriptions.

Writing more recent historical or famous people into your story or novel doesn't give you that choice. Let's say you have President Kennedy as one of your characters; then you'd better make him look and sound like President Kennedy, since everybody knows exactly what he looked and sounded like.

When Herman Wouk wrote The Winds of War he described many world leaders at the time of World War II, so he had much more data to draw from than Caldwell and Murphy did when they wrote about Saint Paul. There are libraries of biographies and many thousands of photographs of the movers and shakers from the mid-twentieth century, so Wouk had specific parameters in which to work when describing this fellow:

Hitler was no taller than Henry himself; a small man with a prison haircut, leaning forward and bowing as he shook hands, his head to one side, hair falling on his forehead. This was Henry's flash impression, as he caught his first full-length look at the Fuhrer beside the burley much-medallioned Bulgarian, but in another moment it changed. Hitler had a remarkable smile. His down-curved mouth was rigid and tense, his eyes sternly self-confident, but when he smiled this fanatic look vanished; the whole face brightened up, showing a strong hint of humor, and a curious, almost boyish, shyness. Sometimes he held a guest's hand and conversed. When he was particularly amused he laughed and made an odd sudden move with his right knee: he lifted it and jerked it a little inward.

Whether describing Saint Paul or Adolph Hitler (and a wider range of human beings would be difficult to come up with) or anyone in between, remember to abide by the clutter rule. Use only those traits and features and actions that serve to move your story along, and avoid teaching a history lesson about the person or their importance.

There's one more category of character that is based on a real person that we need to discuss: the one that you will write about on occasion that is based on you. Much is made in some writing books and in creative writing workshops of the importance of keeping yourself out of your fiction. And I agree, up to a point.

Ernest Hemingway will work nicely here as our textbook example. His protagonists were nearly always him, through and through. Hemingway must have been the sort of fellow that an old woman from my youth used to say wants to be the bridegroom at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral, in other words: the center of attention in every situation. And we're all like that, to varying degrees.

We usually write what we know. And what we know best is ourselves. My only advice here is the same I gave regarding using other real people: Use only descriptions that are called for in a particular story or novel. Even so, much of you will sneak in; you should expect it and accept it. After all, you will relate your tale in your voice, so other parts of you will follow along. If you bounce a tennis ball exactly six times before you serve it, then a character in your story might do that also. It's a nice little detail that shows this person is given to superstition or ritual or habit, and the guy in Sheboygan needn't know that you are too.

LETTING CHARACTERS DESCRIBE THEMSELVES

You've heard the old saw “if you want something done right, do it yourself.”This can apply to your characters, too. You might want to consider having one or more of them take on the job of describing themselves for the reader. There are several ways to do it.

In The Deep Blue Good-By by John D. MacDonald, his narrator Travis McGee tells us about himself:

I tried to look disarming. I am pretty good at that. I have one of those useful faces. Tanned American. Bright eyes and white teeth shining amid a brown reliable bony visage. The proper folk-hero crinkle at the corners of the eyes, and the bashful appealing smile, when needed.

Notice that MacDonald has his protagonist tell us as much about who he is as what he looks like. You might think that this little self-portrait can only be done in first-person narration, but it works just as nicely in third person, as in the following examples. Sometimes, letting your characters dabble in a bit of wishful thinking will be the best way to describe them. That way, the reader is actually getting the opposite of how they really appear. In her novel Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf has her title character consider how she would look if she had anything to do with it:

She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough, with a skin of crumpled leather and beautiful eyes. She would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large; interested in politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified; very sincere. Instead of which she had a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird's.

From that litany of what she wished she was — and then what she actually was — comes a clear picture of this woman.

In that example, a character considers herself and doesn't particularly like what she sees, in this one — from The Seventh Secret, a novel by IrvingWallace — another character takes a look at her likeness and is more impressed:

Evelyn Hoffmann paused briefly to study her reflection in the window of the Cafe´ Wolf. What she saw did not displease her. At seventy-three, one could not expect to appear as one had at twenty-three. In the early days she had been a beauty, everyone had agreed. She had been taller than medium height, with ash blonde hair, slender, sophisticated, reserved, with pride in her long, shapely legs.

A passage like this could do a couple of things for you in your fiction. First, it could get the point across that this lady is still attractive, even at seventy-three, and, second, it would serve as a fine lead-in to a backstory where she was twenty-three.

Having characters take on the chore of describing themselves, either in first person or third, is often a better technique than letting another character or an omniscient narrator do it. It is more personal and allows you to work in details and imperfections that only the character might recognize. But use caution: If you don't make this a very natural part of the story — more than just a device used to describe somebody — then it will come off as contrived.

USING DIALOGUE TO DESCRIBE CHARACTERS

Your characters' dialogue should do more than simply report what they are saying to each other. The words and phrases they speak, and the way they deliver them, can be some of the strongest description in your fiction. Listen to these two sentences by Willa Cather from her novel Death Comes for the Archbishop:

“Clear off them cheers for the strangers. They won't eat ye, if they air priests.”

You've been given not one smidgen of physical description of the speaker of these lines, yet I'll bet you already know a few things about him or her. First, the character is of the earthy variety, hence the use of exaggerated dialect like cheers for chairs, ye for you, and air for are. Second, he or she is addressing a person or persons who might have had little association with priests. Third, the character is hospitable. Fourth, he or she is in some position of esteem or importance, since in just this short declaration they give an instruction and then a reassurance. We know a heck of a lot about this character after merely fifteen words of dialogue.

Your character's words will carry that much weight, also. So choose them wisely, and don't hesitate to infuse them with clue after clue as to the nature and the appearance of the speaker. For example, let's say you have a customer in a general store say this: “My God, Millie, I've done knocked thangs off the shelf agin; why can't you leave enough room for a man to negotiate?” From that the reader will assume that the speaker is either (a) not used to being in stores, perhaps not used to being indoors at all, or (b) is a tad wide in the beam. And there are other traits as well: He likes to blame others, is impatient, perhaps just naturally clumsy, and he knows Millie very well.

When employing colloquial dialect like both Willa Cather's chair-clearing character and the bumbling-shopper use, don't go off the deep end, and write dialogue that readers can't follow. Any puzzles you construct should come in the form of mysteries or unresolved conflicts for readers to ponder, not in dialogue that they'll have difficulty deciphering. Dodedo shouldn't be used for door to door; a nominal egg shouldn't mean an arm and a leg. But dawugg might work as the way your Brooklyn character says dog. Dawugg is more easily and quickly translated than dodedo or a nominal egg, so it won't slow your reader down. To put this briefly: When reading your dialogue becomes a chore, you've gone overboard with dialect.

Be careful, too, when using words in dialogue that have different meanings in different parts of the country or the world. The classic blunder here would be having a little British lady sit down in a teashop in London and order biscuits, only to be served the yeasty lumps of bread that she would receive in America. In England, a biscuit is always what Americans call a cookie, a turtle hull is a boot, and a French-fried potato is a chip. In America, some words either take on or lose certain meanings when they cross the Mason-Dixon Line. For instance, the word yet takes on additional meanings in the North than it has in the South. In both places it means so far, as in “I haven't eaten yet.” But in the South it doesn't mean still, as in “Is your mother living yet?” To which in the classic radio joke Charley McCarthy replied to Edgar Bergen, “No, not yet.” That line drew huge laughs because of the disparity of the meanings of the word. In your story, having a character use yet in one of the two ways will help describe where she is from.

In his novel Advise and Consent, Allen Drury paints a wonderful portrait of an old southern senator named Ceep Cooley, who might or might not have been patterned after Everett Dirksen, a legend in the United States Senate for many years. Much of our perception of Cooley comes from what he says (dialogue), how he pronounces the words (dialect), and the way he says them (inflection). Listen to this exchange between the old senator and a nominee for Secretary of the State who will be appearing before Ceep's Senate committee:

“I want to ask you about your virus, Mr. Director” he said, leaning over the nominee and placing a knotted brown hand on his shoulder. “I hope it's cleared up, I surely do.”

“All gone, thank you, Senator,” Bob Leffingwell said smiling up at him and looking a little more relaxed. “It went over the weekend and I'm feeling good as new now.”

“That's good,” Senator Cooley said softly. “That's good, Mr. Director. Because I suspect — I just suspect now” — and a slow grin crossed his face and he looked at the listening reporters with a sly twinkle in his eye — “I just suspect that before these hearings are over you may just need your strength. Yes, sir, I just suspect you may.”

In chapter three, I talked about being loud and being quiet in your fiction. In this scene, the old senator is speaking very softly — the author tells us this. But, more importantly, his mannerisms and pauses and general composure are just as quiet and soft. And that quiet softness adds an extra punch to that implied threat at the end: that Mr. Leffingwell should expect one hellacious run through the wringer during the upcoming hearings.

Remember to use that quiet or loud approach when letting your character's dialogue describe them. Look in your manuscripts for places to let what a character says and how they say it replace more conventional description. Rather than telling your reader that Mrs. Abernathy is a woman who screams at children, show it:

“Get out of my azaleas!” Mrs. Abernathy bellowed from the porch. The children looked in her direction and gingerly retreated.

One way to emphasize a character's inflection in dialogue is to italicize all or part of a word, as in “I could smash you like a bug!”

Listen to this brief line from John O'Hara's novel Ourselves to Know:“Well, if I know Mr. Mill houser, …” The emphasis on just the first syllable of the name is proof that the speaker does know Mr. Millhouser. And that he is unique in some way.

SHOWING A CHARACTER'S MOTIVATION

You'll need to know exactly what motivates your character before you can convey him or his situation to a reader. Maybe you've created a guy who is set on embezzling some money from his job. He's pretty sure he'll get away with it — almost all would-be criminals think that — and he's willing to take the risk. Now, your description of this guy will depend at least partly on why he wants the cash. If he intends to blow it all on loose women and hard liquor and gambling in Atlantic City, then your description will be altogether different than if he needs the money to pay for an operation for his ailing wife.

Consider how Donald Westlake — writing as Richard Stark — shows the motivation of his central character, Parker, a professional thief who is being solicited to take part in an upcoming heist in Comeback:

Liss said, “You still there?”

“Yes.”

“We could get together someplace, talk it over.”

“Maybe.”

“You want to know who else is aboard.” And again Liss waited for Parker to say something, but again Parker had nothing to say, so finally Liss said “Ed Mackey.”

That was different. Ed Mackey was somebody Parker did know and had worked with. Ed Mackey was solid. Parker said, “Who else?”

“It only takes three.”

Even better. The fewer the people, the fewer the complications, and the more the profit. Parker said, “Where and when?”

Parker is obviously not interested in the project at the beginning, and just as obviously not too impressed with Liss. Then, when he decides to consider the job, it is because he learns of the participation of someone he is impressed with. More precisely, the author shows us one of Parker's motivations here, some essential thing that he had to know before committing: that he is to work with someone that he can trust and have confidence in.

There are other ways of showing a character's motivation than just dialogue. Backstories and flashbacks are very useful, perhaps where some injustice was dealt out to your character and revenge becomes his impetus or some kindness shown to him in his youth turns him into a philanthropist. Once you've determined what the motivation will be, make sure you find ways throughout the story or novel to remind readers of it, through the character's actions, thoughts, words, and descriptions.

Knowing what your characters need, want, and are capable of doing — in other words, what drives them — will determine how well you define them. Once again, I encourage you to make that data sheet (like the one on page 113) for each and every character, and make sure you include their motivations.

SHOWING A CHARACTER'S MOOD

By mood, I really mean their overall state of mind in a given scene. And this is a wide range of possibilities indeed, covering everything from happiness and contentment to anger and depression. In real life, everybody's constantly in one predominant mood or another, so the people who populate your fiction should be also.

Look at how V.C. Andrews shows a character's fear in Into the Garden:

All I could do was listen and wait. The floorboards creaked. I thought I heard what sounded like a skirt rubbing against a leg as someone crossed from the door toward my bed. Shadows darkened. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and then with all my might sat up.

“Who's there?” I cried.

Making a Character Profile Sheet

If you expect your reader to know some things about your character, then you'd better know many things about him or her.

Profile sheets like this one will help you define who you'll be using in your story. Just look at it as your character filling out an application to be in your fiction. When you're done, put it in your writer's journal for quick and easy reference.

PROFILE

Full name__________________________________________________

Nickname__________________________________________________

Married/children__________________________________________________

Age__________________________________________________

Occupation__________________________________________________

Color hair/eyes__________________________________________________

Build/weight/height__________________________________________________

Religious beliefs__________________________________________________

Fears__________________________________________________

Strongest belief__________________________________________________

Biggest secret__________________________________________________

Biggest regret__________________________________________________

Political persuasion__________________________________________________

Favorite color__________________________________________________

Favorite type of movie__________________________________________________

Favorite food__________________________________________________

Strongest personal relationship__________________________________________________

Weakest personal relationship__________________________________________________

Unique mannerisms__________________________________________________

Dependability__________________________________________________

Peculiarities__________________________________________________

Who would he/she have voted for in the last presidential election?

__________________________________________________

The author uses several of the standard “things that go bump in the night” devices that we all have sensed more than once and not just in reading. The use of them here — the creaking floorboards, the darkening shadows, deep breathing and closed eyes — paints a more vivid picture than simply telling the reader that this character is afraid.

Always look for ways to show rather than tell in your description of a character's mood, as David Guterson does when describing his lonely protagonist in East of the Mountains:

He found a fire ring full of charred fence posts, a rusted coffee can holding dry, leached stones, and a plastic bucket turned upside down, tattered and torn along its flanks where shotgun pellets had passed through it. Two beer bottles were set against a strand of rusting, low barbed wire, and then no further sign of people. Ben felt right in his loneliness. It was just as he had wanted it.

Notice all the remnants that the character sees, leftovers from people who are no longer there — things that are used up and discarded, no longer of any use to anyone. These things reinforce the solitude that this man wants at this point in the story, and this bit of description does a much better job of showing it to the reader than just reporting that he wants to be by himself.

In the Andrews example, the character's mood is implied; in the next one it is identified toward the end as loneliness. There's no rule of thumb for me to give you to help you decide which approach to take other than this one: Avoid starting out with a declaration like He was lonely. It's much more effective to show this to the reader than tell it.

That's not to say it is easier. It would be infinitely easier for a writer to simply tell the reader what kind of mood a character is in. But if you haven't noticed by now that the easier path is hardly ever the best one for a writer, then the odds are that you won't end up being a very good one.

SHOWING A CHARACTER'S FLAWS

Odysseus was full of himself, brimming with the excessive pride of self that the Greeks called hubris; Achilles had that vulnerable heel; Don Quixote was a dreamer (and arguably a nut); Hamlet could not for the life of him make a decision; and your Uncle Chester can't hold his liquor. Everybody has a flaw.

And your characters better have at least one, too. Perfection is a trait that just doesn't pop up in real people, neither should it in the ones you create.

In The Great Santini, Pat Conroy includes this scene where some children are watching their military father prepare to begin a family outing:

He arranged the things on the dashboard very carefully. On his far left, he stacked three road maps. Beside the maps was a box of Tampa Nuggets cigars, blunt. On top of the cigars was a pair of aviator's sunglasses. Then, putting his hand into the pocket of his flight jacket, he pulled out a .22 pistol from it and laid the gun gingerly beside the cigar box.

The precise description of this man's actions shows us primarily two things:(a) he is quite the perfectionist when arranging things, and (b) there is something definitely wrong with him. Fathers don't as a rule place a pistol on the dashboard when taking their family on an excursion. Despotism and obstinacy prove to be the flaws of Santini — who turns out to be not so great after all — and Conroy, rather than telling us this up front, slowly establishes the image with descriptions of little scenes like this one. Think back to this example when you write. The careful building up of details, like choosing just the right cobblestones and then laying them precisely in a walkway, is far more effective than reporting the situation all at once.

Let's take a look at one of the classic flawed parents in American literature. This time, however, the child worships the character and wants more than anything for him to be as estimable in other people's opinions as he is in hers. This is from Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn:

Yes, everyone loved Johnny Nolan. He was a sweet singer of sweet songs. Since the beginning of time, everyone, especially the Irish, had loved and cared for the singer in their midst. His brother waiters really loved him. The men he worked for loved him. His wife and children loved him. He was still gay and young and handsome. His wife had not turned bitter against him and his children did not know that they were supposed to be ashamed of him.

Notice that the author begins with a little catalog of people who loved Johnny and ends with a reference to the fact that all of that adoration might be unwarranted, that there was something about him that should cause his family to be ashamed of him. In your story or novel, look for ways to make irony work for you in your description of characters. People not really being as happy as they seem to be — or as rich, or as clever, or as good — make for fine irony. And one of the best ways to pull this off is to build up one image and then deflate or alter it with a hint at another one, as Smith does in that paragraph.

Not all flaws in people — or in fictional characters — are emotional or behavioral; sometimes they are physical. Ahab's missing leg and Captain Hook's missing hand provide motivations for their obsessions, and Flannery O'Connor's one-legged philosopher, Hulga — in “Good Country People” — is bitter and incomplete, just as her body is incomplete.

Look at how Robert Phillips, in his story “Night Flowers,” uses a physical flaw to determine a character's career choice:

Because he had no nose, Thetford Collins took the job as night stationmaster at the Public Landing train station. It was the only job he could find where people didn't look at you.

The flaw gives the reader a vivid description of Thetford, not just the absent nose — though that is graphic enough — but, more than that, his reaction to the condition: taking a job where he will not be gawked at. Look for places in your fiction where physical flaws might provide motivation for a character — or cause them to be unmotivated. Deformities and imperfections are useful ways for you to let characters overcome things, to become more complete in spite of something fate has thrown in their way, like Helen Keller. They can also be a crutch for your character, keeping him from overcoming anything, like Thetford.

STEREOTYPICAL CHARACTERS

So, have you heard this one?

The Texan and his wife are driving through New England to see the fall foliage, and they stop to visit with a New Hampshire man who is raking his lawn. The Texan swaggers out of his Cadillac and hitches his thumbs in his wide belt. “How many acres yah'll got here?” he wants to know. The New Hampshire man tells him he has one and a half. The Texan breaks into a wide grin, slaps his Cadillac, and says that, back home on his place, he can get in this here car and start driving and, two hours later, he won't be off his own property. The New Englander listens, nods, and finally says “Ayah, I used to have a car like that.”

If that joke works for you, it's because you brought some stereotypical baggage in when you read it. You assumed the New Englander would be stoic and practical, and you knew the Texan would be pompous and blustery. In the joke, both characters are stereotypes. In your fiction, they probably shouldn't be.

In reality, not all New Englanders behave as their stereotypical image suggests, and not all Texans bloviate loudly about the biggest and the best (I am a Texan, and refrain from bloviating on most occasions). There are exceptions to every rule, especially when it comes to stereotypes. So beware making most of your characters exactly what your reader is expecting.

That's not to say, however, that you won't draw on that reader's preconceived notions from time to time. You should, and you'd be foolish not to. Let those notions help to make your fiction work, just like your stereotypes of New Englanders and Texans might have made that joke work.

Here's how F. Scott Fitzgerald taps into his readers' expectation of how an old-money, East Coast society matron might see things in his story “The Rich Boy”:

Just before Christmas Mrs. Hunter retired to a select Episcopal heaven, and Aaron became the responsible head of the family.

Fitzgerald could have said Mrs. Hunter died. But he had more intentions for that sentence than to report her demise; he wanted to convey a stereotype of a very wealthy society dame who wouldn't condescend to do anything as common as dying. Retiring to an elect Episcopal heaven is an altogether grander accomplishment.

Using stereotypical, expected images of your characters will work in some places in your writing (as it did in that one from Fitzgerald), but it won't in many others; it will depend entirely on the uniqueness of the particular story. Loading up your fiction with stereotypes will provide your reader with nothing more than a cast of those cardboard, one-dimensional people that we've talked about. Much better to give them folks who surprise them, characters who break out of their stereotypes.

SUMMARY: THE OCCUPANTS OF YOUR FICTION

The characters that people your fiction must come through clearly in order for your story or novel to work. Your reader should see something of themselves in some of them and, via your writer's voice, even something of you. The key to how that reader perceives your characters is how well you breathe life into them. In this chapter, we've looked at a few ways to do it effectively.

Pay close attention to the physical description of all of your characters. Believe me, one of the most stinging and damning criticisms that you can get is that someone didn't “see” your characters. So, make the reader see them; give the reader plenty of things to see. Go beyond the obvious traits like weight and hair color and clothing and work in small details like the way they hold a cup of coffee or wave for a taxi. Be careful when patterning your description on real people, making sure that you walk the fine line between straying too far from reality and making the character a mere stereotype of himself. Consider letting some of your characters describe themselves, and let much of the work of your description be done in their dialogue.

The brush you use to paint these people for your reader should be a fine one, capable of infusing small details, but the canvas should be broad enough to work in more than just what they look like. Your descriptions should also include people's motivations, moods, and flaws.

All of these approaches will overlap in your writing, and you should make sure that they do. Many times the best way to show a character's mood is in her dialogue. That lady that we visited earlier who started her day lamenting that it's not even worth getting out of bed is a far cry from another one who wakes up, reaches for the phone, and starts blabbering sweet things to her boyfriend. One is sad; the other is happy. And we know that without having been told that it is so. Just like we know in some stories that a man is in a particular mood because of something that motivates him or that another is influenced by his flaws or his stereotypical heritage.

The people who do and say the things and words that you put in your fiction are, in large part, what makes your story work for your reader. So treat them well. And describe them well.

EXERCISE 1

Stand in front of your bathroom mirror — or sit yourself down with one of the handheld variety — and take a good, hard, long look at yourself. Now write down what you see in such a way that somebody that has never laid eyes on you might see you through your description. Don't limit yourself to simply physical description: Work in hints of character, flaws, a spiritual awareness, or that evil gleam in your eye that an elementary teacher saw long ago.

EXERCISE 2

Using one of your manuscripts choose one character, major or minor, and look for ways to use your description of him for more than just to report what he looks and sounds like. Consider ways that you can work other elements — foreshadowing, prejudice, fear, a deep, dark secret — into your overall delivery of this fellow to your reader.

EXERCISE 3

Now dig through one of those manuscripts one more time, this time looking for any characters that might benefit from some stereotypical description (attributes and characteristics that the reader expects) but, more so, at how you might “destereotype” some of them. Maybe, in your story set in 1958 in Mississippi, let that rural white southern sheriff say a kind word to a black sharecropper rather than snub him. A bit of irony will have taken place, your reader will be surprised, and at least one of your characters will emerge as something more than a one dimensional cardboard figure.