Introduction to Effective Communication Strategies in Business Writing
Imagine this: You are in a theater in the midst of a packed audience. The curtain goes
up. The stage is set, but you don’t see actors. You can hear them talking offstage,
though the words are unclear. By the sound of their voices, the actors must be doing
things. But what? It’s all happening offstage!
The audience is restless. Everyone wants the actors to come onstage so that they can
be seen. Such is the yearning of today’s audiences for what we have come to call
“immediate scenes,” scenes that take place before the eye.
In the nineteenth century, novels and stories were filled with summations of offstage
events, past or present, almost always told to the reader in summary form. These
clumps of narrative summary are not experienced by today’s readers with the
immediacy and excitement of a witnessed event. With good reason. Even in societies
that are not technologically advanced, a high proportion of the people born in the first
half of this century experienced the phenomenon of moving pictures, which
revolutionized entertainment even for the illiterate. In mid-century, the advent of
television brought a visual medium into homes. Television and movies are full of
immediate scenes, visible to the eye, ready to be experienced firsthand. This has
influenced stories and novels more than we realize. Twentieth-century audiences now
insist on seeing what they are reading. If you examine twentieth-century fiction, you’ll
find a dramatic increase in immediate scenes and a corresponding decrease in
narrative summary. There has also been a decrease in descriptions of indoor and
outdoor places that put the story on hold, making impatient twentieth-century readers
start to skip.
* * *
Understanding the difference among the three main components of fiction—description,
narrative summary, and immediate scene—can be of immense help to a writer of
nonfiction also. The nonfiction writer who learns to use immediate scenes wherever he
can will also find a dramatic improvement in the reception of his work. Nonfiction
writers should pay close attention to the three forms of fiction—which I am about to
define again—because the principles involved relate to their work as well.
Description is a depiction of a locale or person. The Latin root of the word “depiction,”
pingere, means “to picture” or to fashion a visual image.
Narrative summary is the recounting of what happens offstage, out of the reader’s
sight and hearing, a scene that is told rather than shown.
An immediate scene happens in front of the reader, is visible, and therefore filmable.
That’s an important test. If you can’t film a scene, it is not immediate. Theater, a truly
durable art, consists almost entirely of immediate scenes.
Just as every form of writing that is expected to be read with pleasure moves away from
abstraction, every form of pleasurable writing benefits from conveying as much as
possible before the eye, onstage rather than offstage.
John Cheever is a master of using description to do much more than describe. Witness
the beginning of Bullet Park, which describes a railroad station in a manner that is also
a depiction of the narrator’s state of mind at the outset of the book:
Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark. Beyond the platform
are the waters of the Wekonsett River, reflecting a somber afterglow. The architecture
of the station is oddly informal, gloomy but unserious, and mostly resembles a pergola,
cottage or summer house although this is a climate of harsh winters. The lamps along
the platform burn with a nearly palpable plaintiveness. The setting seems in some way
to be at the heart of the matter. We travel by plane, oftener than not, and yet the spirit
of our country seem to have remained a country of railroads. You wake in a pullman
bedroom at three a.m. in a city the name of which you do not know and may never
discover ...
Cheever’s description is not static. It is part of the storytelling, and that is a key to
description as it is used by our better writers: It has more than one function. For
instance, in The End of the Affair, Graham Greene uses description of a room to
characterize the person whose room it is:
I had never been in his study before: I had always been Sarah’s friend, and when I met
Henry it was on Sarah’s territory, her haphazard living-room where nothing matched,
nothing was period or planned, where everything seemed to belong to that very week
because nothing was ever allowed to remain as a token of past taste or past sentiment.
Everything was used there; just as in Henry’s study I now felt that very little had ever
been used. I doubted whether the set of Gibbon had once been opened, and the set of
Scott was only there because it had—probably—belonged to his father, like the bronze
copy of the Discus Thrower. And yet he was happier in his unused room simply because
it was his: if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it.
Narrative summary, if written well and briefly, can transport the reader from one
immediate scene to another, though this isn’t always necessary. Fiction and reporting
have now borrowed a film technique called “jump cutting,” moving from one scene into
the next with no transition for time to pass or locales to change. If the scenes must be
linked, brief narrative summary can do the linking. How brief?
Martin double-locked his door and went to work. In the office ...
In the first part of the first sentence, we actually see Martin locking his door. That’s
immediate scene. “Went to work” is narrative summary. Just three words get us from
one scene to the next.
Narrative summary, if kept short, can be useful in setting up an immediate scene:
I am lying on the familiar couch, listening to the sound of Dr. Koch breathing, waiting
for me to continue talking. I’d been telling him about the botched weekend, about Bill
and Thomassy. I don’t want to talk any more, to him or to anybody. Finally, I tell him
I’m fed up, I don’t want to be in therapy, I want to be back in life.
“You do not stop living,” he says, “when you take time to stop and think.”
We can visualize the narrator on the psychiatrist’s couch, listening to the doctor
breathing. When the doctor speaks, we are back in the immediate scene.
If a narrator tells the reader that Herman sat at a lunch counter “drinking endless cups
of coffee, waiting for Jill,” that’s narrative summary. The reader cannot see “endless
cups” of anything. A summary of repetitive action does not create a clear image. It’s
easy enough to fix:
As Herman sipped the last dregs of coffee, he looked up to see the counterman holding
the pot ready to refresh his cup. When the steam stopped rising from the cup, he
sipped again. As the counterman approached for the third time, Herman shook his
head, and got up from the stool. He reached into his pocket for bills, and tossed two
singles on the counter. Jill could go to hell.
The tiny bit of action keeps the author from intruding with a summary. The reader is
able to feel something of what Herman feels when he is kept waiting.
Editors tell us that a primary reason for the rejection of novels is that they consist of far
too much static description and narrative summary. Even a successful writer like P. D.
James can tax a reader with an excess of description that does not move the story
along:
There is Miss James’s insistence on describing absolutely everything. ... so much of her
scene- setting serves no other purpose than to create impenetrable atmosphere. For
instance, pages are devoted to describing in loving detail the locale of a lunch that
Dalgliesh eats with a friend ... yet the story never returns there A character can’t enter
a room without being lost in its furnishings. A
result is the loss of all sense of pace.
That public reprimand from the chief daily book critic of the New York Times,
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, appeared in a review of James’s 1995 novel Original Sin. If
an experienced writer like P. D. James can slip, why hazard the ice? My advice to writers
yearning for publication is to minimize description, and be sure you don’t stop the story
while describing. You are a storyteller, not an interior decorator.
Though today’s readers want immediate scenes as the primary source of their
experience, editors still see too many manuscripts with a plethora of narrative summary
as if written for nineteenth-century audiences. The news is that the authors of these
manuscripts are writing for audiences that are dead. Readers today insist on seeing
characters onstage.
That doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the works of previous centuries. We can and do. But
as creatures of our time, we often find the pace of earlier writing slow, the descriptions
languid, and the recounting of offstage matters less involving than scenes before our
eyes. Imitating nineteenth-century writing impedes the chances of publication.
I am not arguing for so-called action as it is abused in popular media. In fiction, action
consists of what people do and say. Hemingway said it perfectly: “Never mistake
motion for action.” Adversarial dialogue is action. Combative words can excite readers’
emotions more than sword-play. When characters speak, we see them as they talk,
which means that dialogue is always in immediate scene. Stage plays are in immediate
scene. So are films, and now, for the most part, novels.
To keep the reader reading, you want his involvement to be a continuous experience.
The best reading experiences defy interruption. I think I am especially sensitive to
glitches that interrupt the reader’s experience because of my years as a playwright. In
the theater, we instantly know if there is a loss of audience attention. Playgoers, if
taken out of their experience even for a moment, cough and rustle in their seats.
Writers of books
don’t have the advantage of seeing and hearing their audience’s reaction. We have to
train ourselves to detect and remove interruptions of the reader’s experience. Static
descriptions interrupt the story. So does a summary of what has happened offstage
between scenes or elsewhere.
The ideal is not to break the reader’s experience even for a few seconds. Which leads
me to a common fault of the inexperienced writer. He is writing a scene that the reader
can experience, but he feels the need to provide some information. Instead of finding a
way to have the information come naturally out of the characters in the scene, he
states the information baldly. The author’s voice interrupts the scene.
When I speak to groups of writers, I sometimes hold up a large pane of glass. I ask the
writers to imagine that the glass separates the writer from his readers. The readers are
having their experience entirely on the other side of the glass. If they hear the author
even for a phrase or two, it interrupts their experience. Information that seems to come
from the author rather than a visible character is an intrusion from the other side of the
glass. Writers are directors of what transpires on the other side of the glass. They are
not one of the actors.
In sum, if you want to improve your chances of publication, keep your story visible on
stage and yourself mum.
Part II
Fiction
Chapter 4
Competing with God: Making Fascinating People
Think of the novels you have loved most. Do you remember a character you lived with
page after page, perhaps hoping the book would never end? What do you remember
most clearly, the characters or the plot?
Now think of the movies you’ve seen that affected you the most. Do you remember the
actors or the plot?
There’s a book called Characters Make Your Story that you don’t have to read because
the title says it all: Characters make your story. If the people come alive, what they do
becomes the story.
Writers of literary and much mainstream fiction usually begin by imagining a character.
The same is true of the writers of the most popular mysteries centered around a
character: Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, or Kinsey Millhone. The
characters engage us first and are remembered most. The plots of individual books are
chapters in their lives.
Some writers of popular and transient fiction begin with a character, but a large
percentage who write category books (e.g., adventure, spy, westerns, science fiction,
romance novels) start with a plot, then populate it with characters. That method usually
results in hackwork, at which some writers have become so skilled that they have made
millions with stories that even their devoted readers acknowledge seem “made up.”
Other writers can’t help starting out with a theme that obsesses them. They imagine
characters whose lives might involve the theme, or they work out a plot first. If their
allegiance is to character, their theme-originated story has a better chance of survival.
During all the many years in which I was an editor and publisher, what did I hope for
when I picked up a manuscript? I wanted to fall in love, to be swept up as quickly as
possible into the life of a character so interesting that I couldn’t bear to shut the
manuscript in a desk overnight. It went home with me so that I could continue reading
it.
We know what love is, we think of the other person at odd moments, we wonder where
they are, what they are doing, we seem a bit crazy to the rest of the world. That’s
exactly the feeling I have about characters I fall in love with in books.
From those experiences I am convinced that we need to know the people in the car
before we see the car crash. The events of a story do not affect our emotions in an
important way unless we know the characters. Some books center on catastrophic
events that don’t move me at all. The characters in those books come across as
stereotypes with names. If they are not alive, why should I care if their well-being is
threatened?
Let’s look at proof that characters come first:
Harry jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge.
The typical reaction is “So what?” Who’s Harry? Suppose we add just one word, a
second name of someone you may remember, a popular singer and film star. With the
addition of a second name, does your reaction to the sentence change?
Harry Belafonte jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge.
Suddenly the sentence means something. If you remember the singer Harry Belafonte,
you can visualize the character. Why did he jump? With no characterization beyond a
name, because it’s someone we know about, we begin to care. Of course this example
has nothing to do with the real Harry Belafonte, whose name we have borrowed for this
demonstration.
One of the devices used by successful thriller writers is to give a small role to a real
person, usually a high officeholder. That’s what Jack Higgins did in his breakthrough
novel, The Eagle Has Landed, in which Winston Churchill makes a cameo appearance.
Writers who use this technique do not attempt to characterize famous individuals in
depth. A trace to jog memory is enough. Watch what happens in the following:
Harry Truman was not a man to be governed by rules. When he was President, he used
to take long walks each morning to destinations of his own choosing, trailed by Secret
Service agents who sometimes had trouble keeping up with him. What few people know
is that once, when visiting New York, Harry Truman decided to stroll across the
Brooklyn Bridge against the advice of his Secret Service escort—he never listened to
them. Halfway across Truman saw another early-morning walker, an old man wearing a
fedora pulled down almost to his eyes, trying to hoist himself up onto the railing.
Truman, the most universally admired President of the last half century, realized
instantly that the old man could have no other purpose than to jump.
We get interested in the action of a man about to jump off a bridge because we know
the observer. What will Harry Truman do? The engine of the story has turned on. Our
curiosity is involved. We want to know more.
When neighbors report gossip to us about people we know, we can be titillated or
sometimes even moved. A writer cannot depend on “sometimes.” His characterization
must elicit emotion from a wide variety of readers without fail. How does he do it? He
learns the art of characterization, adding details and depth until he has created a
character whom we may know better than all but our closest friends.
Let’s take it one step at a time. How does a writer characterize in simple ways?
What we do in life is lazy. We say the first thing that comes into our heads. Think of a
ticket taker at a movie house. He sees people passing in a stream. He can only make
quick generalizations. That man is tall, that woman is skinny. How does a writer deal
with similar facts?
Frank is so tall, he entered the room as if he expected the lintel to hit him, conveying
the image of a man with a perpetually stiff neck.
The man is not just tall, he is being characterized through an action.
What about the woman who was described as skinny? How does a writer deal with that
fact?
She always stood sideways so people could see how thin she was.
Again, the writer is not just describing; he is characterizing by an action. We
individualize by seeing characters doing things and saying things, not by the author
telling us about them. Don’t ever stop your story to characterize. Avoid telling the
reader what your character is like. Let the reader see your characters talking and doing
things.
Let’s look at some examples of characterization by novelist Nanci Kincaid, in her
talented first novel Crossing Blood:
Once we looked in Patricia’s window and saw her in her half-slip First she curled her
eyelashes,
holding a mirror in her hand. Then, out of the blue, she picked up a lipstick, smeared it
on, and kissed the mirror. Kissed it. She made little kiss marks and looked them over
real close, studying them. She was dead serious about it. Jimmy got mad and made us
get down off the trash cans and stop looking. He swatted Donald to make the rest of us
stop laughing at Patricia.
The same author will now introduce a character called Skippy. Kincaid doesn’t tell us
Skippy was brave; she lets the reader experience Skippy’s bravery through an action:
Skippy will pick up a snake as quick as he will a cat. He will let one crawl on his neck
and down his arm, a black snake, until me and Roy go crazy watching him. More than
once he let me and Roy hold one, which we did, but we had to practically quit breathing
to do it.
Exaggeration is another technique for characterizing:
Laverne weighed two tons naked.
Nobody believes for a second that Laverne weighed four thousand pounds. In speech
we hear it said about an object that “it weighed a ton.” We exaggerate constantly. It’s a
way of communicating quickly, and often effectively.
Comparison to a known quantity or quality is sometimes a useful form of exaggeration:
Archie was Wilt Chamberlain tall.
Bruce wafted me around that dance floor. If I’d shut my eyes, he could have been Fred
Astaire.
Exaggeration can be especially useful when dealing with children. Here’s Nanci Kincaid
again:
The worst thing about George, though, worse than his nasty mouth, full of missing and
broken teeth, worse than his fleas and sore spots, was the fact that he was missing one
eyeball. He had an empty hole in his head. You could poke your finger in there and he
wouldn’t even twitch.
Reproving someone who is late, a layman might write, “I’ve been waiting a long time
for you.” That doesn’t characterize either the speaker or the latecomer. “I’ve been
waiting forever for you” is an exaggeration—and also a cliché. It doesn’t characterize.
Here’s how an experienced writer, Rita Mae Brown, did it in her novel High Hearts:
“Girl, my fingernails could grow an inch just waiting for you.”
In The Best Revenge I needed to introduce a character who would prove to be
influential, a tough lawyer named Bert Rivers, who is short and bald. If he was
described as short
and bald, that would be a movie-house ticket taker’s description. Nick Manucci, in the
company of his lawyer, Dino, sees his opponent’s lawyer for the first time, and says:
“This distributor has a lawyer so short you wouldn’t be able to see him if he sat behind
a desk. And he’s Yul Brynner bald. But when he shakes your hand you know this dude
could squeeze an apple into apple juice. Every time Dino opens his mouth, this lawyer
pisses into it.”
That’s not the author talking, it’s a character talking, and therefore an acceptable
exaggeration. It also characterizes the speaker.
Can you characterize more than one person at a time? Of course you can. You
characterize the speaker as well as the person spoken about. A novice writing what first
comes to mind might write, “My father is a pompous judge.” That’s telling the reader,
not showing him. Here’s the way it was done in the voice of a character named Jane
Riller in The Best Revenge:
My father is still living, but less and less. Judge James Charles Endicott Jackson, his
“appellations” as he called his full name, that tall, lean, hollow-cheeked man who had
made such a religion of the law, preached from the head of our dining-room table each
evening of my young life.
A character would not likely say, “My mother always gave in to my father.” That’s
telling the reader. Here’s how Jane Riller says it:
When they stood next to their car at the bus station, for a moment I thought my mother
was going to leave the Judge’s side long enough to come forward and say a few words
more than good-bye. But it was only the wind ruffling her dress, not a movement of her
body that I saw. I admired her as one would a pioneer farm woman, someone who had
lived a life no longer possible. What great and unacknowledged actresses the women of
my mother’s background were; to avoid shattering the fragile innocence of their
spouses, some of them simulated not only their orgasms but their entire lives.
Jane’s snapshot of her mother also characterizes Jane. It shows what she, as a young
woman, rebelled against. She wanted to go out into the world where you could
experience everything. Note that the paragraph starts with a visual image—the parents
standing next to their car at the bus station—and ends with the character’s conclusion.
Had the order been reversed, the effect would be lessened. Also note that Jane is
characterizing not only her mother but a whole class of people.
Can characterizing a whole class of people be done by a beginning writer? Here’s
another example from Nanci Kincaid’s first novel to demonstrate that it doesn’t take
decades of experience to use the techniques that writers have developed over
centuries:
Migrant kids know they are white trash, so they never speak a single word the whole
two weeks they come to school. The rich kids will not sit by them at lunch. They invite
each other to birthday parties held at the swimming pools in their backyards. The rich
daddies usually go into politics. They slowly get bald and fat and buy up everything for
miles around. When the legislature is in session Tallahassee swarms with them. Mother
says half of them have girlfriends put up at the Howard Johnson’s.
Is it possible to characterize with a single word?
In a work in progress, I wanted to reintroduce two characters who’ve been in several of
my books, the lawyer George Thomassy, and Gunther Koch, a sixty-year-old Viennese
psychiatrist. Dr. Koch is lecturing Thomassy, a successful trial lawyer, about how to
detect jurors who might disadvantage Thomassy’s case. The lawyer reacts to being
lectured:
Thomassy didn’t take this kind of shit from a judge, why the hell should he take it from
this accent.
The word “accent” characterizes not Koch but the speaker Thomassy. He deprecates
Dr. Koch because he doesn’t like being lectured. The trace of prejudice against
foreigners is especially meaningful because Thomassy has tried hard to repress his own
immigrant background.
If there is a common error among inexperienced writers, it’s that they say too much,
they try to characterize with an excess of detail instead of trying to find the word or
phrase that characterizes best.
The words you select depend on the circumstances under which you introduce the
character. For instance, when we first see a character at any distance, physical size
makes an instant impression. If we are seeing a character at closer range, we often
notice the eyes first. What inexperienced writers often do is give us the color or shape
of eyes. That’s not as effective as conveying how the character uses his eyes. If on
meeting a person he averts his eyes, it usually connotes something negative. Good eye
contact is usually perceived as positive. Unrelenting eye contact can be negative to a
shy or withdrawn character:
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:
1. Through physical attributes.
2. With clothing or the manner of wearing clothing.
3. Through psychological attributes and mannerisms,
4. Through actions.
5. In dialogue.
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.
I made the Browns just different enough to interest the reader, but it was important
that they not seem “special.” Therefore, when calamity hits the Browns, readers from
any walk of life can identify with their plight, which is critical for the story. Stephen King
usually has quite ordinary-seeming characters get involved in extraordinary
circumstances. In most instances, however, you’ll want to make your characters as
distinctive as possible rather than “ordinary.”
The extraordinary quality of a character should usually be made evident almost
immediately after he or she appears in the story, unless the thrust of a story is to have
the gradual unveiling of a character’s unusual habits or ambition.
Beware of characters who are so extreme as to seem like cartoon characters. Some
characters in Charles Dickens’s novels seem wildly exaggerated. Such characters are
difficult to make credible to readers of mainstream fiction today.
Most authors seek high ground between the character who seems “perfectly
ordinary”—and therefore uninteresting—and the wildly exaggerated cartoonlike
character. Let’s get a fix on the most fertile areas of characterization.
What makes a character extraordinary? Personality? Disposition? Temperament?
Individuality? Eccentricity? How much overlap is there?
Let’s explore each of those terms in as much depth as we can. My students find that
their work in characterization improves markedly after they’ve considered the full span
of meaning of those terms.
First, personality. We know that people at a party will cluster around people with
personality. Personality refers to the distinctive traits of an individual, a set of
behaviors, attitudes, manners, and mannerisms that identify a person. Personality
speaks of an individual’s makeup, nature, and combined traits, his essence. It means
the specialness of a person, which in some may involve likability, power, charm,
magnetism, and charisma. The constituent parts of personality are disposition,
temperament, individuality, and eccentricity.
I’m not pushing these definitions as definitive. I’m trying to suggest that exploring an
important term in depth can produce a stimulating variety of definitions that are
valuable tools for thinking about a character.
The disposition of a person is her attitude toward the people and places of the world,
her customary response, particularly her emotional response. Disposition can involve a
person’s qualities, outlook, mood, frame of mind, inclination, bent, bias, tendency, and
direction, her proclivity, predilection, penchant, and propensity. Today, disposition is
sometimes thought of as a predisposition, a mind-set. As you can now see, there are
inspiring convolutions of meaning for these words that together define what a writer is
trying to achieve in characterization.
Temperament is a person’s manner of behaving, thinking, and particularly reacting to
people and circumstances, his characteristic way of confronting a new day or a new
development. Temperament can also be seen as a person’s mettle, spirit, leaning, or
inclination. Temperament often connotes a negative tendency toward anger or
irritability, though the term “even temperament,” of course, means the opposite.
Individuality is the aggregate of qualities that distinguish one individual from others. It
connotes that person’s distinctiveness, difference, and, most important, her originality
and uniqueness. A writer describes a character’s singularity with the particulars of
concrete detail. These are the characteristics by which an individual is recognized by
others. Her differentness is her identity. It can be said that the individuality of a person
marks her off, singles her out, sets her apart, and ultimately defines her.
I’ve left for last a definition that speaks most to the point of giving your characters
special and unusual characteristics.
Eccentricity is an offbeat manner of behavior, dress, or speech that is peculiar to a
person and greatly dissimilar to the same characteristics of most other people. We
think
of the eccentric person as odd, a card, perhaps somewhat kinky, a queer fish, a quirky
individual different from the other people we know. When we speak of an eccentric
person, don’t we refer to him or her as a “character”?
The idiosyncrasies of a person are, of course, as seen by others rather than that person,
who often believes his or her idiosyncrasies to be “perfectly normal.”
Eccentricity is at the heart of strong characterization. The most effective characters
have profound roots in human behavior. Their richest feelings may be similar to those
held by many others. However, as characters their eccentricities dominate the reader’s
first vision of them.
If you were to examine the surviving novels of this century, you would find that a
majority of the most memorable characters in fiction are to some degree eccentric.
Eccentricity has frequently been at the heart of strong characterization for good reason.
Ordinariness, as I’ve said, is what readers have enough of in life.
When a great number of young men take to wearing an earring, that is not eccentricity.
When young women iron their hair as many did in the sixties, that is not eccentricity.
They are conforming to a widespread group mode.
Eccentric behavior is sometimes said to be nutty behavior, implying strange behavior,
which is perfectly suitable for fiction. But “nutty” can also mean crazy, which is not
intended here for an important reason. There are two types seldom seen in fiction:
people who are psychotic and habitual drunks. Readers find it difficult to identify with
their behavior. There are exceptions, of course, as in horror stories. In Alfred
Hitchcock’s Psycho, the leading character is crazy, though we don’t know it for certain
until quite near the end. Alcoholics sometimes play secondary roles in novels, and there
have been several novels featuring alcoholic individuals or couples. But the most
memorable alcoholic, who saw a giant rabbit called Harvey, involved a playful use of
alcoholism that would probably not be attempted today with the recognition of the
severity of the illness.
Dostoevsky’s opening of Notes from Underground has a character explaining himself.
He is so self-contradictory that when I read this opening aloud to students, they
invariably laugh:
I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my liver hurts.
But actually, I don’t know a damn thing about my illness. I am not even sure what it is
that hurts. I am not in treatment and never have been, although I respect both
medicine and doctors. Besides, I am superstitious in the extreme; well, at least to the
extent of respecting medicine. (I am sufficiently educated not to be superstitious, but I
am.) No, sir, I refuse to see a doctor simply out of spite. Now that is something that you
probably will fail to understand.
Consider also Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick, certainly an eccentric. In Mark
Twain’s celebrated novels, what captures our attention is not the ordinariness of Tom
Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn but their eccentricity. Think of the twentieth-century
novels of Hemingway, Faulkner, Graham Greene, Kafka, Garcia Marquez, Fitzgerald,
Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger. Or the short stories of John Cheever. Their most
memorable work springs from eccentric characters.
Think of the most eccentric person you know. What makes him (or her) eccentric? What
is the most eccentric thing they have ever done? What might they do that would seem
even more eccentric? Then think of your character doing that very thing! Unlikely?
Unreasonable? Surprising? All of the above? If such behavior would be out of character
for your protagonist, then what variation of it would be in character?
If your character isn’t capable of any important eccentricity, you may have picked a
character who will not be greatly interesting to readers. People notice the eccentricity
of others. They talk about it with their friends. It becomes the subject of gossip and
rumination. When people do only what they are expected to do, they don’t make us
eager to spend a dozen hours in their company.
You may be wondering if I am suggesting too much complexity in characterization. I
don’t expect you to use it all, but your explorations will stimulate thoughts that add to
the potential richness of the characterization. To the extent that the complexity reflects
the intricacy of human nature, the characters will come alive to the reader and remain
alive in the reader’s memory.
One reason characters in transient fiction don’t linger in the reader’s memory is the
shallowness of the characterization. If Ian Fleming’s James Bond is remembered, it is as
a kind of cartoon character. The reader doesn’t concern himself whether James Bond
lives or dies except when he is in the middle of reading a James Bond story, and even
then he doesn’t worry much because the cartoon character has to live another day—for
another book!
Sherlock Holmes is a wonderful character. But we don’t think about him as we would
about a member of our family or a close friend, living or dead. We think of him as a
character in a book or film. In the best of mainstream fiction, and in literary fiction, the
most complex characters seem to graduate to a permanent place in our memory, as
good friends do.
The same is true of villains. Professor Moriarty doesn’t occupy our lives except when we
are reading about him. But the reader carries the memory of Iago and Lady Macbeth for
a lifetime.
Contrast is a useful technique for characterization. It sometimes has the extra virtue of
surprise. I recall attending a convention once where I sat in back of a large room.
Several rows ahead of me sat a woman dressed in an immaculately tailored gray suit,
her hair kempt, her posture markedly straight, and she was picking her nose. What
helped characterize her for me was the contrast between her appearance and her nose-
picking.
Characterizing through unusual clothing or the manner of wearing clothing is another
often neglected possibility. What it requires is to avoid the easy description that first
comes to mind. “Jerry always wore his cap backwards” isn’t writerly. It can be
improved:
His cap worn backwards was a message to the world: Jerry did things differently.
A layman might say, “Ellen looked terrific in her gown.” That’s top-of-the-head writing,
which can be improved:
In her gown, Ellen looked like the stamen of a flower made of silk.
The first description doesn’t say anything particular about either Ellen or the gown. The
second is visual and tells us how Ellen and the gown came across in a way that made
them both look good.
One of my students took the easy way out in describing his character Martin. “Martin
was an informal dresser who didn’t like other men getting all dressed up.” I persuaded
him to rethink the sentence:
Martin referred to men who wore shirts and ties all day not as people but as “suits.”
An important technique that is used too seldom by novelists is to give a character life
by introducing attributes that go against the character’s dominant behavior in the
scene to come. Early in The Best Revenge there is a scene in which the hero, the
Broadway producer Ben Riller, whose current play is in severe financial difficulty, goes
to see Aldo Manucci, the moneylender Ben’s father used to go to many years earlier. In
the scene, done from Ben’s point of view, Ben is in the position of pleading for money,
and Aldo presumably has the power to save him. Therefore, in characterizing Aldo on
his first appearance, I gave him a variety of weaknesses:
At last she wheeled him in, a shrunken human stuffed by a careless taxidermist. He was
trying to hold his head up to see me, an eye clouded by cataract. He took an unblinking
look, then let a rich smile lift the ends of his mouth as his voice, still bass though
tremulous, said, “Ben-neh!” which made my name sound like the word “good” in
Italian.
A common fault in fiction is the portrayal of characters as all good or all bad. Therefore,
when introducing a character who will be in a position of power in a scene, suggest that
character’s vulnerability before the character exercises power. Conversely, when
introducing a character who will be hurt emotionally or physically in the scene to come,
show the character’s strength at the outset.
In a short story there is usually time for only one event or episode. A character comes
to life, the event takes place, the story’s over. There is room for a change of attitude
toward something specific. Most often there isn’t room in a short story for a character
to experience enough to cause a profound change.
In a novel it is common and desirable for the principal character to change by the end
of the book. If the protagonist is a risk taker, he may step into adulthood by learning
that some kinds of risks are foolhardy. If the protagonist accepts certain conditions as a
part of life, he may have learned that some of those conditions can change. And the
protagonist who at the start is a pessimist about human nature may discover that a
single human being can make a difference for a large number of fellow humans.
These are just a few examples of how a character might change in the course of a
novel. The writer has to ask, is the change consistent with the character as portrayed?
A change can be surprising, but it should not seem out of sync with what we know
about the character.
Somerset Maugham said, “You can never know enough about your characters.” When
you have trouble improving a particular characterization, you need to know more. The
remedy may lie in viewing your character from a different perspective.
Another way is to have your character complain bitterly about something. In life,
complaining is more effective when it is done in a normal voice, the words speaking for
themselves. However, bitter complaining connotes an emotional overload. At such
times, your character is speaking, as it were, from the gut or the heart rather than the
head. Listen to the character in that state. It will help you with the part of
characterization that is normally hidden from public view.
Imagine your adult character secretly dressed in children’s clothes. Why is he doing
that? What you want is not your answer, but the character’s answer to that question.
The child in an adult character may have a poignant memory of a lasting hurt. Or a
marvelous secret to reveal.
Yet another way is to visualize your character as suddenly rather old. How would that
change her appearance, dress, walk? Is there anything that you can incorporate in your
characterization at your character’s present age? Some people preserve characteristics
of their childhood, others seem prematurely old in some way. So do some characters.
Imagine your character in an armchair talking to you. Ask your character questions that
are provocative. Let your character challenge you. Disagree with your character. Let
him win the argument.
Unfetter your imagination. Can you see your character flapping arms, trying to fly? Or
trying to kiss everyone at a party? Or walking in the snow without shoes? Readers are
interested in the out-of-the-ordinary. All these questions involve the character in action,
the ideal way to characterize.
Last, imagine your character in the nude. This one almost always works if you portray
your character in the nude honestly and in detail. People in the nude become especially
vulnerable. This doesn’t mean you should necessarily portray your character actually in
the nude. Your character may not want to get undressed, or may want to dress quickly
to cover up. Or your character can just be thinking in the bath or shower. An author of
mine, Edwin Corley, had a remarkable success with a first novel called Siege, which
started with a scene of a black general in his bathtub. Everything the general did later
was more believable because a person seen realistically in the nude is immediately
credible.
CHARACTERIZING VILLAINS
Once upon a time, readers tolerated mustache-twirling villains with no countervailing
virtues in their makeup. Today’s readers can be roughly divided into two groups, those
who accept the fantasy villains of childhood, as in the James Bond stories and Arnold
Schwarzenegger films, and those who insist on credibility. In life, villains do not uncurl
whips and snarl. They seem like normal human beings. But normal humans are not
villains. What distinguishes the true villain is not just the degree to which he hides his
villainy under an attractive patina to snare his victims, but his contact with evil. There is
no social solution to the true villain’s villainy, he cannot be reeducated and become a
nice guy. His villainy is an ineradicable part of his nature.
In the successful TV series NYPD Blue, a senior police official from outside the precinct
makes the precinct captain’s life miserable at every opportunity. The official is not a
nice guy, he is a bad guy. The audience dislikes him more than it dislikes the criminals
who are brought in. Every time the official hurts one of the good cops, we wish
something bad would happen to him. Then, when the official overreaches and blunders,
we are exhilarated. The official has boxed himself into a corner. We like that. Finally,
when the official has to choose between defending a civil lawsuit he can’t win and
resigning from the force, we are joyful. The villain is getting his due.
What the writers have been doing with this character all along, of course, is
manipulating our emotions, which is exactly what your role is when you are pitting
characters against each other to create a story.
Some suggestions to consider in characterizing an antagonist:
Can he have a physical mannerism that would be at least slightly disturbing to most
people, for instance an involuntary blinking of one eye? Or sniffing? Frequent nose-
wrinkling? Earlobe-pulling? Elbow-scratching? It is the repetitive nature of such
mannerisms that grates on readers.
How does your antagonist behave toward people he’s never met before? Does he effuse
charm, is he overly deferential, or is he discourteous, uninterested, openly bored,
arrogant? All of these are characteristics that would help form the reader’s attitude
toward your villain.
Another possibility is to have your antagonist do something frequently that most people
do only occasionally. For instance, does he blow his nose every few minutes (though he
is not sick), does his forehead sweat a lot though it is not especially hot, does he
scratch himself, cough unnecessarily, wink at others as if there were some implied
meaning in what they or he were saying?
To weave individual characteristics into a story, as much as possible let them come out
during or as part of an action. The object is to avoid holding up the story and to keep
the writer’s explanations out of it. To see how it’s done, let’s examine a work-in-
progress in which a successful young businessman, driving to work in what becomes a
severe rainstorm, passes a hitchhiker, then out of compassion and guilt, turns his car
around to pick the man up:
As the man clambered in I could see he was one of those assless thin fellows who hikes
his pants up higher than most men do.
The hitchhiker had his hand stretched out to shake. I was of the belief that hitchhikers,
like waiters and mailmen, don’t offer their hand, but this man’s was stuck out there like
an embarrassment, so I held on to the wheel hard with my left hand and put my right
hand out to shake the man’s rain-wet palm.
I could tell the man’s breath was the kind that toothpaste didn’t cure.
The hitchhiker introduces himself. Even his name has an evil sound. He is characterized
by clothing, sight, smell, and now touch:
The skin of Uck’s hand seemed flaked, reptilian. Even when the man tried to smile, his
face didn’t cooperate. Like Peter Lorre’s, his lips thinned, but that was all. I thought if
this man’s mother had pressed a pillow on his nose and mouth when he was a baby,
would anyone have convicted her?
The protagonist is so repulsed by what he sees, smells, and touches of the hitchhiker,
that his mind jumps to wishing the man dead. That puts the reader’s emotion on the
defensive. The reader—whatever his conduct in private life—doesn’t believe or wish to
believe that he would hope a man would drop dead just because he was repulsive.
“Hey,” the reader thinks, “this guy’s human.”
That’s the key, of course. Uck is human. We meet his wife and child. He can be
charming if he wants to. Nevertheless, he is fundamentally evil in the way he attaches
himself to the life of the protagonist and won’t let go. He is not just getting a lift in the
rain, he is the leech that cannot be pulled off the skin. Uck has taken the first step in
pushing himself into the protagonist’s life and has begun the process of forcing the
protagonist out of his job and home, a true villain.
You need to ask yourself about your antagonist, Is he curable? Is he bad but can be
straightened out? Bad will work, but evil will provide a more profound experience for
the reader.
We have seen that wimpishness is off-putting in a protagonist. We have a sense that
will—desire reinforced by ambition—is what makes protagonists drive us through their
stories. In the example just given, the protagonist is intensely interested in his work
that has brought him a comfortable life, his wife, his house. The hitchhiker who appears
in the rainstorm is set to take that from him and cannot be bought off by ransom of any
kind. From that clash of these two characters, we get the kind of conflict that attracts
readers.
CHARACTERIZING MINOR PLAYERS
Major characters deserve and get our primary attention. That doesn’t mean we should
settle for stereotypes for minor characters. Sometimes they are given a name, a sex, an
age, and no characterization. I’ve seen minor characters given too much
characterization, fooling the reader into thinking they had some larger role to play.
Sometimes all you want is for the reader to be able to see the minor character. Here’s
how Nanci Kincaid does it:
You think you never saw white completely until you see Roy’s butt.
The most efficient technique for making minor characters come alive is to select one
memorable characteristic that singles them out from the rest of humanity. This is
particularly true for fleeting characters, those that appear and vanish, not to return.
Early in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms the reader comes upon:
The priest was young and blushed easily.
In just seven words, the priest is visible even before his special uniform is described.
Note that blushing is an action that characterizes, important here because the priest, in
military service, is about to be picked on by a senior officer.
Irwin Shaw, in a story called “No Jury Would Convict,” shows us this:
The man in the green sweater took off his yellow straw hat and carefully wiped the
sweatband with his handkerchief.
Simple enough, but what makes us see that man is not a description of what he is
wearing but an action, wiping the sweatband.
When a writer characterizes beautifully, we indulge him. Every page of Dennis
McFarland’s first novel, The Music Room, is a delight because it is so well written.
McFarland doesn’t pass up any opportunity to characterize. Here’s how he deals with
the most minor of characters, a hotel desk clerk, seen from the point of view of the
protagonist, whose brother has just died:
... the man behind the hotel desk, whom I had never seen before—dark, and sporting
the handlebar mustache of a lion tamer in a circus—seemed to know me, and to know
my trouble. I watched him cheerfully help a man just ahead of me, then turn decidedly
sorrowful as he shifted his gaze in my
direction. It was with great sympathy that he handed me the pink slips of paper on
which my telephone messages were written, and I couldn’t help noticing that the skin
on his hand appeared a bit too moist and white, and the several hairs on the back of it
were a bit too coarse and black, individual, and rooted, as if magnified.
Characterizing a minor character through the eyes of an important character is a
valuable technique. Note how Anne Richardson Roiphe does it in Up the Sandbox!:
... the dwarf lady who lives in our building is hurrying across the street, her shopping
bag filled, her fat legs bare and her feet encased in their usual heavy orthopedic shoes.
Her face is round and her features are broad, distorted by thick glasses. I had never
seen a dwarf till we moved to this building. It’s been four years now, and each time we
pass my skin crawls. Despite all the humane teachings I have of course heard, I still feel
not considerate, compassionate or easy in the company of cripples. I hold to the
medieval conviction that someone has been criminal, perhaps in bed, or maybe only in
imagination, but someone has committed a crime, perhaps the victim herself.
Minor characters can not only help characterize the major players in a story, but can
also advance the plot. In the first three pages of The Best Revenge, I introduced five
characters in addition to the protagonist in order to characterize the protagonist, Ben
Riller, and to get the main plot line going: Ben is in trouble.
A theatrical producer, Ben is just entering the reception room of his office. An elderly
messenger is at the desk of Ben’s assistant, Charlotte. She is trying to signal to him, but
Ben’s attention is on the waiting actors. Let’s see how the messenger is used:
The geriatric who’d been wrangling with Charlotte spots me at last. Some of the best
actors in the world are close to eighty. Their age-lined faces exude character. In the
movies you can do repeated takes, but in theater the scourges of the body haunt eight
performances a week. Old people chip at my heart. I see my father, Louie, in every one
of their faces. It aches to turn an old man down. I
smile as he approaches me. I think he wants to shake my hand.
What he wants to do, it turns out, is to provide me with personal service of a subpoena.
I try to hand it back to him, but he’s out the door with a gait a younger man would
envy.
I used the messenger to help fill out the characterization of the protagonist, Ben.
Characterizing a minor player gives us a chance to characterize a major player.
In that same paragraph, several other things come across. The reader learns the
producer’s feelings about the theater, age, the differences for actors in film and on the
stage. It also introduces the producer’s father, Louie, a major character. The point to
note is that when depicting a minor character, you can seize the opportunity to convey
much else. The most important thing in that brief bit with the messenger is that it takes
us— through an action—into the heart of the plot: the hero, Ben Riller the successful
producer, is in trouble.
The point I want to leave you with is that the permutations of character are endless and
the techniques for achieving them are many. When you are engaged in the complex
task of characterization, consider the techniques in this chapter the equivalent of
calling 911.
I have tried in this chapter to convey a variety of ways to characterize both minor and
major characters. I have an additional suggestion. Spend some time reading or
rereading two or three of the classics in which characterization is both profound and
memorable: the novels of Dostoevsky and Flaubert from other cultures; Shakespeare’s
great plays,
particularly the tragedies; such twentieth-century writers as Joseph Conrad, Graham
Greene, Henry James, to pluck a few from among the many. You’ll find that one of the
characters resonates in your memory or speaks to your view of life more than most. As
you are readying yourself for sleep, imagine a scene in which that character and the
character you are working on have a conversation about the story of your book. Imagine
what one says and how the other answers. In due course, let yourself sleep. You might
find that in the first moments of wakefulness the next morning, you’ll want to reach for
a pad and paper at your bedside to record some thoughts about your character,
enriched by his or her conversation with a character you loved.
Ultimately, the job of characterization among the best of writers is governed by that
writer’s understanding of human nature. In the early twentieth century, a novel called
Pollyanna by Eleanor Porter put a new word into our language. “Pollyanna” has come to
stand for a blindly optimistic person. We speak of an ostrich attitude, putting one’s head
into the sand, pretending what is out there and real does not exist. A writer cannot be a
Pollyanna. He is in the business of writing what other people think but don’t say, which
leads us to markers, the subject of the next chapter.
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