Writing Characterization

A Student–Tutor Dialogue

Student: What do you think of this story? I know it lacks something, but I don’t know what.

Appearance as Metaphor

Tutor: You need to love your characters. There is a convention in fiction that uses the features of a person as metaphors for character. Close-set eyes mean a person may be untrustworthy. Narrow, slumped people are likely to be criminal. Plump people are jolly. There are smile wrinkles and calloused hands or finger tips that indicate a manual worker or a player of a stringed instrument.

These are tools of show-don’t-tell. As writers we need to know what these metaphors are and how to use them.

Student: This is news to me…how do I learn these conventions?

Tutor: Next time you watch TV or a movie, look for type-casting. (Hallmark is sometimes very bad at type-casting.) The moment you see a character for the first time, hit pause. See if you can predict the kind of role the actor will play by your gut response to his facial features; what does his clothing, body type, and posture tell you about him?

Student: This is novel for me. I thought that, like cliches and adverbs, writers wanted to avoid stereotypes like “plump people are jolly.” Should I care about  stereotypes since they’re old and not a fresh take on a character’s motives?

Collective Subconscious

Tutor: Yes, they matter. And we are not talking about developing a character who is a cookie-cutter stereotype. We are talking about activating the reader’s instinctive feeling/belief about a certain characteristic.

Check out this link. https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/what-your-facial-features-say-about-you

It explains the effect a person’s face has on others, how convicted felons who look trustworthy don’t get the death sentence nearly as often as those with the wrong sort of lips and eyebrows.

The point is that stereotypes are powerfully active in our collective subconscious and we writers can use one or two to lead our reader into making his own decisions about the character of our protagonist without us having to tell him how to feel.

Student: As a writer, I am interested in creating original characters and their motives, not clichés.

You are now saying I should understand about “activating the reader’s instinctive feeling/belief about a certain characteristic.”

Wow! This is new territory for me. 

Tutor: Stereotypes are not clichés; they are another tool for your tool box. These subconscious judgements are universal and you should be using them; they increase the depth of characterization and even provide psychological insight when used correctly. The reader matters—we have to write to his perspective.

Literary Archetypes

There are archetypes—the first one of its sort that we all remember:

• Stevenson’s Long John Silver—an eye patch, a wooden leg, a parrot on the shoulder—that’s a pirate forevermore. 
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula—a pale, sharp face, with blood-red lips and piercing eyes? Add fangs and it’s a vampire. 
• Dickens’ Miss Havisham—wearing a decayed and yellowed wedding dress, herself shrunken within, her hair white, face wrinkled. Talk about holding a grudge!

Masters of Description

But we don’t need to write stereotypes or archetypes; use them if they are helpful; if not we can a create our own. For example, here is Captain Aubrey, from Patrick O’Brian’s, Master and Commander:

“The listener farther to the left was a man of between twenty and thirty whose big form overflowed his seat, leaving only a streak of gilt wood to be seen here and there. He was wearing his best uniform—the white-lapelled blue coat, white waistcoat, breeches and stockings of a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, the silver medal of the Nile in his buttonhole—and the deep white cuff of his gold-buttoned sleeve beat the time, while his bright blue eyes, staring from what would have been a pink-and-white face if it had not been so deeply tanned, gazed fixedly at the bow of the first violin. The high note came, the pause, the resolution; and with the resolution the sailor’s fist swept firmly down upon his knee. He leant back in his chair, extinguishing it entirely, sighed happily and turned towards his neighbor with a smile.”

We already love this man. We’d like to take him home and introduce him to Mother.

Here is another example, Mary Lennox from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden:

“When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another.”

Who could like this child? But she’s been sick. Perhaps we should reserve judgement.

Photo Credit: Auntie and Aunt Blogspot

Student: My head now is spinning a bit from our texts. My muddled mind needs to settle and clear up. It’s like cloudy pond water that has been stirred up.

Jane Austen

Tutor: The books you love, have characters you love. They’re real, they’re friends you’ll always remember. When you want to visit them just pull down a book and see what they’re up to.

There are fan clubs of Jane Austen’s world and the characters they adore. 

They get together by hundreds to go and visit that world, the house where Jane lived, the places she wrote about in Bath. 

You really should read everything she wrote. Start with Pride and Prejudice, a story about a mother’s desperation to get five dependent daughters married. Follow that with Emma, a story about an independently wealthy girl who knows whom everyone should marry, except herself.

Student: Can I watch the movies instead?

Tutor: NO!

Student: Ha! Just wanted to make you laugh.

Tutor: You succeeded. Have a great day.

From Lynn’s Medium Account.