Make Your Characters Leap Off the Page

by Hugh Cook

A cardinal principle of fiction writing is that effective characterization lies at the heart of all good fiction. This holds true whether you write thrillers, romance, fantasy, sci-fi, or literary fiction. This principle is universally agreed upon by editors, literary agents, and writers themselves. Listen to what they say:

Renowned New York editor and publisher Sol Stein says in his book On Writing, “During all the years in which I was an editor and a publisher, what did I hope for when I picked up a manuscript? I wanted to be swept up as quickly as possible in 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.”

Donald Maass, a prominent literary agent based in New York, sells more than a hundred novel manuscripts every year to publishers in the U.S. and overseas. At a writing festival I attended some years ago, Maass stated that the number one reason he turns down novel manuscripts is three “uns”: unsympathetic, uninteresting, and unmemorable characters.

Janet Burroway’s book Writing Fiction is one of the finest textbooks on the craft of fiction writing. In it she states that character is “the foreground of all fiction.” If this is so, she says, “then your fiction can be only as successful as the characters who move it and move within it…We must find them interesting, we must find them believable, and we must care about what happens to them.”

One basic truth of all fiction, then, is this: the success of your fiction depends on your ability to create interesting, memorable characters.

Test that theory a moment. Think of some great novels, and you will see that they feature memorable characters: Melville’s Moby Dick and Captain Ahab; Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Ebenezer Scrooge; Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn; John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany.

If it is true that interesting characters lie at the heart of great fiction, then a first question facing a writer is, how do I create interesting characters? Which fiction strategies are available to me to create memorable characters?

There are four basic fiction techniques that all writers use, regardless of genre. I’ll list them, and give examples of each. Here are the four strategies:

1) through direct author comment

2) through the character’s appearance

3) through the character’s action

4) through dialogue

1. Through direct author comment

In this first method, the narrator tells the reader about the character. In his classic story “The Necklace,” Guy de Maupassant describes Mathilde Eloise as follows: “She was one of those pretty and charming girls who are sometimes, as if by a mistake of destiny, born in a family of clerks.” The story ends in a surprising tragic irony that nevertheless ennobles Mathilde.

Leo Tolstoy’s beautiful and poignant novella The Death of Ivan Ilych states that Ilych “was just what he remained for the rest of his life: a capable, cheerful, good-natured, and sociable man, though strict in the fulfillment of what he considered to be his duty.” Through a painful illness that leads to his death, Ilych discovers the misdirection of a life devoted to these values.

There are several distinct advantages to direct author comment. First, you can say a good bit about the character in a short space. Second, you can shape the reader’s reaction to the character by choosing which details to reveal about the character. A disadvantage of direct author comment, however, is that when you merely tell the reader, they’re not as likely to be as emotionally involved as when they draw their own conclusion. So you’ll want to keep this method to a minimum.

2. Through the character’s appearance

This second method is a wonderfully concrete way of revealing a great deal about your character. By appearance I mean 1) the character’s physique, and 2) manner of dress. A character’s clothing is a key method of revealing his or her personality. Several examples:

[Eliza’s] face was lean and strong and her eyes were as clear as water. Her figure looked blocked and heavy in her gardening costume, a man’s black hat pulled low down over her eyes, clodhopper shoes, a figured print dress almost completely covered by a big corduroy apron.

John Steinbeck, “The Chrysanthemums”

Mrs. Withers, the dietician, marched in through the back door, drew up, and scanned the room. She wore her usual Betty Grable hairdo and open-toed pumps, and her shoulders had an aura of shoulder pads even in a sleeveless dress.

Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

These two examples create vivid characterization through carefully selected details of appearance.

Here is another strategy to consider. Many authors will use a disability or an abnormality in physical appearance to symbolize a significant character trait. Consider how Flannery O’Connor gives the protagonist Hulga a wooden leg in her story “Good Country People” in order to reveal a salient aspect of Hulga’s character.

Or think of the symbolic possibility inherent in blindness, as exemplified in Raymond Carver’s great story “Cathedral.” Try to think of such ways in which you can make your character much more interesting and memorable through physical appearance.

3. Through the character’s action

The third method of revealing character is through action. Notice how William Faulkner in his powerful story “Barn Burning” uses Abner Snopes’ actions to characterize him as a violent sharecropper: “His father struck him [his son Sarty] with the flat of his hand on the side of the head, hard but without heat, exactly as he had struck the two mules at the store, exactly as he would strike either of them with any stick in order to kill a fly, his voice without heat or anger.”

In perhaps Joyce Carol Oates’ most widely anthologized story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, Oates describes a teenage girl: “Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick nervous giggling habit of craning her neck into mirrors, or checking other people’s faces, to make sure her own was all right.” Through these details Oates captures perfectly the concern for appearance and the psychological insecurities of a teenager.

Which actions can you give your character(s) that give your readers a sudden and perhaps

dramatic insight into that character?

4. Through dialogue

Dialogue can serve a number of functions, and a central one is to characterize. What does your character’s manner of speech say about him or her?

See how Flannery O’Connor uses dialogue here in a key moment of her story “Revelation” to characterize Ruby Turpin as an uppity southern countrywoman:

“One thang I don’t want,” the white-trash woman said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hands. “Hogs. Nasty stinking things, a-gruntin and a-rootin all over the place.”

Mrs. Turpin gave her the merest edge of her attention. “Our hogs are not dirty and they don’t stink,” she said. “They’re cleaner than some children I’ve seen. Their feet never touch the ground…Claud scoots them down with the hose every afternoon and washes off the floor.”

As you can see, dialogue is an effective means not only in characterization, but also for placing the reader right into the scene.

One important means of characterization within the four strategies above is to use concrete detail. In Janet Burroway’s book Writing Fiction which I mentioned earlier, Burroway gives a dramatic example of how concrete detail makes characterization so effective it leaps off the page. She offers the following bit of characterization:

Debbie was a very stubborn and completely independent person and was always doing things her way despite her parents’ efforts to get her to conform.  Her father was an executive in a dress manufacturing company and was able to afford his family all the luxuries and comforts of life.  But Debbie was completely indifferent to her family’s affluence.

Then Burroway asks, what is striking about that character description? Which of the four methods of characterization does this description use predominantly? It consists essentially of only the first of the four methods of characterization. It’s all tell, and no show.

Notice also that the character description works on the level of abstraction: look at the key words: stubborn, independent, conform, comforts, indifferent, affluence.  What this description consists of is a series of judgements by the author which are supported only by generalizations. In other words, we’re being told rather than shown.

But what happens to the characters when the emphasis shifts from authorial comment to concrete details of appearance, action, and dialogue? Here it is as given by Burroway:

Debbie would wear a tank top to a tea party if she pleased, with fluorescent earrings and ankle-strap sandals. (appearance)

“Oh, sweetheart,” Mrs. Chiddister would stand in the doorway wringing her hands.  “It’s not nice.”

“Not who?” Debbie would say, and add a fringed belt. (direct dialogue & action)

Mr. Chiddister was Artistic Director of the Boston branch of Cardin and had a high respect for what he called “elegant textures,” which ranged from handwoven tweed to gold filigree, and which he willingly offered his daughter. Debbie preferred her laminated wrist bangles. (action)

Here is another version of Debbie and her parents offered by Burroway:

One day Debbie brought home a copy of Ulysses. Mrs. Strum called it “filth” and threw it across the sunporch. Debbie knelt on the parquet and retrieved her bookmark, which she replaced. “No, it’s not,” she said. (dialogue and action)

“You’re not so old I can’t take a strap to you!” Mr. Strum reminded her. Mr. Strum was controlling stockholder of Readywear Conglomerates and was proud of treating his family, not only on his salary, but also on his expense account. The summer before, he had justified their company on a trip to Belgium, where they toured the American Cemetery and the torture chambers of Ghent Castle. Entirely ungrateful, Debbie had spent the rest of the trip curled up in the hotel with a shabby copy of some poet. (dialogue and action)

In both revisions of the original, notice the immediate difference. Each of the abstractions has now been conveyed through a specific, concrete detail, and see how the characterization is therefore so much more effective.

Note also that this version implies certain value judgements about Debbie and her parents: Debbie’s rebellious nature; her mother’s philistinism and obsession with social decorum; her father’s physical abusiveness and shady financial practices. So: concrete details matter in presenting meaning, or value, or judgement.

What you notice also is that concrete detail involves the reader; it forces the reader, if he or she is paying attention to detail, to form conclusions about the character. But it’s the reader who draws these conclusions, rather than being told what to think about the character. If the author only tells, the reader is passive. If the author shows, the reader is involved. It becomes an active partnership between author and reader. So, when you develop your characters, it’s wise to use appearance, action, and dialogue more widely than direct author comment.

I’ll end with an important piece of advice: Your portrayal of your characters is only as good as the degree to which you know them. I edit novel and short story manuscripts—I receive query letters from writers from Alaska to Florida, from Massachusetts to California—asking me to edit their fiction, and now and then I observe that a manuscript falls short primarily because the author just hasn’t familiarized him- or herself with the characters sufficiently to know them inside out. Use all the strategies available to you to develop your characters fully. Have the characters come to life off the page!

Hugh Cook holds an MFA in fiction writing from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has published two books of short stories and two novels. Readers can obtain his recent novel Heron River at Amazon and at Barnes and Noble .

Hugh also edits fiction manuscripts. Send him a query at hughcook212@gmail.com.

Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay