HOW DO YOU MAKE A CHARACTER REAL?
Specificity. The more specific you get, the more vivid
you get. It’s not enough to speak of
someone just as a “big guy,” “little woman,” “pretty girl,” or “smart kid.”
Downplay
generalities and concentrate on detail.
You walk wide around words that apply to anyone: man, woman, boy, girl, fat, thin, tall,
short, pretty. Save these as a launching
pad. Start with the big picture, the
dominant impression: adjective of
manner, vocational noun. Then you
incorporate additional tags and traits that flesh it out.
As you
write get down to cases. Specifics.
That is,
if you’re talking about a man with a limp, don’t let it be just any limp. Maybe the man lurches along, or drags his
foot, or humps his shoulders as if each step were painful. Does he walk with a
rigid, erect stance, in a manner that says he doesn’t want to acknowledge his
handicap? Or is his progression more
that of a person that’s undergone a kneecap job? Or the tentative, unsteady trotter in the
manner often found in someone ninety years of age?
If the
character is a woman who is less than a fragile flower, don’t be content to
call her tough. Let her retrieve a can
of Copenhagen
These
factual details avoid judgmental words and eliminate the writer’s opinion
(subjective). When you say, “She was a
tough-looking broad,” you’re passing judgment on her. You’re assessing her in terms of your
personal prejudices. The reader may or
may not agree.
If you
report that “She wore a smudged T-shirt torn to point that her bra-less left
breast was almost falling out. The shirt
blazed the slogan, ‘Death ‘and the image of a blood-dripping knife,” your reader is in a position to draft his/her own
conclusions. Same for “She crossed her
legs. The split skirt fell away,
revealing a scorpion tattooed high on the inside of her right thigh.” The onus of judgment isn’t on you.
Your goal
should be to provide your readers with just enough raw material to enable them
to draw their own conclusions.
The reader
may or may not agree with you when you say that your character looks hung
over. But if you say that the man looks
up at you out of “bleary, bloodshot eyes” while he “scrubs shaking fingers
along his stubby jaw.”
In the
same way, your female lead will come through more sharply if she “runs slender
fingers along her stocking, scowling and muttering, ‘Oh shit!’ as a nail snags
a loose thread. Think of the difference
if you had said ‘exclaiming petulantly.’
Conjure up
a picture of precisely what you saw in your memory. What are the feelings that go with it? Search out words to describe it on a level
that your reader shares the experience with you.
Objective
presentations are most effective when they concentrate on the particular, the
definite and the concrete, rather than the general, the vague and the
abstract. When you speak of the
particular, it means that you’re dealing with a unique and special individual,
rather than people in general.
“Definite” says exact, specific. Particular,
definite and concrete formulations draw picture in your readers’ heads. Vivid pictures, especially if you bear down
on things you can see and hear and smell and taste and touch. Seeing is believing and all our feelings
spring from sensory perceptions.
Remember the smell of lilacs, bacon frying or day-old sweat? The smoothness of velvet, the graininess of
sand, the roughness of splintered wood.
The taste of ripe Camembert, of sharp cheddar; of chocolate and peppermint
and licorice.
It will
help, too, in your descriptions if you make use of active verbs as
differentiated from passive. An active
verb shows a character doing something, rather than merely existing.
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