Perilous Adventures: Being A Character

ISSN 1836-8441

Being A Character

by n a bourke

I want to suggest a writing exercise that builds on and reflects the little essay on ‘being/character’ that introduces this newsletter. What I want to do is suggest some ways in which you might, as a writer, bridge that gap between a hollow character (one that is just an empty suit) and a character that is suggestively nuanced, complex and interesting without, necessarily, being completely ‘mapped’. I want to encourage you to create characters that are more than a set of descriptors laid out in banal sentences (She was 28, brave, blonde and well-educated). Instead, what I want you to aspire to is the emotionally-resonant difference between how a second-hand suit, and your deceased great-grandfather’s suit hanging on a rack at St Vincent de Paul.

First, though, some concrete and specific notes about character. There are four basic ways to reveal character, each with particular uses:

To tell the reader yourself: She was tall, thin and anxious.
To let the character speak about themselves: I was tall and not thin enough, and late for the first time in ten years.
To let another character or character/s ‘see’ them for the reader: I was still drinking coffee when she arrived, early, but clutching her watch and pulling at her skirt. Her smile was pinched and nervous. I could not imagine kissing her.
To let them reveal themselves through their actions: Isabel hurried. She checked her watch at each third step, trying to wait until the fourth and failing, each time, to have the patience. Her clothes were neat and ugly, ill-fitting. They made her thin frame seem gaunt. When she walked into the restaurant to meet her date she held out her hand, the nails bitten to the quick, and tried to smile.

As you can see, each of these have very different effects. From 1 to 4 they are increasingly convincing - allowing the reader to make up their own mind rather than be told about a character third-hand, so to speak. Actions, even in fiction, speak louder than words. This is not to say that the quick summary of the first option is never useful: it is, but one of the more subtle arts of writing is knowing when to balance brevity and bluntness with subtlety and restraint.

Now, it’s your turn. Select a character from your work in progress and think about the ways in which they do or do not naturally fall within the ‘unmarked state’. Write a scene, or even a short fiction, in which the ways in which they do not are not revealed until the end - or not at all - and yet in which this ‘difference’ is essential to the understanding why they, or those around them, act in the way they do.

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