8

Characterization

Character signifies human experience. It includes many elements such as a body, a mind, and social circumstances. A character must have a body. This is called physical characterization. Give your character a mole or a crooked knee. Allow your reader to see your character.  For example: in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, Dickens depicts Mrs. Sparsit as that woman “with the Coriolanian style of nose and the dense black eyebrows” (Dickens 47). In this way, Dickens allows us to see his character, to picture her.

Moreover, a character must think and feel. This is called psychological characterization. Give your character thoughts, assumptions, biases, feelings, doubts, fears, hopes, and dreams; and give your character a desire. For example: in Hard Times Dickens’ describes his character Louisa as having a “starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which brightened its expression. Not with the brightness natural to cheerful youth, but with uncertain, eager, doubtful flashes, which had something painful in them, analogous to the changes on a blind face groping its way” (19). Here Dickens allows us to understand the inner dimensions of his character, Louisa—inner dimensions that have a profound impact on the events that play out in the story. In Dickens’ novel we learn that Louisa wants to make her own choices in life, “that she would have been self-willed…but for her bringing-up” (19). She does not want to be controlled.

So what does your character want? Ice cream? A girlfriend? To save the neighbor’s dog? To kill it? This can often be very difficult to determine. But once you clearly decide what your character wants then you should keep your character from achieving that want either by the internal issues your character struggles with or by the external struggles your character engages. In either case, a character’s struggle is the story and should constitute the bulk of it.

It may sound simple, but developing a character’s struggles requires lots of practice. Why? Naturally, we avoid them. We are averse to them; but as a writer, you must embrace them, even manipulate them. A writer is a manipulator. He manipulates his reader by abusing his character. The reader, on the other hand, is manipulated. That’s why a reader reads: to be manipulated, to sit down and read a good story, to struggle alongside a character and reach resolution with that character. A reader enjoys this. So give it to him. Let him have it. As much as you love your character don’t avoid abusing him. If you love him, let him suffer. You can always make things right in the end. Allow your reader to see the world through the eyes of your character and to want what your character wants.

Lastly, give your character social circumstances. Your character must come from somewhere and have some kind of social profile. Give or don’t give your character an education, money, a family, friends, a religion, a hobby, a special taste for squid. Allow your reader to see the world from which your character comes.