On Characterization

What is characterization?

Characterization is who someone is.

This includes their style and mannerisms, how they feel about themselves, how they feel about other people, and how they present themselves to the world.

We learn about characters through a narrator, other characters, or the character herself, and characterization can be offered directly or inferred through her actions, thoughts, and dialogue.

In direct characterization, we are told by the author what the character is like.

With inference, the author creates the character, and we (the readers) are left to make the appropriate connections. 

What a character says, how they say it, what they wear, how they behave in certain situations--these all work together to paint a portrait of who that character is.

Some novels, though, won't call for rich, deeply imagined characters. These genre-based stories typically rely on archetypes or stock characters. Readers of mystery, for instance, tend to focus on the plot unfolding (whodunit?) rather than the detective unraveling the crime. This is why there's so little evolution of characters like Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, and Jack Reacher from book to book.

If your characters aren't very complex (on purpose), the plot should be intriguing enough to carry the reader all the way to "the end." Otherwise, your main character will need contradiction and depth (and so will your minor characters, to some degree).

An interesting character *can* carry an entire story, but only if the writer succeeds in expressing their dimensionality on the page, and this means becoming an expert at characterization.

Be Brilliant

~Katie~

On Writing for Writing's Sake

"Writing is not about publication, 

though publication can be a splendid event. 

Writing is about writing."

"People should be able to write and feel proud 

without ever being published. 

Writing is a human right . . . 

and humans should be able to do it 

without being judged as failures 

for not making the professional cut."

-Mark Edmundson-

Why Write?

Story Rhythms

The rhythm of your story (or the pacing) is built around your scene structure. 

The length (or how long or short your scenes are) is what drives the flow.

Scenes with more exposition and description, for instance, will slow down the story. Dialogue will always speed a scene up. 

A comedic scene will be shorter and more quickly paced than a dramatic scene, which tends to be longer and more drawn out. 

But whether you're writing comedy or drama, the scenes should get shorter as you progress toward the climax. This is when the intensity of the story will be at its greatest, where the pages (hopefully) start turning themselves.

Otherwise, there should be a nice mix of points in your novel where the speed picks up, then pulls back a little--action vs. reaction--an incline that slowly builds to that key moment where everything unravels.

Be Brilliant!

~Katie~

Story is Best

"Story is best when a character acts in a probable way,

but the world reacts in a way he doesn't see coming."

--Robert McKee

What a character wants to happen vs. how the world responds sets up a nice "expectations vs. reality" scenario.

Characters shouldn't always get what they want. 

Sometimes they should.

And sometimes they should get what they want, realizing soon after it wasn't what they really wanted (or needed), after all.

Expectations vs. Reality

Deepen your plots and characters by creating contradictions at every turn. Look for those opposites and play against your character's (and ultimately your reader's) expectations.

Be Brilliant!

~Katie~

Sympathy vs. Empathy

The dictionary definitions are similar, but empathy is the stronger of the two ideas.

With sympathy, we can understand; with empathy, we can relate.

If we sympathize with a character, we can learn to like him and will, most likely, find ourselves rooting for him in some way.

Empathizing, however, is next-level. With empathy, the events surrounding a character are heightened because what is happening to them is also happening to us. We're sharing in their experiences because we're projecting our own experiences onto them. They are like us, so we've moved past understanding them and into being them.

Empathy is what creates an emotional interest in the reader, and when we relate to a character on this visceral level, it's because we see ourselves in them.

We want them to succeed so we, too, can share in that success.

Be Brilliant!

~Katie~