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.
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~
