An Exercise in Character Description

One of the first pieces of advice I received when I began writing mysteries, in the 1980s, was this: Every story should have something real in it. Not everything can be invented; the story will begin to feel ungrounded, thin. The real element can be in the setting, characterization, dialogue, or plot development.

In writing classes I illustrated this general rule with a simple writing exercise focusing on character development: describe three people, one whom you know, one whom you have seen around where you live but don’t know personally, and one who is entirely your invention.

 

Every student reacts to this exercise differently.  At first I thought students would approach the three characters in the order in which they were presented, and some did, but not all and not even most. I expected they would devote an equal amount of time and thought to each one, but again they did not. Some spent paragraphs on one and only a line or so on the others. Again, I expected most would fall into the pattern of a basic description, but I was wrong. Some gave a basic description of each person, almost like an abbreviated biography, and some gave the same information in a bullet list. Others wrote a scene with snatches of dialogue, and still others described the person in question engaged in an activity. For some this exercise was clearly the beginning of a short story. But in the end almost every student responded to one of the three characters most strongly and most creatively.

 

The second character I asked them to describe—the one whom you have seen around the town or city where you live but don’t know personally—brought out the most original and compelling characterizations. After listening to the students describe their process, I wasn’t surprised at the results.

 

The first person, one whom you know, brought along a lot of limitations, and the writers felt restricted—and some felt uncomfortable—in describing someone they knew well. The last one sounded tempting, and for several it was, but the character felt less than real, sometimes fanciful and often dull. The middle one—one whom you’ve seen but don’t know personally—gave them a starting point. The mere fact that this was a person who had caught their attention suggested their imagination was already engaged, and the descriptions became vivid, going far beyond the person they had seen at a distance. By not knowing the individual personally no one was constrained by specific characteristics. The half-knowing seemed to stimulate the imagination, and the descriptions took off from the basic reality of the person seen from afar.

 

The second person had enough grounding in reality to give the character, no matter how fancifully or outrageously described, a certain persuasiveness because he or she was in fact real. Even when we’re making something up in its entirety we add that telling detail we glimpsed while sitting opposite someone on the subway or a manner of speech we overheard at a party. We look for something that caught our attention and use it to catch the reader’s.