writercises | Entries tagged with characterization

Original Posting 2021/4/17

Writer's Digest, July 1994, p. 24-27, had an article by Michael Ray Taylor about fleshing out your writing. He suggest you draw. Oh, not literally, most of us aren't artists enough for that. No, DRAW is an acronym for delineate, ruminate, analogize, and write. Here's his four steps.

Delineate. Make a list. Refine and develop your ideas by listing, and then picking examples. Then for each example, make a list of the sensory aspects of that idea or example. He suggests timing yourself, give yourself 5 to 10 minutes per point.

Ruminate. Summon a vision. Look at your list about one idea or element. Close your eyes, and think about it. Is it primarily visual? What does it suggest? You can add things to your list at this point. This also is timed, 3 to 5 minutes per item.

Analogize. What's it like? For each item, come up with some other things, idea, or image that describes it in an unusual or creative way. Go ahead and write those comparisons down on your list. Again, this is time, about 10 minutes per item, and keep going.

Write. Sketch the flesh. Now, go ahead and create descriptive sentences using the analogies and other thoughts you had. Go ahead and make us see and feel each and every element.

Now, take all the pieces you put together and put them into finished piece. Setting, action, characterization, plot… Put it all together. DRAW gives you a number of written sketches you can use as part of your writing.

mbarker

Original Posting 9/11/2019

Writer's Digest, May, 1991, pages 36-37, have an article by Terence A. Dalrymple about revealing a character's thoughts. "... Revealing a character's thoughts can be essential to both characterization and plot development. You have also likely discovered that revealing thoughts believably is tremendously difficult."Terence starts out by pointing out the obvious and not very effective method of having the character talk to themselves. Yes, people do talk to themselves sometimes, but readers tend to see these as a convenience for the author, not a believable element of the story. So what are some other ways?Punctuation. Quotation marks, parentheses, italics can all identify the character's thoughts. You normally would use a tagline such as Myrtle thought with this. Be careful with quotation marks, it's easy to get mixed up with dialogue. Italics can work, although they are usually used for emphasis. Parentheses... Well, this attracts attention and announces that you are doing something. Probably not the best idea.Paraphrasing. Use tags about thought or wondered, and just paraphrase the thinking. It fits fairly naturally. Don't exaggerate, he screamed in his head. Watch out for tonal modifiers, he thought quietly. And redundancy isn't good, he thought to himself.Show it. We all know show, don't tell. If you can show what's on their minds instead of telling us what they think, it's usually better. We are all used to inferring thoughts from words and deeds. You can do the same thing in your fiction. Sometimes you need to reveal a thought. But readers like action.Take a look at your own writing. You probably use one of these methods mostly. You might want to consider, is there another one that fits the pace and the structure better? Experiment, try out one of these other methods."If you agonize over your character's thoughts, your readers won't have to."In other words, yes, you want your reader to know what your character is thinking. But, do it the right way, so that readers don't even notice that you let them peek inside your character.

mbarker

Original Posting 5/27/2019

Writer's Digest, January 1994, on pages 44-46 has an article by Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet talking about anecdotes. As the subtitle says, "Anecdotes told by one character to another are an effective means of accomplishing a host of storytelling objectives."

They start out by recounting part of Jaws, when Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss are waiting for the great white shark to attack, and Shaw tells a war story. Even while it lets us the viewers catch our breath, it adds to the tension. Now, having characters tell anecdotes to other characters is fairly common in stories, on paper, stage, and movies. So, how can you add this tool to your toolbox? Why would you want to? Well, it at least provides variety, right? But it also has a number of other advantages.

First, it helps you deliver information. Sure, writers may get away with infodumping, but playwrights and others usually dramatize information. Even little stories about other characters can help with this.

Second, anecdotes are engaging for the audience! Show, right? Well, anecdotes make things very clear. "In short, the more your audience can picture what's happening (instead of trying to decipher abstractions), and the more they wonder about what's going on, the more involved though be in your story." Simple, right?

Third, anecdotes often are used to illustrate themes. "An effective means of simplifying a difficult concept is to create a narrative that dramatizes your story's major insights." These anecdotes "translate complex ideas into more easily understood situations, characters, and actions."

Fourth, anecdotes can deepen characterization. Readers need insight into characters, and a well constructed anecdote can give them that insight. Often, they can explain motivation.

Fifth, anecdotes can save words. You can accomplish multiple goals. Exposition, engaging the audience, characterization, and theme? All in a short anecdote.

So, what if you wanted to let your audience in on a character's motivation for a dream? Well, you could just describe it, perhaps in a flashback. But you want to emphasize it, so, think about dramatizing it. When one character tells another character about something, that anecdote gets a little extra polish. They provide an example in their article. Engagement, exposition, theme, characterization, all compressed into a few words. Not bad!

Now, to make the-story-within-the-story most effective, use it sparingly. If a short story has four or five anecdotes, people are likely to notice. You can vary the presentation, picking a different speaker and listener, and maybe changing the length. Remember that the anecdotes don't have to be autobiographical every time, for that matter, they don't have to be about humans. The old stories about animals may be just the right anecdote for your story. Do try to have your anecdotes serve multiple functions. It's not just content. "The fact that a character chooses to tell a story, how he relates it, and to whom he tells it can all divulge something about the teller."

So, kind of like the cream filling in an Oreo, think about adding a-story-within-a-story, an anecdote, to your story! Where can it add just the right touch?

tink

mbarker

Original Posting May 1, 2019

Writer's Digest, August 1993, pages 25-27 and 59, have an article by Michael Orlofsky talking about discreet dialect. The subtitle is "When handled poorly, dialect can demean your characters and make them into superficial stereotypes. Follow these precepts, and you'll craft dialect that'll have editors saying, 'this dog will hunt.'"Michael starts by pointing out that dialect can be problematic. Substandard English, boorish concerns, perpetuate stereotypes and don't create good dialect! Basically, we all need to be honest and careful in the characterization that dialect portrays. "I think all writers need to take dialect personally. Our challenge is implicit in all the diverse and wonderful voices and sounds we hear." Beware of the natural tendency to try to write dialect that re-creates speech patterns verbatim. All too often, this undermines the character, making them parodies or stereotypes. Simply overusing contractions, dropped letters (a.k.a. elisions) and other misspelled words really doesn't make a dialect. "The best dialogue is rarely written exactly the way it's heard."So, how do we distill dialogue and dialect to their essence? Well, dialogue must reveal personality. "My cardinal rule is this: when it comes to dialect, a little contriving goes a long way." Personality and sound often come from just one word. It's easy to read, and it can convey the character. So, how do you create dialogue that has cultural verisimilitude but dodges the stereotyping bullet, the hard to understand bullet, and the bias bullet. Try these alternatives.Euphony and rhythm. No, not you phony, the sounds! Take a look at Hemingway. Standard English, but it has a Spanish flavor. Short sentences, simple clauses, no contractions.Word choice. Sometimes ethnic, cultural, and regional groups have words that are unique, but not quite slang. Valley girl talk might be a common example. Regional usage. You're going to need context clues to help the reader understand these terms, visual descriptions, whatever.Slang. This is word choice, pushed a little bit further. It's a quick and easy way to sketch dialect. Be aware, it's dated very quickly. "Basically, slang is the substitution of a usual word or phrase with an unusual word or phrase." Or, I would've said it's substituting an unusual word or phrase for a more usual word or phrase. Take a look at Shakespeare's slang. "The trick is to avoid obviously short-lived slang and to opt for slang that so classic or entertaining that it, too, lives beyond its own time."Foreign terms. Some of the immigrants will use their own words. A single word, sometimes a translated phrase, you can use the other language.Weltanschauung. A German word for world outlook, or philosophy of life. This is probably one of the most subtle, and yet very effective, ways to portray cultural identity. How does this individual look at life differently because of their culture or society? "You probably can't learn the sensitivity and sensibility needed to understand other cultures – you're born with it. But you can cultivate what you have. Listen. Watch. Interview. Research. Read."Jargon! Groups within groups often have special words or phrases, their own jargon. Workgroups, religious groups, all kinds of groups develop their own special language. "What a character does for a living should enter into his speech and help us know him."Simile, metaphor, and colloquialism. Certain parts of a country have their own phrases. Keep track of those similes and colloquialisms when you hear them.Gestures and underlining. Dialect is not always words, sometimes it's body language. Snapping fingers, gesturing hands, and so forth. Underlining gives a word a little bit more stress, which might be just what you need to remind us that it's dialect."Each of these techniques is designed to vividly render dialect while maintaining the honesty and dignity of the character."I'm not sure that I would say he has exactly defined how you use all these, but it's an interesting collection of tools for tackling the problem of dialect. You might use it as a checklist, see whether you can use one or more of his tools. He has a lot of examples in his article, but finding the article is probably going to be kind of hard. Anyway, it's something to think about. How do you use dialect to help with characterization, and what are the writing tools to build that dialect into your dialogue?

mbarker

Original Posting Sept. 14, 2018

Writer's Digest, October 1993, had an article on pages 32-35 by Carol-Lynn Marrazzo with the title Show and Tell. It's not about the school pastime, it's about using both show and tell in your storytelling. She starts out by explaining that her readers were telling her that the climax just fell flat, they felt distanced. "Even though I'd used dialogue and description to show what was happening… readers said they wanted more." So she did some analysis of stories by writers that she admired.

"In story after story, I found that climactic moments contained two elements: a physical action or manifestation (crying, trembling, etc.), and narrative. Telling." In that moment of realization, when the characters internalize change, the narrators told us what they were thinking and feeling.

Carol-Lynn next shows us an example from Eudora Welty. A bit of action, but what it means is focused and heightened with narrative. Show and tell!

Then she expands on it a little bit. "You can do this in your own stories. For example, if you show a character doing something at a critical juncture in the story – breaking eggs, unbuttoning a blouse, drawing an ace from a marked deck – in that bit of storytime you have the opportunity to tell that character's thoughts or feelings."

Sometimes it's just a very short characterization. Carol-Lynn gives an example of the" "sweat of regret." That "of regret" is clearly the narrator naming the experience. So, you can use this technique to heighten characterization in later drafts, during revision. Watch for these little sprinkles of telling, and make sure that they're the right ones. Or, of course, you may be more expansive. There is an example from James Joyce, with a rather lengthy chunk of narration. It depends on the character. "If your character has been freely sharing observations and feelings throughout the story, and then goes mute at a critical turn, your reader may feel cheated."

Internal monologue, a.k.a. narrative, helps us to really understand what the character is feeling. Physical signals are good, but tell us the true feelings!

Try what Carol-Lynn does throughout her article. Take a scene from a writer that you admire, and highlight the pieces of narrative, the telling intertwined in the showing. You may be surprised at how much is there.

Now, Carol-Lynn warns that you have to know your characters and your stories very well to do this effectively. But, separate the showing and the telling, then look for inconsistencies and contradictions. Study the telling, modifiers, adverbs, adjectives, little descriptive phrases and clauses. Make sure they match your story and your characters.

"Pay special attention to the narrative. Learn to identify ineffective telling, and let it help you find and focus your story. Then, use artful telling to heighten your character's deepest thoughts and feelings, to get to the heart of things and bring your story to life."

There you go. Show and tell.

Entries tagged with characterization

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