Who Is It? Writing Character.

We're nearing the end of the spring break weeks, and so I'm going to begin winding down this blog, at least for  now. Today will be the first of the final three posts, these three linked. Write them as separate pieces, or view these next three prompts as separate components of a single piece.

(Post by Kirsten)

* Photo credit

Today's component is a biographical sketch. Focus on creating a character and conveying that character to your reader in a compelling, brief description. To write that description, think about the central ways writers show character: appearance, dialogue, exposition (an explanation from the narrator of the character's background or behaviors, likes or dislikes, etc.), action or gesture, and thought (the character's own thoughts, the thoughts of other characters about your central character, or the thought of an external narrator about that character).

Below are several examples of character introductions in familiar texts. Read these and assess how each writer is developing his/her character(s). What techniques are being used in each example? Why are they successful?

Here is Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice, introducing Mr. Darcy:

“Mr. Bingley was good looking and gentlemanlike; he had a pleasant countenance, and easy, unaffected manners. His sisters were fine women, with an air of decided fashion. His brother-in-law, Mr. Hurst, merely looked the gentleman; but his friend Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mein; and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year. The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.”

Here is Michael Chabon in The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, introducing Clay:

“Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. He was seventeen when the adventures began: bigmouthed, perhaps not quite as quick on his feet as he liked to imagine, and tending to be, like many optimists, a little excitable. He was not, in any conventional way, handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed, with pouting lips and a blunt, quarrelsome nose. He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he had just been jumped for his lunch money. He went forward each morning with the hairless cheek of innocence itself, but by noon a clean shave was no more than a memory, a hobo-ish penumbra on the jaw not quite sufficient to make him look tough. He thought of himself as ugly, but this was because he had never seen his face in repose. He had delivered the Eagle for most of 1931 in order to afford a set of dumbbells, which he had hefted every morning for the next eight years until his arms, chest, and shoulders were ropy and strong; polio had left him with the legs of a delicate boy. He stood, in his socks, five feet five inches tall. Like all of his friends, he considered it a compliment when somebody called him a wiseass. He possessed an incorrect but fervent understanding of the workings of a television, atom power, and antigravity, and harbored the ambition—one of a thousand—of ending his days on the warm sunny beaches of the Great Polar Ocean of Venus. An omnivorous reader with a self-improving streak, cozy with Stevenson, London, and Wells, dutiful about Wolfe, Dreiser, and Dos Passos, idolatrous of S.J. Perelman, his self-improvement regime masked the usual guilty appetite. In his case the covert passion—one of them, at any rate—was for those two-bit argosies of blood and wonder, the pulps. He had tracked down and read every biweekly issue of The Shadow going back to 1933, and he was well on his way to amassing complete runs of The Avenger and Doc Savage.”

And, finally, from the first volume of the Lemony Snicket series, here is the introduction to the villain Count Olaf:

“’Hello hello hello,’ Count Olaf said in a wheezy whisper. He was very tall and very thin, dressed in a gray suit that had many dark stains on it. His face was unshaven, and rather than two eyebrows, like most human beings have, he had just one long one. His eyes were very, very shiny, which made him look both hungry and angry. ‘Hello, my children. Please step into your new home, and wipe your feet outside so no mud gets indoors.’”

Here's an article with a few more pointers about writing character, just in case you'd like to do a bit more reading on this element of fiction.