Skip to main content

Describing Your Characters' Features and Actions Subtly

We have had some character development posts already here. Narrating your characters is as important as developing them. By narration, we mean describing the character’s appearance, looks, methods, viewpoints, opinions, feelings, etc. It can be difficult to create a full-fledged character without properly describing him.

Don’t Make It Flat

Look at this:
Ben Thompson doesn’t look like a company’s top official. He barely looked his age of 50. He had quite a good-looking face with pointed moustache, staring intelligent eyes, and sharp raised nose. His ears were pointed like those of a cat, giving him the appearance of Dracula.
This narrative of Ben Thompson the central character is completely flat. It is just another description and doesn’t lead you to any interesting fact about this character. When describing your character’s features, you should make sure that it is not a straightforward description of the features.

Show Characters Through Actions

The best way to describe the features of your character is using their actions describe themselves. This way, there is a progress in the story as well as description of characters. For instance:
"He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages. A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips."

"He looked in Stephen’s face as he spoke. A light wind passed his brow, fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety in his eyes."

Two Examples From Ulysses by James Joyce
Ulysses has several places with such beautiful subtle narrations. Reading such great works of fiction alone can guide you well in your character narrations.

In order to display your characters’ thoughts and features, action is the best means. Within your scenes, exploit those points when characters look, speak, listen, move about, etc. Insert pretty descriptions of what sort of eyes he uses to look, what sort of voice he has when speaking, what sort of he has, how he moves about, etc.

With such subtle descriptions, you can easily show a handicapped villain with a grating voice to your readers without ever mentioning: “John was handicapped, with a grating voice.”

In a First Person Point of View

When your POV (Point of View) is first person, which means the central character or someone related to him is narrating the story, descriptions can be hard. Particularly self-descriptions, since that gives the impression of self-importance. In such cases, narration of the features of the central character may be given with the help of other characters within the story. Let the other characters describe the features of the central character through their dialog exchange with him.

Related Entries:

Character Development

Copyright © Lenin Nair 2008

Comments

  1. hi... thanks for visit my blog.. nice blog and success for all activities... please visit to my blog www.aglaonemaku.blogspot.com salam Aglaonemaku

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated very strictly

Popular posts from this blog

En Dash, Em Dash, and Hyphen

We have three types of dashes in use: The hyphen, En Dash, and the Em Dash. In this post, we will see how to use them all correctly. Hyphen (-) The hyphen is the minus key in Windows-based keyboards. This is a widely used punctuation mark. Hyphen should not be mistaken for a dash . Dash is different and has different function than a hyphen. A hyphen is used to separate the words in a compound adjective, verb, or adverb. For instance: The T-rex has a movement-based vision. My blog is blogger-powered. John’s idea was pooh-poohed. The hyphen can be used generally for all kinds of wordbreaks . En Dash (–) En Dash gets its name from its length. It is one ‘N’ long (En is a typographical unit that is almost as wide as 'N'). En Dash is used to express a range of values or a distance: People of age 55–80 are more prone to hypertension. Delhi–Sidney flight was late by three hours. In MS Word, you can put an En Dash either from the menu, clicking Insert->Symbol or by the key-combinatio...

Unethical Business Practices by Associated Content (AC)

Useful Resources Freelance job at Constant Content Freelance for a 6 figure income Get paid to write on the Internet 25 Ways to write for income on the Internet Work from home as a virtual assistant Freelance for fortune 500 companies Today’s Internet slogan is ‘Content is King’ . If you have well-written, keyword rich content, without grammatical errors, then you can rank very high on search engine results, thus making a lot of money. With this business idea, several companies have sprung up, and Associated Content (who call themselves, People’s Media Company) is one among them. Here, we will try to find answers to these questions: 1. What exactly is Associated Content (if you don’t already know this)? 2. Is it really worthwhile to work with them? 3. Why should you steer right clear of them? What is Associated Content (AC) Associated Content (AC) is a website, in which you can earn money submitting content (text, video, audio, or images) . Anyone from anywhere in the...

What Is DoFollow? Guide: How to Make Blogspot Blogs Dofollow?

Dear friends, this is a blog notification post. I have decided to make my blog, DoFollow. You will find the comment policy updated on the sidebar about this (please look at the left sidebar). [Edit: The blog is no longer DoFollow due to loads of spam comments it attracted ] Backlinks are very important for your websites. They are like votes cast by one respectable website to another, and they will greatly increase the site’s traffic. When one gets many backlinks, one’s site’s ranking in search engine results will skyrocket. Search engines use programs called search bots or web crawlers to access and index web pages. That’s how you see websites in the search results of Google and Yahoo!. If your site ranks high for any search terms related to the products you promote, you can get several potential customers (a very daunting task indeed). Now, in order for you to get business, you must rank high in search engines , and the most important thing that will help you in this is link build...