Dynamic Characters (3 page)

HOW DO THEY DO THAT?

These authors and the others quoted throughout this chapter achieve so much with visual description because they choose and present details that suggest more than their literal meaning. You, too, can choose from several categories of details that accomplish this. Consider the following as a literary smorgasbord, to sample as you wish.

Use Appearance to Indicate Personality

The technique is to choose details that match your character's inner self, and then to use language that makes that connection clear. There are hundreds of details that could be cited about anyone's appearance. Stephen King chose to describe Carrie's blemished skin, passive posture and colorless hair because they suggest an unattractive person, a victim. This suggestion is reinforced by King's word choices:
stolidly, dispirited, sogginess, letting
the water run off her—even the word
splat
to describe the water hitting her, since
splat
is usually a sound associated with someone being hit, rather than someone enjoying a hot shower. The facts that Carrie is plain and overweight would not, by themselves, indicate a victim—there are plenty of plain, overweight, feisty fighters in the world. It's King's diction that transforms a collection of physical details into a memorable impression.

Similarly, Margaret Mitchell selects some details over others in describing Scarlett O'Hara in
Gone With the Wind:

Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. in her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia skin. . . .

By focusing on Scarlett's square jaw, aggressive eyebrows and feminine skin and lashes, Mitchell emphasized the contradictions within Scarlett's nature: a delicate Southern belle with a will of steel.

Use a Character's Own Reaction to His Appearance to Indicate Personality

This is Sylvie Fisher, from Marilynne Robinson's novel
Housekeeping:

After a while they would turn on the radio and start brushing Sylvie's hair, which was light brown and hung down to her waist. The older girls were expert at building it into pompadours with ringlets at ears and nape. Sylvie crossed her legs at the ankles and read magazines. When she got sleepy she would go off to her room and take a nap, and come down to supper with her gorgeous hair rumpled and awry. Nothing could induce vanity in her.

From this we learn that Sylvie has long, thick brown hair. This helps us visualize her, but we actually learn more about Sylvie from her reaction to her own beauty. She is unimpressed. Rather than participate, she passively lets her sisters fiddle with her hair. She destroys their efforts carelessly, preferring sleep to vanity. Sylvie, for the entire length of Robinson's novel, remains careless and unimpressed.

How does your character feel about her own appearance? proud? Indifferent? Dissatisfied (if so, why)? Insanely jealous of people with more attractive exteriors? Would including her reaction to another's appearance give us vital information about her? If so, do it.

Use Appearance to Indicate a Temporary Situation

In this case, you choose physical details that apply to how the character is feeling at the moment, rather than as indicators of permanent personality. This description of teen Conrad Jarrett occurs early in Judith Guest's
Ordinary People:

He does a quick look in the mirror. The news isn't good. His face, chalk-white, is plagued with a weird, constantly erupting rash. This is not acne, they assured him. What it was, they were never able to discover. Typical. He tries to be patient as he waits for his hair to grow out. . . . Everything's okay, he's here, wearing his levis, boots, and jersey shirt, just like everybody else, all cured, nobody panic.

From Guest's wording, we understand that Conrad didn't always have acne, hacked-up hair and an intense concern with dressing ''normal.''

Rather, these are temporary conditions, and Guest has chosen to emphasize them because they reflect Conrad's current situation: uncertain, still damaged from mental illness, hacked up inside.

Even in a romance novel, where the heroine's beauty is usually fulsomely dwelt on, you can introduce her with a focus on temporary disadvantages rather than permanent prettiness. Meet Hero Wantage, from Georgette Heyer's
Friday's Child:

The Viscount looked her over. She was a very young lady, and she did not at this moment appear to advantage. The round gown she wore was of an unbecoming shade of pink, and had palpably come to her at secondhand, since it seemed to have been made originally for a larger lady. . . . In her hand she held a crumpled and damp handkerchief. There were tear stains on her cheeks, and her wide grey eyes were reddened and a little blurred. Her dusky ringlets, escaping from a frayed ribbon, were tumbled and very untidy.

Hero's reddened eyes, tear-stained cheeks and messy hair are not indicative of her usual state. She is currently very unhappy. The description thus accomplishes two goals at once: letting us visualize the basic facts of Hero's appearance (young, small, dark-haired) and giving us her temporary state of mind.

If you decide to introduce your character to us at a moment of high emotion, pick details that do double duty.

Use Dress to Indicate Personality

Because a character can choose his clothes—or at least his reaction to them—clothing details are a good way to tell us about your character's personality. Note Jenny Fields's reactions to her own clothing:

In Jenny's opinion, her breasts were too large; she thought the ostentation of her bust made her look ''cheap and easy.''... She liked her simple, no-nonsense [nurse's] uniform; the blouse of the dress made less of her breasts; the shoes were comfortable, and suited to her fast pace of walking.

—John Irving,
The World According to Garp

Jenny likes her sensible shoes and relatively sexless nursing uniform because
she
is sensible and sexless.

Dominique Francon, from Ayn Rand's best-selling
Atlas Shrugged,
chooses much different clothing:

She had gray eyes that were not ovals, but two long, rectangular cuts edged by parallel lines of lashes; she had an air of cold serenity and an exquisitely vicious mouth. Her face, her pale gold hair, her suit seemed to have no color, but only a hint, just on the verge of the reality of color, making the full reality seem vulgar.

Dominique's subtle suit, which makes actual colors look ''vulgar,'' tells us that she is elegant and disdainful.

Look back at the description of Morgan Gower. He wears a child's pom-pom hat, pointed like an elf's cap, in bright red. To see how truly dress can indicate personality, picture Dominique in Morgan's hat. Or Scarlett O'Hara in Jenny Fields's sexless uniform. No, no.

What clothes does
your
character prefer? Sharply creased slacks? Jeans? Designer dresses? Shapeless ones? His military uniform? Give this some thought. Then show us.

Use Dress to Indicate a Temporary Situation

On the other hand, Hero Wantage's shabby cloak and made-over, ill-fitting gown don't indicate her basic personality any more than do her reddened eyes. The frumpy clothes clearly have been forced on her by necessity, and so serve to tell us more about her current situation (poor relation) than her own taste. Do this when you wish to put your character's current situation in the foreground, so you can change it later (Hero becomes rich and well dressed).

Use Details of the Home to Indicate Personality

Among the first things we learn about Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton's popular detective, is that Kinsey lives sparsely:

My name is Kinsey Millhone. I'm a private investigator, licensed by the state of California. I'm thirty-two years old, twice divorced, no kids. . . . My apartment is small but I like living in a cramped space. I've lived in trailers most of my life, but lately they've become too elaborate for my taste, so now I live in one room, a ''bachelorette.'' I don't have pets. I don't have houseplants.

—'A' Is for Alibi

Note that this apartment contains nothing living that might shackle its occupant. Kinsey has chosen this environment. Beyond letting us visualize setting, this is Grafton's way of alerting us that Kinsey is a loner, not materialistic, wary of close bonds. And so she is.

Use Personal Tastes to Indicate Personality

Just as homes can illustrate character, so can anything else that your character chooses: car, food, drink, music, books, vacation spots. Ian Fleming suggested quite a lot about James Bond with Bond's precise specifications for his martinis (''shaken, not stirred''). Is your character more likely to drive a Ford Escort, a Mercedes-Benz or a pickup truck? Conservative black, or gold with racing stripes? With or without bumper stickers? What do the bumper stickers say? What's in the back seat: decaying McDonald's wrappers, a complete first-aid kit, a change of clothes and toothbrush (just in case), fishing gear from last summer, broken toys? When was the car last serviced? Washed? Is it usually driven on a familiar round of home-work-mall, or has it seen both Acapulco and Anchorage?

The man with volumes of Nietzsche beside his bed is not the same man with
Turkey Grower Monthly
beside his. Or maybe he
is
(interesting). Show us. Not everything, of course. Just two or three personal tastes that indicate a lot about who this character really is.

Use Mannerisms to Indicate Personality

Jenny Fields walks fast, swinging her arms. Carrie White stands with her head bent. Other characters may chew on their hair, endlessly jiggle one foot or carefully fold all pieces of paper into precise thirds before throwing them away. Such mannerisms—habitual physical gestures—tell us something about the inner life of each character.

Some mannerisms, such as lighting a cigarette to show nervousness, have been so overused that they're now cliches. But the
idea
of using mannerisms is still viable. Search for fresh gestures that let us visualize what your character is doing while telling us something significant about her personality.

Use Description to Indicate Relationships With Others

Look again at the description of Macon Dead. We don't actually learn anything about what Macon looks like. What author Morrison does instead is use minimal physical description as a jumping-off place for authorial exposition about how Macon Dead relates to other people.

Philip Roth uses the same technique in
Goodbye, Columbus.
Here is the narrator, Neil, describing his new girlfriend's mother:

I did not like Mrs. Patimkin, although she was certainly the handsomest of all of us at the table. She was disastrously polite to me, and with her purple eyes, her dark hair, and large, persuasive frame, she gave me the feeling of some captive beauty, some wild princess, who had been tamed and made the servant to the king's daughter—who was Brenda.

The actual visual details about Mrs. Patimkin are pretty generic: handsome, purple eyes, dark hair, large frame. That's because the visual details aren't the point. They're merely a springboard for the narrator's observations about the family's social dynamics.

But, you might ask, isn't that just abstract
telling
rather than
showing?
Not the way Morrison and Roth do it. Both use command of the English language to create vivid metaphors, word pictures striking enough to replace descriptions of their characters' bodily appearance. Macon Dead's hatred is a physical thing; it ''glitters'' and ''sparkles.'' His disappointment, too, is physical: ''like ash, dulling [his daughters'] buttery complexions and choking'' them. His glance is ''frozen heat''; its effects are described in the specific physical images of his daughters tripping over door sills and dropping salt cellars into poached eggs (more specificity: poached, not scrambled or over-easy—nothing in Macon Dead's house is easy). Attitudes have been translated into strong and original metaphors that show us Macon Dead as well as— or better than—a direct description.

Similarly, Roth gives us a striking metaphor for Mrs. Patimkin's relationship with her family. She's a captive princess forced to serve a younger woman, ''disastrously polite'' in her impotent rage. This is such a startling metaphor to evoke about a mother-daughter relationship that it serves as a memorable description of Mrs. Patimkin. She's fixed in our minds.

This works best if you allow us to first glimpse your character when he's in the presence of other people. Visualize the scene carefully before you write. Where is everybody standing? What do body language and facial expressions say about these people's relationships? When you're sure
you
know, search for an interesting way to convey that information to
us.