Master Characterization through Description

Whether laboring over your latest novel or an anecdote in your nonfiction book, characterization will make your story either pop into three dimensions or fall flat. Characterization happens many ways, but usually the first depiction of a character in a story involves a detailed rendering of some kind. Go beyond cliché to master the technique of active description so we see your characters clearly.

Beyond Cliché

Read much pulp fiction or amateur manuscripts and you come to one sad conclusion: we regularly define people by their hair, skin, and eye color, stature, weight, age, and sex, as if those mostly genetic details reveal their full person. In a recent escape from my pandemic "social" life, I read a murder mystery in which the author stopped the action to describe these bland details of every member of a jazz band. Only three of the six musicians had significant roles in the story. Not for one of them did stature, hair, or eye color matter, and I remembered none of what the author had said about them by the next page.

We need more than the data on our driver’s license to see people clearly. Roy Peter Clark tells us to “create a mosaic of detail” by piecing together “habits, gestures, and preferences into a vision of life on the page” (262). But to do that, to see beyond the “abbreviation of life,” we have to “shed the blinders that prevent us from seeing it full-blown.” Rick DeMarinis reminds us of all the more telling details we fail to observe in reality or on the page:

We don’t see how they fit in their clothes, the peculiarities of their movements, the expressions or lack of expressions on their faces, the way a hand gestures, the way an eye moves in its socket, how hair is made to obey or how it is in a condition of constant rebellion. We don’t see the touch of grime on a coat sleeve, the long scratch on the back of a hand, the worn heel, the empty smile, the combative stiffening of a neck. (79)

Writers need to see beyond the surface façade, to notice how “strangely unique each thing in the world is” (DeMarinis, 79). Paying attention to the not-noticed details—especially the striking contradictions between status and aptitude, career and demeanor, hygiene and preferences—will help you sculpt each character in high relief.

John Dos Passos does so brilliantly in his classic 1920s work, Manhattan Transfer, a novel that juxtaposes outsiders with insiders through a vast cast of the well-off, the merely survivors, and the dreamers who want to get at the “center of things.” Such a character is Bud Korpenning, who arrives on the ferry and dreams of making his fortune on Broadway:

On the ferry there was an old man playing the violin. He . . . kept time with the toe of a cracked patent-leather shoe. Bud Korpenning sat on the rail watching him, his back to the river. The breeze made the hair stir round the tight line of his cap and dried the sweat on his temples. His feet were blistered, he was leadentired, but when the ferry moved out of the slip, bucking the little slapping scalloped waves of the river he felt something warm and tingling shoot suddenly through all his veins. “Say, friend, how fur is it into the city from where this ferry lands?” he asked a young man in a straw hat wearing a blue and white striped necktie who stood beside him.

The young man’s glance moved up from Bud’s road-swelled shoes to the red wrist that stuck out from the frayed sleeves of his coat, past the skinny turkey’s throat and slipped up cockily into the intent eyes under the broken-visored cap.

“That depends where you want to get to.” (3–4)

In this introduction to Bud, Dos Passos gives us far more information than the character’s height, hair, and eye color, which are details we never learn. We don’t know Bud from any other passenger on the ferry, but quickly we see the comparison of him with the old musician still trying to earn an entertainer’s living and the contrast between Bud’s sweaty cap and frayed, ill-fitting sleeves and the other young man spiffily dressed in straw hat and striped necktie. We detect a potential German-immigrant background in his last name, Korpenning, and Dos Passos’s coined leadentired, which hints at the sounds of lederhosen. And we know he has traveled a long way on foot, not because the author tells us in so many words but because we experience his blistered feet and road-swelled shoes. Poor, an outsider, and eager, Bud naïvely assumes he can arrive where he aims to go, a bubble of a dream the insider immediately tries to burst. In short order, Dos Passos paints a full-blooded picture, and he does so without stopping the action.
 

Active Description

Story is dynamic. Static description isn’t story. Even nonfiction writers giving a few details about interviewees should strive to make their subjects’ lungs breathe. The introduction “Frank Briggs is a widowed, heavyset, and balding man with a quick smile, a father to three boys, and runs three of the largest pizza chains in town” works, but Briggs might as well be a cardboard cutout. Make his heart beat by characterizing him through action:

Frank Briggs welcomed me at his front door with a wide smile that shined brighter than his balding dome. He ushered me down a hallway littered with boy’s shoes and sports equipment to a small, tidy office at the back of the house. Pictures of his late wife adorned the walls and desk. Briggs saw me take them in, and his eyes shined along with his smile. “She keeps me focused on the right things,” he said. “Now I hear you want to chat about my pizza chains.”

Fiction writers have even more latitude to explore character. For point-of-view characters, we gain much understanding through their internal narration. But we don’t need to be inside everyone’s heads to get a sense of how they think and who they are. Make use of the characters’ presence, entrances, and exits to show what they value and how they think. Jerome Stern explains the technique this way:

You could describe what Bella does upon entering the living room. If she starts cleaning up imaginary lint from the sofa, one sort of person is suggested. If she spills her scotch and lets it sink into her skirt without seeming to care, that suggests another. …The actions you give your characters should be densely informative. If her actions are rendered vividly, we know Bella without entering her mind in great depth. (97)

Characterization depends on what we discover about a person through observation and how much we trust any observations told to us. We trust the actions we see far more than what anyone else says about that character, even an objective narrator. But for a truly round character, we must discover what others think about that person, and the language about a person will differ depending on whose eyes we look through.
 

Through Whose Eyes?

Zora Neale Hurston, celebrated Black folklorist of the twentieth century American South, begins her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God with a contrast between the experience of men and women, particularly Black men and women, and how they find their identity. Our first glimpse of the book’s hero, Janie Crawford, comes from the third-person omniscient narrator:

So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment. (1)

We see none of Janie’s physical description in this passage; rather, we gain a sense of her inner experience, her recent trauma, and the way in which she will differ from the traditional Black woman sitting on her porch at home.

Next, we receive an assessment of Janie through the eyes of the townsfolk, who watch her come home from her adventure at sundown. The narrator first tells us a little about this collective before revealing more about them through how they view Janie. Notice which details Hurston chooses to narrate—not their stature but their status:

These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed notions through their mouths. They sat in judgment. (1–2)

Twice now in two pages, we learn that Janie faces judgment from others—the dead, the townsfolk, and perhaps all the world. And here is how the townsfolk judge:

“What she doin’ coming back here in den overhalls? Can’t she find no dress to put on?—Where’s dat blue satin dress she left here in?—Where all dat money her husband took and died and left her?—What dat ole forty year ’oman doin’ wid her hair swingin’ down her back lak some young gal?” (2)

Deftly, Hurston allows us some of Janie’s physical description, but only in terms of how she has rebelled against convention. We discover her age, hairstyle, and clothing through active dialogue that furthers the plot. Then Hurston drills deeper. It’s not enough to understand how the collective judges Janie, we must see how the men view Janie differently from the woman, and the obstacles Janie will encounter on the road to defining her own identity.

Here’s what the men saw:

The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt. They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye. (2)

To them she is an object and arm adornment. Here’s what the woman saw:

The women took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance. It was a weapon against her strength and if it turned out of no significance, still it was a hope that she might fall to their level some day. (2)

To the women, she is a rival.

In the first two pages of exposition, we gain the same information we would have had Hurston had stopped the action to say, “Janie Crawford, age forty, had chocolate eyes and skin, and long, black hair braided down her back. Her curves couldn’t be hidden by the baggy overalls she had come back to town in.” But in Hurston’s masterful telling, we gain much more than superficial physical appearance; we experience a living, breathing person, with all her history, personality, and human conflict rising from the page.

Everyone is flawed, everyone is unique, and the backstory of the limping janitor with tobacco-stained fingers on Vine Street is just as important as the history of the tanned, weekend-alcoholic businessman on the Plaza. Master characterization by putting on your Sherlock Holmes deerstalker and observing all the subtle, telling details of the whole person. 

Sources
Clark, Roy Peter. Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2016.
DeMarinis, Rick. The Art & Craft of the Short Story, 1st ed. Cincinnati, Ohio: Story Press, 2000.
Dos Passos, John. Manhattan Transfer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1st Perennial Library ed. New York: Perennial Library, 1990.
Stern, Jerome. Making Shapely Fiction. New York: Norton, 2000.